COLT operates a 13-country, 25,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 34 major European cities with direct fiber 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.

COLT chose Infinera because they believe that the speed and simplicity of Infinera's digital architecture will enable COLT to deliver services to their customers more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Infinera's architecture enables the rapid delivery of services because every Infinera line card enables 100 Gigabits/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 utilization 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.

Infinera's unique digital architecture will also help COLT meet the growing demands of their customers. COLT's customers require a range of different services including wavelengths and Ethernet at varying bit rates. Through a combination of Infinera's Just-in-TAM fulfillment program and intelligent GMPLS control plane software, COLT can rapidly deliver a broad range of new services to their customers over pre-deployed 100Gbps DWDM increments. With many of Europe's largest financial institutions as customers, COLT is focused on delivering a network with high reliability and low latency. The use of Infinera's photonic integration technology also delivers significant savings in space and energy consumption.

Network Deployed in Three Months

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. Based on Infinera's large-scale photonic integrated circuits, the Infinera DTN optical system uses fewer line cards and fewer cables, simplifying and speeding up the initial deployment process.