Ciena’s product marketing manager in the UK, Paul Indoo, claimed that the deployment will offer Vaioni’s carrier customers improved reliability across the network, which is based around a number of 10Gbps optical fibre rings. The fibre rings offer physical diversity and operate using a protection switching mechanism, allowing a ring to heal itself within 50 milliseconds.
In addition, Vaioni is using a range of smaller demarcation devices at customer sites which Indoo claims to allow the service to be tailored for a customer’s bandwidth profile.
“When a service is launched from one of these demark devices we can set quite comprehensive quality of service mechanisms on each of those Ethernet services. So we can tailor the service around what the customer’s application is, so make sure the correct bandwidth profile is provided.”
Indoo says that this will provide an information rate with the ability to cater to bursts in demand, and allow customer to set smaller details like latency.
The major sites on the network are using Ciena’s 5150 platform with the smaller sites using the 3930 platform.
According to Indoo, Vaioni wanted to reduce the cost of operating its network and approached Ciena after reviewing other alternatives.
“We went through a long engagement process where we explained our vision of using Ethernet-based technology to meet the requirement to offer layer 2 services to their customers. As our products are designed specifically around layer 2, and don’t address the layer 3 market, they realised that they could meet all of the requirements they were looking for in a Carrier Ethernet network at a much lower cost of ownership.”
