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Ericsson to roll Ciena kit into Telstra
Carrier preps core for SDN
Ericsson's February 2014 agreement with Ciena has paid off in Australia, with the two to work on a major optical network upgrade for incumbent Telstra.
Beyond Ericsson's canned announcement, details of the upgrade are sketchy, but the carrier is keen to get its hands on Ciena's 100 Gbps packet-optical system which Ericsson resells under the partnership.
As well as the product resale arrangement, the two companies are working together on a multilayer WAN controller, and are crafting IP-over-WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) kit.
The latest announcement includes the obligatory hat-tip in the direction of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV), with Telstra's transport routing and engineering director David Robertson quoted as saying the carrier wants to “dynamically move and shape transport capacity with the flexibility and scalability to streamline our network operations”.
The increasing popularity of the cloud also means Telstra wants less latency in its network. Ericsson says these technologies have been piloted in Telstra “over a number of years”. ®