8:30 AM -- Infinera Corp. is on the verge of announcing a U.S. Tier 1 customer for the DTN-X, one that some people have guessed is Verizon Communications Inc..
I'm wondering if it might be CenturyLink Inc. instead.
We'll find out soon.
"We've been awarded a project, it's a long-haul application in a tier 1, and we do intend to announce it this year," CEO Tom Fallon said on Wednesday's earnings call with analysts.
And he does mean a U.S. tier 1. He'd mentioned a domestic win earlier, and that statement was a response to a question about it.
Infinera has hinted at this before, without disclosing the customer. Verizon has been the popular guess, mainly because the companies have hung out together so much. Stuart Elby, Verizon's vice president of network architecture and technology, was at last year's launch of the DTN-X, Infinera's next-generation optical transport system. (See Verizon Teases at Infinera Event and Is Verizon an Infinera Customer?; free registration required for that second link.)
And the companies presented a workshop together in May, at Light Reading's Packet Optical Transport Evolution conference.
But consider this: Infinera already had Qwest as a customer. (Qwest counted as a tier 1, right?) And Qwest became CenturyLink last year.
Nobody thinks the customer is AT&T Inc., which has pegged Ciena Corp. and Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. as domain suppliers for optical networking. (See AT&T Officially Picks Ciena.)
Infinera has set itself a Dec. 31 deadline to tell us. The company also has a Wall Street analysts' day set for Dec. 6 in New York, as executives noted on Wednesday's call, so they'll even have a venue for anything big they want to talk about.
— Craig Matsumoto, Managing Editor, Light Reading
