Colt is further investing in its Colt IQ Network, ensuring it remains ready to power organisations’ digital transformations - both today and in the future.

Colt Technology Services today announced that it has upgraded its award-winning Colt IQ Network by deploying the most advanced optical technology.

This upgrade saw Colt deploy a combination of Ciena’s (NYSE: CIEN) market-leading WaveLogic Ai technology with a conversion to flexible grid photonics. This combination will deliver a significant uplift in the core network capacity, and pave the way for the launch of new product capabilities including higher bandwidth services.

The Colt IQ Network launched in 2016, has facilitated high bandwidth services to more than 900 connected data centres and 27,500 on net buildings – providing unrivalled coverage in Europe and Asia. This latest upgrade will quadruple the capacity on Colt’s core optical network in preparation for the delivery of 400Gbps wavelength services and beyond.

Along with this significant increase in capacity, this upgrade allows Colt to continue to evolve its product portfolio to support the requirements of its high bandwidth solutions. Flexible grid technology will drive key enhancements to Colt’s high bandwidth optical connectivity and Spectrum offerings - now widely available across the global Colt IQ Network - enabling customers to deploy bandwidth at scale.

This investment further highlights Colt’s commitment to ensuring its network is at the forefront of technological innovation, bringing the cloud environment closer to organisations as well as providing customers with an agile, on-demand and high bandwidth backbone that drives business transformation.

“In 2016, Colt announced a major investment in a next generation optical and packet network as a key enabler to our high bandwidth strategy”, explains Rajiv Datta, Colt’s Chief Operating Officer. “Since then, we have actively served the growing needs of enterprises and providers to connect to the cloud and to bring that scale to their end user locations with our highly distributed fibre network. The response from our customers has been strong and this further investment ensures that we will continue to be at the forefront of serving high bandwidth connectivity needs.”

Over the past few years, Colt has expanded its global reach to the US - spanning 13 cities, Eastern Europe, Australia and new regions in Japan. Additionally, the network in existing metros like London, Dublin and Berlin have been further densified.

Jamie Jefferies, Ciena’s Vice President & General Manager of Europe said: “Ciena’s WaveLogic Ai creates the perfect foundation for a truly adaptive network, helping to ensure that Colt’s IQ Network can address the high bandwidth and on-demand requirements of business today. We have worked with Colt for many years and are excited to see what this next-generation network can achieve with Ciena’s coherent optical innovations underpinning it.”

About Colt
Colt aims to be the leader in enabling customers’ digital transformation through agile and on-demand, high bandwidth solutions. The Colt IQ Network connects 900+ data centres across Europe, Asia and North America’s largest business hubs, with over 27,500 on net buildings and growing.

Colt has built its reputation on putting customers first. Customers include data intensive organisationsspanning over 213 cities in more than 30 countries. Colt is a recognised innovator and pioneer in Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). Privately owned, Colt is one of the most financially sound companies in its industry and able to provide the best customer experience at a competitive price. For more information, please visit www.colt.net.

About CienaCiena (NYSE: CIEN) is a networking systems, services and software company. We provide solutions that help our clients create the Adaptive Network^TM in response to the constantly changing demands of their users. By delivering best-in-class networking technology through high-touch consultative relationships, we build the world’s most agile networks with automation, openness and scale. For updates on Ciena, follow us on Twitter @Ciena, LinkedIn, the Ciena Insights blog, or visit www.ciena.com.

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