The news marks one of the industry’s first 400GbE deployments for a business services provider and includes the use of collaborative technologies such as Infinera’s Groove (GX) Series compact modular platforms and Juniper’s PTX Series transport routers.
In addition, Windstream delivered a 400G wavelength service, built on 4th generation, 600G per wave coherent technology from Infinera, which enabled Everstream to significantly augment the capacity of its network.
Speaking exclusively to Capacity, Buddy Bayer (pictured), chief network officer at Windstream, expanded on the project saying that “the 400GbE service is part of Windstream Wholesale’s Wave Product which enables carriers, cable companies, and hyperscalers with super high-capacity services between data centers, other carrier meet points, and customer locations. Our customers are continually increasing their bandwidth needs, and our 400GbE service enables them to efficiently increase capacity. It is a natural evolution as our customers grow beyond Nx100G needs.”
For Everstream’s part its CEO Brett Lindsey, explained that the 400GbE service enables the company to “offer a substantial increase in connectivity for business-specific applications that require high-capacity bandwidth, such as the rollout of 5G, data replication and cloud computing”.
Specifically, the partnership enables Everstream to leverage Windstream’s advanced fibre-optic network and augment its high-demand route between Chicago and Cleveland, in particular.
As Windstream continues to support its 400GbE customers like Eversteam, Bayer shares their focus is not on what’s next but where, with plans for further network expansion,
“We continue to expand our network reach with the next phases of our Pacific Northwest expansion (markets: Portland, Hillsboro cable landing station, and Seattle) plus other network expansion in the West including a new route between Las Vegas and Los Angeles,” said Bayer
“Windstream announced a quantum technology leap to our optical network with our recently announced NCON initiative. Our next generation products built on top of NCON will leverage disaggregated networks, Alien Wave support, colour-less directionless contention-less Add/Drop capabilities, Layer Zero Analytics, and L-Band capacity.”
This isn’t the end of the collaboration between the two with Joe Scattareggia, Executive Vice President at Windstream Wholesale saying: “Everstream is a great example of the true partnership relationship that Windstream Wholesale cultivates with our customers, so yes, we will continue to collaborate in the future”
“The primary collaboration with Everstream will be to continue be to enable them to grow their network by using our network so that they can focus on growing their commercial services.”
“Everstream has enjoyed a longstanding partnership with Windstream over the years and is open to continuing to collaborate on future projects,” added Lindsey.
