Ciena and Altibox: Amsterdam bound with 800G

Earlier this year, Ciena and service provider Altibox Carrier launched a 800G optical transport deployment over 1,100 kilometers between Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Jürgen Hatheier, international CTO of Ciena, and Svein Arild Ims, CEO of Altibox, join the podcast to discuss why the companies partnered on this deployment, what it means for customers and how it sets up Norway as a data center hub.

"Altibox Carrier is trying to enable Norway for more data center activity," said Arild Ims. "And to do so we need the proper infrastructure to Europe, where the main data centers and PoPs (points of presence) are … We have approximately built 2,500 kilometers of new long haul infrastructure, including both subsea assets and terrestrial fiber."

According to Altibox, this makes the company the first provider to reach 800G over a submarine link, across its NO-UK cable. The NO-UK submarine cable is 670km long and links routes between the Nordics, United Kingdom and US.

This deployment could also have a positive impact on the environment, said Arild Ims.

"Norway has a huge surplus of green energy," he said. "And I think 95% of the energy produced in Norway is hydro energy. So for energy-intensive industries that want to lower the carbon footprint, that's ideal."

You can download a lightly edited transcript of the podcast here.

Here are a few topics we covered:

• Background on partnership to deploy 800G (00:28)
• Length of the project (02:19)
• Why the Amsterdam to Copenhagen link was chosen for the 800G deployment (03:59)
• Reasoning behind connecting Norway to other regions in Europe (06:34)
• Positioning Norway as a sustainable data center hub by using renewable energy (07:49)
• Milestone of providing 800G over a submarine link (09:51)
• Changing customer demands for bandwidth (11:38)

Related stories and links:

• Ciena's Brian Lavallée on Tonga's tussle with a broken submarine cable
• Global Cloud Xchange battles global latency with subsea connectivity
• Ciena's Gary Smith: Looking beyond the chip blip
• Ciena blames 'unreliable' suppliers as profits tumble
• Trans-Pacific subsea cable set for $2.5B construction boom
• 400G roundup: GTT upgrades; Telstra's new subsea cable
• Subsea players plot quake-detecting sensors

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading