Telecom Central Office/POPs

International Telecommunications Carriers use Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems to reduce OPEX, improve availability, and manage high-value, high-speed customer traffic.

The Challenge   Bandwidth demand is once again surging, driven by new media formats and increased broadband penetration. By some estimates, the amount of content generated to hit worldwide networks in 2010 is 500% greater than it was in 2006. Telecom carriers are looking for ways to manage this deluge while reducing total cost of ownership of their networks and ensuring profitability.

With network designers looking into various options, such as collapsing layers or possibly skipping 40G networks in favor of 100G, the need for a flexible, simple, and future-proof solution is clear.

The Solution

Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems create a dynamic physical layer to help address the bandwidth deluge. By adding flexibility and intelligence to a carrier’s physical layer, and pushing optical-electrical conversion further to the edge, Glimmerglass leverages all the advantages of purely optical, photonic signal management. Customer paths can evolve from 10Gb/s to 40Gb/s without the need for a switching fabric upgrade, DWDM bundles in transport can be redirected as one wavelength, and wavelength management at network nodes (such as submarine cable landing stations) can be carried out without the complexity of wavelength/hardware compatibility. With Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems, any signal travelling over fiber can be redirected in milliseconds, without adversely affecting customer traffic.

Advantages Glimmerglass brings to Telecom Carrier customers:     Reduce OPEX and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR). testing and restoration can be performed rapidly and from a remote location – downgrading emergency repairs to scheduled maintenance calls.   Minimize or eliminate SLA penalties. The Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Switch provides means for routing around multiple failures on an optical transport path, as well as maintaining protection schemes during transponder upgrades – helping your network achieve five 9’s reliability.   Field Reliable. Glimmerglass systems have an outstanding reputation for reliability in the field, and are the only true photonic cross connects with a track record of managing live customer traffic for telecom carriers. Reconfigure and provision in minutes instead of hours or days. Redirect optical layer signals at remote sites in real-time using our intuitive GUI or a command line interface.   Protect investments as data rates grow from 10G to 40G to 100G. Because Glimmerglass optical systems are based around a true photonic cross-connect, they are ‘transparent’ to data rate and format and thus inherently prepared to accept future signals without requiring upgrade.

Glimmerglass is deployed in:

Submarine Cable Landing Stations (Learn more>)

Using Glimmerglass systems at undersea cable landing stations enables carriers to monitor and test these remote facilities from a central office. In the event of failures, operators can easily reinforce protection schemes or restore from failure without the need for emergency response.

Peering Exchanges (Learn more>)

With more than 340 connected members, the Amsterdam Internet Peering Exchange processes up to 890 Gb/s. By using Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems in their MPLS/VPLS infrastructure, they achieve a greater resilience of their 10GE customer lines.

Case Study

 

Problem

AMS-IX needed to manage rapid traffic growth at its data centers while at the same time offer a high-bandwidth service for its customers.

Our Solution

Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems enabled a dynamic optical layer that could make physical topology changes without disrupting customer traffic – the ideal solution for facilitating network upgrades and managing high-bandwidth customer traffic.