FiberLight, Ciena Help Wireless Operators Manage Soaring Data Services Demand

March 8, 2013

FiberLight is offering a long-term solution to manage backhaul traffic by bringing fiber directly to wireless cell towers. In two major projects, FiberLight is deploying Ciena’s packet networking solution to help operators replace slow legacy T1 connections and bring fiber to nearly 450 cell towers in total. The backhaul solutions, built on Ciena’s OPn network architecture design principles, are simple, streamlined and scalable, with fewer router locations and equipment than traditional networks. The FiberLight and Ciena infrastructure is future-proofing the operators’ backhaul networks for the long term, making it possible to scale seamlessly to 1G per cell tower and beyond.

Many U.S. wireless networks are running at 80 percent of their full capacity because of the mobile data revolution, with nearly 100 million U.S. consumers e-mailing, texting, browsing and downloading on their mobile devices, causing backhaul traffic management to become a major challenge. FiberLight provides next-generation optical transport solutions — including Ethernet, wavelengths, IP and dark fiber — that help organizations manage rapid traffic growth. FiberLight’s $1 billion, 500,000-mile network serves 40 of the nation’s 50 highest-bandwidth users, spanning Georgia, Texas, Florida, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

“Since 2005, we’ve been providing fiber-optic transport solutions for carriers, government organizations and large enterprises,” said Joe Patton, executive vice president of sales and marketing at FiberLight, in a company statement. “However, we recently began helping wireless operators meet the challenges of exploding backhaul traffic by bringing fiber all the way to their cell towers.”