Infinera Dives Into Submarine Market

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Infinera (Nasdaq: INFN) is launching a new submarine solution to bring the benefits of photonic integration to the world of undersea networks. The new Infinera submarine solution is designed to bring enhanced capacity, new services, and Infinera’s rapid speed of deployment to the world of subsea networks. The Infinera submarine solution, which is designed to be deployed at land-based terminals of submarine networks, is already shipping to Infinera customers and is carrying live traffic today for Global Crossing.

Carriers worldwide are seeing increasing bandwidth demand on submarine networks, driven by growing pervasiveness of the Internet and network usage in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Many of those networks are reaching the limits of their current capacity. The Infinera submarine solution offers submarine network operators a highly cost-effective way to protect their investment in their subsea infrastructure while adding new capacity to the network and taking advantage of other features of the Infinera Digital Optical Networks architecture. The Infinera submarine solution enables carriers to deliver additional capacity, typically including a doubling of the number of wavelengths on their subsea networks, while enjoying the speed of deployment, ease of operation, and flexibility of the Infinera platform. With the ability to use one optical platform for their subsea networks and their terrestrial networks, we believe network operators can deploy an end-to-end solution with significant savings in capital and operating cost and simplified operation.

The new Infinera submarine solution is based on several technical breakthroughs. Infinera’s large-scale photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have been enhanced with the addition of semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) to provide trans-oceanic optical reach for the Infinera submarine solution. The enhanced PICs are implemented in the new Infinera Submarine Line Module (SLM), which provides 100 Gigabits/second (Gb/s) of PIC-based DWDM capacity on every line card. With up to 16 SLM modules multiplexed onto a single fiber, the Infinera submarine solution can provide up to 160 wavelengths on existing submarine optical networks. In addition, the Infinera solution incorporates innovative new technology intended to provide significant cost and space savings as compared to traditional DWDM submarine networks.

Infinera Corp. (Nasdaq: INFN)