ADVA Optical Networking has landed a significant customer for its non-coherent 100Gbit/s metro transport system in the form of one of the largest IP traffic exchanges in the world.

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange B.V. (AMS-IX) will deploy ADVA's FSP 3000 platform, incorporating the company's 100Gbit/s technology, to ship traffic among its 12 data center locations in Amsterdam. Financial details of the deal were not released.

The deployment, ADVA's first 100Gbit/s deal, is part of AMS-IX's core network upgrade, which is needed to cope with the exchange's significant increases in data traffic volumes.

"We are experiencing exponential growth in data transported over the exchange platform," stated the exchange's CTO, Henk Steenman, in a press release about the deployment. "We expect that this growth will continue in the next three years."

In May this year, more than 318,600 terabytes of data flowed through the AMS-IX platform, a year-on-year increase of 22 percent.

Steenman talked about the growing capacity demands of AMS-IX's 500-plus customers during a video interview in April, when he was still searching for a suitable metro solution:

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Why this matters
The 100Gbit/s market isn't all about fat long-haul pipes based on the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) framework. ADVA's direct-detection (that is, non-Coherent) 100Gbit/s technology combines four 25Gbit/s wavelengths into one feed that fits in one ITU grid assignment, an approach designed to attract metro network operators looking for a cheaper alternative to the coherent systems, which are better suited to long-haul deployments. (See ADVA Offers a Cheaper 100G.)

This deployment vindicates the decision by ADVA, and others such as Ericsson, to develop such alternative, non-coherent high-capacity metro systems and provides a valuable reference customer for the transport equipment specialist.

Now ADVA and its peers need to secure other deployments to create a meaningful market, albeit a potentially fragmented one that has no unified approach.

ADVA says there are more deals in the pipeline. "This is our first publically announced 100G Metro deployment and we expect to announce more over the coming months," says the vendor's director of corporate communications Gareth Spence.

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— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading