Stadsnätsföreningen, the Swedish Urban Network Association, has chosen TransPacket to provide cost-efficient ‘virtual wavelength’ services to its customers throughout Sweden. Using TransPacket´s hardware, Stadsnätsföreningen will be able to provide cost-efficient, flexible service provisioning and efficient bandwidth utilisation.
TransPacket´s Ethernet-based Fusion technology enables sub-wavelength capacity services and traditional Ethernet services to be carried in the same physical wavelength. Virtual wavelengths possess the service characteristics of physical wavelengths, but at a fraction of the production cost per bit for the service providers, the vendor asserts.
The concept was developed by TransPacket’s CTO Thomas Örnevik, who launched the company in 2009. “Wavelength services seldom fill the available capacity of the wavelengths. With the TransPacket Fusion technology, any unused capacity is available for traditional Ethernet service offerings,” Örnevik explained.
Traffic carried on the virtual wavelength is experiences zero jitter or packet loss, while any gaps in transmission can be filled with statistically multiplexed low-priority traffic, allowing bandwidth use to be maximised.
Stadsnätsföreningen has been instrumental in Sweden’s ‘fibre to the village’ movement, which encourages deployment of fibre-optic cable in rural areas. The project is one of the main factors behind the increase in the number of community-owned fibre networks in Sweden, which are now thought to number more than 1,000 (see Survey: over 1000 rural broadband networks in Sweden).
Stadsnätsföreningen plans to use the TransPacket equipment to provide services to these community-owned municipal networks, which serve more than 1.3 million broadband consumers in Sweden. In order to manage all of these networks and customers, Stadsnätsföreningen needed a system that could be as flexible and efficient as possible.
Explaining why TransPacket was chosen, Jimmy Persson, product manager of Stadsnätsföreningen said: “TransPacket´s equipment enables cost efficient provisioning of wavelength services across our network of near 200 individual service providers. The solution extends the capability of our Ethernet network with a bandwidth utilisation and flexibility higher than for a comparable OTN solution, increasing the life-time of the investment.”
The virtual wavelength capability was initially deployed in May 2015 by one of the local fibre network providers. This deployment provides the network provider with flexibility to connect a large number of customers using both physical and virtual wavelength services as well as traditional Ethernet services at different locations in their network.
