Infinera, a provider of Intelligent Transport Networks, in partnership with leading digital communications company Telefónica UK, has announced the deployment of the Infinera DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform across Network Rail’s railway infrastructure in the UK.
Andy Hudson, Director, Network Rail Telecom said: ‘The partnership with Infinera in deploying this network to scale to terabits in the future supports all our future requirements in the UK with bandwidth deployed quickly and efficiently, meeting the increasing demands of the railway. Deploying a vendor with Infinera’s capability is key to enabling a safer, smarter and more cost effective telecoms platform fit for a better railway for a better Britain.’
Network Rail Telecom (NRT) is Network Rail’s national telecommunications asset management and service provision function. NRT manages over 16,000 km of fibre optic cable in England, Wales and Scotland, delivering telecommunications systems and managed services, to the UK’s railway.
NRT’s deployment of the DTN-X platform, is designed to support future terabit super-channels without requiring new chassis. NRT’s deployment features Infinera’s ‘Instant Bandwidth’ technology, which enables NRT to deploy capacity with the click of a mouse, to rapidly meet their customer service demands for high capacity, low latency services.
The DTN-X is designed to scale in the future to support up to 12 Tb/s of integrated OTN switching as well as Fast Shared Mesh Protection to provide rapid service protection even in the face of multiple fibre cuts.
Craig Ellis, Head of Technology & Engineering at NRT said: ‘We deployed Infinera's solutions to enable a railway fit for the future, providing improved network reliability, scalability and safety for our teams. For railways, it’s about safety and performance through reliable network infrastructure and leading-edge network management systems. Remote configurability of bandwidth is also important since the majority of our nodes are at the railway track and accessing these sites is not as easy as accessing a traditional telco node.’
Chris Champion, Infinera senior vice president, EMEA sales said: ‘Network Rail's selection of an Infinera Intelligent Transport Network for a cutting-edge optical network, highlights the value of our solutions to provide reliability for a mission critical network that isn’t easily accessible at all times. The Infinera Intelligent Transport Network enables network operators to automate, converge and simplify their optical transport networks to reliably deliver advanced services to their customers.’