Iceland’s Farice upgrades submarine and terrestrial networks via Ciena

Farice, which provides fiber-optic network services between Iceland to mainland Europe, is upgrading the DANICE submarine cable system with 40-Gbps coherent optical transport technology from Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ: CIEN). The new capabilities on DANICE, a 2295-km undersea fiber-optic cable system that links Iceland and Denmark, should be operational early this year, the two companies say.

The upgrade leverages Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform with coherent transmission technology. The platform will not only support 40-Gbps connections early this year, but a planned roll out of 100 Gbps later in the year.

Ciena also will deploy its GeoMesh networking approach, which uses optical bypass technology to simplify the end-to-end network design, from the cable landing station in the south of Iceland to Farice’s points of presence (PoP) in downtown Reykjavík and Keflavik Airport. While traditional approaches call for regenerators at the cable landing station -- thus increasing latency, cost, and complexity, Ciena asserts -- the GeoMesh approach uses an all-optical network design to connect the submarine and terrestrial segments into a single seamless link in which high-capacity optical signals are carried as foreign wavelengths over the existing terrestrial backhaul network.

As a result of the upgrade, DANICE will be scalable to 8.8-Tbps of capacity per fiber, making the four-fiber network’s total capacity 35.2 Tbps.

“Thanks to its well educated workforce and accessibility to affordable and sustainable power, Iceland is truly uniquely positioned to serve Europe’s growing data center market,” says Örn Jónsson, CTO at Farice. “With this opportunity, however, also comes the need of a connectivity solution that will provide unmatched reliability, scalability, and robustness. Ciena’s technology selected for the end-to-end network upgrade offers all these attributes and has been proven in numerous submarine and terrestrial deployments around the world. Together with the original FARICE-1 system connecting Iceland and the Faeroe Islands to Scotland, for years to come the newly upgraded DANICE cable will enable us to better serve the needs of both our data center customers, as well as our traditional telecommunications customers.”

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