The upgrade saw Colt deploy a combination of Ciena’s WaveLogic Ai technology with conversion of flexible and grid photonics. This combination will create a significant uplift in the core network capacity and lay the groundwork for the launch of new product capabilities including higher bandwidth services.
“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 (pictured), 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.”
Launched in 2016, the Colt IQ Network has enabled high bandwidth services to more than 900 connected data centres and 27,500 on net buildings. Through this latest upgrade, Colt will quadruple the capacity on Colt’s core optical network in preparation for the delivery of 400Gbps wavelength services and beyond.
In addition to a 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 enabling customers to deploy bandwidth at scale.
“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,” added Jamie Jefferies, Ciena’s vice president & general manager of Europe. “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.”
Rajiv Datta was recently named as one of the 20 SDN Market Leaders, in the October/November issue of Capacity Magazine. To read the full listing, please click here.
