Farice upgrades the FARICE-1 Submarine Cable Network

Ciena® says that Farice, the main provider of international capacity from Iceland to mainland Europe, has deployed Ciena’s 100G coherent optical transport technology to upgrade its submarine cable system that connects Iceland and Scotland. With Ciena’s converged packet optical and GeoMesh solutions, Farice will be able to satisfy the growing and unpredictable bandwidth demands of both its traditional telecommunications carrier customers, as well as the rapidly growing Icelandic data center industry being driven by Iceland’s low cost and green energy sources.

Farice operates submarine cables between Iceland and both Scotland and Denmark. The company is the main provider of wholesale capacity in and out of Iceland and operates a city-to-city network in five European countries. The network is optimized for delivery of wholesale capacity to service providers, content providers, cloud service providers, and data center customers.

Farice selected Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, powered by 100G WaveLogic 3 Coherent Optical Processors, and GeoMesh optical bypass for deployment on its 1,200 km submarine cable system, FARICE-1, and almost 800 km of terrestrial backhaul network where Ciena is the alien wavelength. This will provide high-bandwidth connectivity between Reykjavik and Keflavik, Iceland to Dunnet Bay, Scotland. It will also enable Farice to provide high-speed, reliable and flexible on-demand service delivery.

Ciena’s GeoMesh 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, reducing capital and operational expenses – savings that allow Farice to offer its customers higher capacity at more competitive prices. By allowing Farice to use the same technologies over land and undersea, it can efficiently interconnect its points of presence and service switching centers, with end-to-end service provisioning to make the global network operate as a single, unified network.

Additionally, GeoMesh’s simplified all-optical design delivers lower power consumption, therefore supporting Iceland’s green data center goals, while also supporting lower latency to improve connectivity between Iceland’s data centers and the rest of the world.

Farice will also leverage Ciena’s advanced management solution for simplified low-touch service activation, which provides rapid service delivery, comprehensive service visualization and network monitoring.

This deployment builds on an earlier agreement between the two companies to enhance Farice’s submarine cable system DANICE, which connects Iceland with Denmark. The DANICE upgrade was completed in January 2013.