Tata serves up 100G wholesale services for U.S., European carriers

Tata Communications (NYSE: TCL) on Thursday began providing 100G-enabled services on its TGN-Atlantic (TGN-A) submarine cable system, providing connectivity between New York and London.

The service provider is leveraging Ciena's (Nasdaq: CIEN) GeoMesh network solution, which is part of the company's 6500 Packet-Optical Transport System (P-OTS), to upgrade the first segment of its submarine cable network to 100G.

By serving a number of traditional wireline and wireless carriers with wholesale bandwidth in both the United States and the U.K.--two segments that are seeing a strong uptick in cloud services, mobile devices and social network applications--Tata said the upgrade will help increase carrier network performance by consolidating transport traffic.

Similar to other deployments, Ciena's equipment gives Tata a painless migration path to 100G because it only requires service providers to upgrade their existing submarine cable network with the addition of new terminal equipment.

Tata's move to 100G on the New York to London route has come fast. It was only November 2011 when the service provider lit 40 Gbps-enabled services on the TGN-A cable system. Tata said that in time it would also upgrade its routes to 40G in Ashburn, Va., and the rest of Europe.

Similar to the latest 100G deployment, Tata also used Ciena's 6500 P-OTS with 40G/100G, which it settled on after conducting tests with a number of traditional subsea and terrestrial network vendors.

Tata said the first phase of the 100G deployment along the U.S. and U.K. route will be completed in the first half of this year.

For more:
- see the release

Special report: In detail: Following the Packet Optical Transport Systems (P-OTS) evolution

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