40/100 Gigabit/s Submarine Network to Connect Iceland with European Continent

Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, and Farice, the main provider of international capacity from Iceland to mainland Europe, have jointly announced an upgrade to the submarine cable system DANICE, connecting Iceland with Denmark. The new upgrade, due to become operational in early 2013, will utilize Ciena’s 40G coherent optical transport technology to significantly increase the total capacity of the submarine cable, providing sufficient bandwidth to support the rapidly growing Icelandic data center industry. Leveraging Ciena’s unique GeoMesh networking solution, Farice has optimized its cable landing station design allowing for seamless connectivity between their submarine and terrestrial networks leading to savings in operation and capital expenditures, as well as reduced latency.

Key Facts:

  • Farice selected Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform for deployment on its 2,295 km long DANICE submarine cable system providing high-bandwidth connectivity between Landeyjar, Iceland and Blaabjerg, Denmark. The network will initially utilize Ciena’s 40G coherent transport technology, with ultra-long distance 100G wavelengths (based on the WaveLogic 3 coherent optical processors) to be deployed in 2013.
  • With an increasing number of foreign enterprises and operators turning to Iceland with their data center investments – in search of low cooling costs and renewable energy sources – the country’s submarine cable system with direct connection to the European continent was running out of available bandwidth. Scalable to 8.8 Tb/s of total capacity on a single fiber, Farice’s upgraded submarine cable will address this capacity crunch, paving the way to further growth of Iceland’s storage and data center market. The upgraded DANICE submarine cable consists of four fiber pairs giving a maximum capacity of 35.2 Tb/s.
  • The network upgrade will be managed by Ciena’s OneControl Unified Management System, providing Farice’s Network Operations Center (NOC) with multi-layer service management thus enabling rapid service deployment, accurate resource utilization tracking and network hotspot identification, resulting in efficient use of critical network assets and bandwidth optimization.
  • In addition to upgrading one of two submarine cables, the deployment also includes a unique GeoMesh network solution, which incorporates optical bypass technology to significantly simplify the end-to-end network design from the cable landing station in the south of Iceland to Farice’s Points of Presence (PoP) in downtown Reykjavík and Keflavik Airport. The traditional approach is to add regenerators at the cable landing station, which adds increased latency, cost, and complexity. Ciena’s GeoMesh network solution incorporates an all-optical network design to connect submarine and terrestrial segments into a single seamless link, with high-capacity optical signals carried as foreign wavelengths over the existing terrestrial backhaul network.

Executive Comments:

  • “Thanks to its well educated workforce and accessibility to affordable and sustainable power, Iceland is truly uniquely positioned to serve Europe’s growing data center market. With this opportunity, however, also comes the need of a connectivity solution that will provide unmatched reliability, scalability, and robustness. Ciena’s technology selected for the end-to-end network upgrade offers all these attributes and has been proven in numerous submarine and terrestrial deployments around the world. Together with the original FARICE-1 system connecting Iceland and the Faeroe Islands to Scotland, for years to come the newly upgraded DANICE cable will enable us to better serve the needs of both our data center customers, as well as our traditional telecommunications customers.”
    -       Örn Jónsson, Chief Technical Officer /CTO at Farice
  • “Iceland’s cool climate, coupled with an abundance of cost-effective green and renewable energy sources, makes it an ideal place for European enterprises’ secondary data centers. Because of its scarce supply, network connectivity can be a significant limitation to the country’s ambition of becoming a major force in the data center world. Leveraging Ciena’s innovative GeoMesh network solution, Farice’s latest cable upgrade will not only provide enough bandwidth to meet the operator’s needs today, but also allow it to grow as customer demand increases. As such, the deployment will be a true poster child for the scalability and flexibility that Ciena’s OPn network architecture is all about.”
    -       John-Paul Hemingway, Vice President and General Manager, Ciena EMEA

Supporting resources:

About Farice
Farice operates a city to city network in five European countries.  The network is optimized for delivery wholesale capacity to service providers, content providers, cloud service providers and data center customers. Further information about Farice and its services can be found by visiting www.farice.is.

About Ciena
Ciena is the network specialist. We collaborate with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they perform and compete. Ciena leverages its deep expertise in packet and optical networking and distributed software automation to deliver solutions in alignment with OPn, its approach for building open next-generation networks. We enable a high-scale, programmable infrastructure that can be controlled and adapted by network-level applications, and provide open interfaces to coordinate computing, storage and network resources in a unified, virtualized environment. We routinely post recent news, financial results and other important announcements and information about Ciena on our website. For more information, visit www.ciena.com.

Note to Ciena Investors
Forward-looking statements. This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on information available to the Company as of the date hereof; and Ciena's actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied, due to risks and uncertainties associated with its business, which include the risk factors disclosed in its Report on Form 10-K, which Ciena filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on December 21, 2012. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding Ciena's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "should," "will," and "would" or similar words. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.