Alaska Communications has upgraded its terrestrial and AKORN submarine networks with Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) to improve internet access and provide secure, reliable connectivity. The network upgrades will also support demand for mobile broadband services, serve as a cloud enablement platform for Alaska businesses, and allow Alaska Communications to continue offering reliable Unlimited Internet to residents.

With this additional network capacity, customers can take greater advantage of critical applications. For example, this can reduce the amount of time it takes hospitals to share high-imaging files, provide 24/7 connectivity for public health and safety notification systems, and enable large scale data transfer for higher education institutions.

Key Facts:

• Alaska Communications serves businesses, schools, health care providers, state and local governments and other carriers with the company’s terrestrial and subsea networks. AKORN, the undersea fiber-optic network between Alaska and Oregon, follows a unique, geographically-diverse secondary path, reducing the potential for service disruption.
• This upgrade increases network capacity by four times from the Lower 48 to Alaska via Ciena’s GeoMesh solution. With the new scalable, OTN-switched network’s efficient traffic grooming and aggregation capabilities, Alaska Communications can rapidly turn up new services and deliver low-latency, high-capacity and reliable connectivity, resulting in a superior customer experience.

Executive Comments:

• “Alaska Communications is constantly upgrading our network to improve our customers’ experience. Our collaboration with Ciena is one way that we work to improve connectivity for businesses and consumers in Alaska. This upgrade will give our customers more agile capacity to expand services and leverage the power of our network and the cloud as organizations develop new services, providing businesses with new economic opportunities and supporting critical public safety services.”
  - Rick Benken, Senior Director, Network Engineering, Strategy and Management, Alaska Communications

• “Today’s web-scale tools have allowed application development to move quickly, driving new innovations and, subsequently, bandwidth demand, which creates new challenges for the network. Alaska Communications’ adoption of Ciena’s GeoMesh solution provides the expansive bandwidth, efficiency and agility needed to deliver an exceptional customer experience in today’s on-demand society.”
  - Ian Clarke, Vice President, Global Submarine Systems, Ciena