Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ: CIEN) says that Lightower Fiber Networks has begun to offer 40-Gigabit Ethernet and 100-Gigabit Ethernet services, thanks to Ciena’s 6500 packet-optical transport platform.
Lightower Fiber Networks operates in the Northeast U.S. Its network includes more than than 6,400 route miles of fiber that connects more than 2,800 buildings in New England, metro New York City, New Jersey, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley. The network includes low-latency network connections to 15 interconnection facilities in the New York and New Jersey financial markets.
The service provider also offers Managed Private Optical Network (M-PON) services. These custom-designed services aim to help large organizations in the government, financial, and healthcare industries that may be subject to strict regulations on storage and recovery of sensitive data.
"Higher capacity bandwidth services continue to be a driver for our customer base and a natural progression as we look to advance our services to enable cutting-edge applications such as high-frequency trading, delivery of high-quality HD and 3D video, and collaborative diagnostic and healthcare services,” according to Doug Dalissandro, executive vice president, sales, at Lightower. “With Ciena's cutting edge packet-optical transport solutions, we are easily able to accommodate the changing needs of our customers without network disruption."
The new 100-Gbps services come via an upgrade of Lightower’s existing 6500 platforms, on which it was already offering 40G bandwidth services. In December 2009, Lightower and Nortel combined on a 100G trial spanning 600 km between New York and Boston, prior to Ciena’s acquisition of Nortel’s optical networking product line (see “Lightower, Nortel complete 100G optical trial”).