Wholesale customers of Virgin Media Business (VMB) in the UK can now benefit from managed wavelength services and the flexibility to allow direct access to optical filter ports to scale their own dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) access infrastructure, after the business arm of the cable operator introduced its Flexi Filter service, using Infinera’s XTM Series.
VMB’s carrier network includes 162 voice telephony switches across the UK with 330 Ethernet points of presence across 186,000km of local and metro network. The Flexi Filter service offers a combination of form-factor, capacity, distance and port presentation. This enables customers to extend fibre-based footprints deeper into access networks to support applications such as 5G cell tower backhaul.
Already deployed by Virgin Media in its UK and Liberty Global pan-European networks, the XTM Series is a modular and scalable system of pluggable optics that feature low power and high density, providing efficient delivery of Ethernet services. Using the platform’s flexibility, Flexi Filter offers managed 10G and 100G solutions, allowing multiple client services over a single fibre pair in one rack unit while enabling the customer two additional wavelengths for its own services.
End-users can choose from a range of managed service types with a ‘build-as-you-grow’ model, allowing additional capacity to be added as needed, depending on the base configuration chosen. All solutions are designed to allow for the requirements of 5G in terms of synchronisation, latency and delay variation.
Andrew Halliwell, product director at Virgin Media Business said that the introduction of Flexi Filter ‘gives our customers and partners the flexibility, scalability and control they need.’ While Bob Jandro, senior vice president, worldwide sales at Infinera said that the deployment ‘emphasises the XTM Series’ ability to deliver optical and packet services required for a modernised metro network, with support for dark fibre services.’
Infinera also recently launched The Infinite Network, an end-to-end network architecture, designed to pave the way to instantly scaleable, self-optimising networks, while its new ICE6 is engineered to deliver up to 800Gb/s per wavelength and an expanded toolkit of advanced coherent technologies.
