Verizon provided a few more general details about its ongoing upgrades of its optical network, designed to help the company with its strategy to target specific business types.
The company has a stated goal of targeting specific industries such as health care, retail and financial services.
To that end, Verizon said it has deployed Ciena’s 5430 Reconfigurable Switching System. The new control plane technology was installed to enable electronics devices on Verizon’s optical network to more easily communicate with each other. Verizon expects the result will be to simplify operations and allow for near-real-time provisioning.
The company has simultaneously been upgrading to 100G transport in its backbone; it says it will extend 100G technology into its Metro networks, as well, starting in the first half of 2013.
Ihab Tarazi, vice president of global IP and transport planning and technology for Verizon, said of the twinned upgrades: “It’s no longer about miles and scope. It’s about leveraging strategies that further enable us to deliver the promise of cloud-based and mobility-enabled industry solutions.”
The Ciena switching system is an upgrade from Verizon’s SONET-based network. The new system features advanced optical transport network aggregation and switching software to provide higher bit rates and greater availability than what conventional SONET networks provide, Verizon said.
The control plane initiative enables end-to-end optical transport network functionality and global mesh architecture capabilities. Mesh networks create additional paths to reroute traffic in the event of multiple breaks or network disruptions.
During a natural or manmade disaster, Verizon can automatically reroute customer traffic to an equivalent available network path without human intervention, thereby increasing service resiliency, the company said.