Business need

At a time when customers are demanding more and more bandwidth, you want to avoid the cost and time of laying new fiber. Placing stranded capacity back into productive use and using existing capacity more efficiently allows you to refrain from pulling new fiber while accelerating the delivery of additional high-speed services.

Challenges

Building out multiple SONET/SDH networks forces service providers to rapidly consume the fiber already deployed in edge, metro and core networks. In addition, the creation of "stacked" networks that support additional protocols—such as Ethernet for data services, SDI and DVB-ASI for video, or Fibre Channel, ESCON® or FICON® for storage—is also exhausting the available fiber in the network. As optical rings run out of fiber, you need an alternative method to add capacity without the lengthy and expensive process of laying new fiber.

Solution

By converging all of these networks onto a single fiber network using WDM technology, you can efficiently reclaim fiber capacity. A single fiber pair can carry voice, data and video services using WDM platforms that combine multiple channels on a single wavelength and combine multiple wavelengths on a single fiber. This approach allows you to reclaim fiber assets and postpone or avoid the need to deploy new fiber—so you can reach subscribers faster and more efficiently with high-bandwidth services.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena offers flexible converged multiservice solutions that allow you to multiplex various protocols onto a single fiber pair and benefit from the economic efficiencies of WDM technology. We offer converged network solutions designed for access, metro, regional, long-haul and ultra long-haul distances that increase capacity across your network from end to end. We even allow you to multiplex wavelengths running at different speeds, including 2.5G, 10G and 40G, onto a single wavelength for further fiber efficiency. From cost-effective passive wavelength multiplexing access and aggregation platforms through high-value, intelligent WDM solutions for delivering end-to-end, carrier-grade services, Ciena offers a WDM product portfolio that allows you to better leverage existing infrastructure investments to increase revenues and profits. We offer multiservice solutions that allow you to deliver diverse services, and provide multiservice switching and transport platforms that integrate aggregation, cross-connect functions and WDM capabilities such as Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexing (ROADM) to enable a diverse range of new service offerings over existing infrastructure.

Benefits

• Swiftly deliver new services and reach new customers over existing networks
• Add managed, full-rate data and storage transport services without pulling new fiber
• More effectively utilize existing network assets
• Delay or avoid time-consuming and costly fiber buildouts
• Increase billable capacity without disrupting existing services