The new optical network, MassBroadband 123, will provide residents and businesses in Massachusetts with advanced connectivity requirements to close the digital divide and bring new economic opportunities on a converged network. Through a $45.4 million grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), and $26.2 million from statewide resources, the MassBroadband 123 project, stretching 1,200 miles and over 120 communities, will serve approximately 1,400 public safety entities, community colleges, libraries, medical facilities and town halls.

This deployment aligns with OPn, Ciena’s approach for building open, programmable next-generation networks that scale and automatically adapt to quickly deliver new services and bandwidth.

OpenCape, a 350-mile fiber optic network across Southeastern Massachusetts is also using Ciena coherent optical transport and packet networking solutions. Once fully deployed, these networks will combine to deliver robust and reliable service from the New York border to Cape Cod.

Ciena successfully completed an extensive evaluation and field trial period managed by G4S, the project’s systems integrator and Ciena BizConnect partner, before being selected. Axia NGNetworks will be responsible for managing and maintaining the Internet backbone network for the MBI, and will provide fiber extensions to the network in response to market demand.

Along with community anchor institutions, Ciena’s 6500 equipped with coherent optical technology will allow the MBI to provide cost-effective, high-performance optical transport to support commercial entities and competitive last mile service providers throughout underserved areas of the state. The MBI will be able to easily scale capacity and program its network to deliver 40G wavelength services upon completion of the MassBroadband 123 project, with the ability to scale to 100G and higher in the future to satisfy the region’s 330,500 households and 44,000 businesses.