COLT operates a 13-country, 25,000 kilometre network that includes metropolitan area networks in 34 major European cities with direct fibre connections into 16,000 buildings and 18 COLT data centres. The first phase of COLT’s Infinera network connects major cities in eight countries in the business heart of Europe, including the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.
Infinera’s architecture enables the rapid delivery of services because every Infinera line card enables 100 gigabits per second of optical capacity, which is automatically configured and available to support services once the line card is installed. With Infinera’s Bandwidth Virtualization model, COLT can both achieve rapid provisioning of a range of services as well as enjoy full utilisation of the optical capacity, without complex optical engineering. This flexibility is not possible with traditional DWDM networks, where each service is tightly coupled to the wavelength transponder card.
Other Infinera features that delivered value to COLT included the rapid initial deployment of the first phase of the network and Infinera’s digital performance monitoring capabilities. The first phase of the network was deployed in just three months, significantly faster than the time required by a traditional DWDM network.