The upgrade doubles capacity per fibre pair and makes it Arelion’s first route with active L-band capacity in service.
The news comes as Arelion has seen growing demand from customers for terabit-scale bandwidth between Ashburn and Atlanta. Further L-band deployments on high-traffic routes in North America are planned for later this year.
“We’re seeing significant demand for additional capacity from our customers along this high-traffic route as these tech hubs grow rapidly,” said Georgios Tologlou, senior network architect, Arelion.
“This innovation is a strong business case for us to optimise the cost per bit and minimise operational expenditures. Leveraging L-band, we can maximise the capacity per fibre pair to quickly serve our customers’ demands and supercharge our sales growth on one of the most popular routes in our North American network.”
Infinera FlexILS is a flexible grid-compliant open optical line system, featuring C+L-band support and colourless-directionless-contentionless reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM). It enables carriers to remove vendor lock-in, manage supply chain variations, and manage native and alien wavelengths with granular-level control.
The system enhances flexibility by supporting programmable configuration that optimises operation based on performance, spectral efficiency, long span reach, and fibre conditions. In addition, Infinera FlexILS doubles fibre capacity through L-band expansion from the adjacent C-band without impacting service or operational quality.
“Our platforms are purpose-built to enable seamless upgrades to provide the greatest amount of investment protection and enable our customers to meet relentlessly growing bandwidth demand,” said Ron Johnson, general manager of optical systems and network solutions group at Infinera.
“Expanding the network to support L-band doubles the spectrum that can be used to transmit optical signals, hence enabling Arelion to double the amount of services they can provide per fibre while simultaneously achieving simplification of their network through automation and flexible operation.”
