CIENA Corp. and Farice have jointly announced an upgrade to the submarine cable system DANICE, connecting Iceland with Denmark. The new upgrade, due to become operational in early 2013, will utilize Ciena's 40G coherent optical transport technology to significantly increase the total capacity of the submarine cable, providing sufficient bandwidth to support the rapidly growing Icelandic data center industry.

Leveraging Ciena's unique GeoMesh networking solution, Farice has optimized its cable landing station design allowing for seamless connectivity between their submarine and terrestrial networks leading to savings in operation and capital expenditures, as well as reduced latency. Farice selected Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform for deployment on its 2,295 km long DANICE submarine cable system providing high-bandwidth connectivity between Landeyjar, Iceland and Blaabjerg, Denmark. The network will initially utilize Ciena's 40G coherent transport technology, with ultra-long distance 100G wavelengths (based on the WaveLogic 3 coherent optical processors) to be deployed in 2013.

With an increasing number of foreign enterprises and operators turning to Iceland with their data center investments -- in search of low cooling costs and renewable energy sources -- the country's submarine cable system with direct connection to the European continent was running out of available bandwidth. Scalable to 8.8 Tb/s of total capacity on a single fiber, Farice's upgraded submarine cable will address this capacity crunch, paving the way to further growth of Iceland's storage and data center market. The upgraded DANICE submarine cable consists of four fiber pairs giving a maximum capacity of 35.2 Tb/s. The network upgrade will be managed by Ciena's OneControl Unified Management System, providing Farice's Network Operations Center (NOC) with multi-layer service management thus enabling rapid service deployment, accurate resource utilization tracking and network hotspot identification, resulting in efficient use of critical network assets and bandwidth optimization.

In addition to upgrading one of two submarine cables, the deployment also includes a unique GeoMesh network solution, which incorporates optical bypass technology to significantly simplify the end-to-end network design from the cable landing station in the south of Iceland to Farice's Points of Presence (PoP) in downtown Reykjav k and Keflavik Airport. The traditional approach is to add regenerators at the cable landing station, which adds increased latency, cost, and complexity. Ciena's GeoMesh network solution incorporates an all-optical network design to connect submarine and terrestrial segments into a single seamless link, with high-capacity optical signals carried as foreign wavelengths over the existing terrestrial backhaul network.