Making light of it

It is rare these days to come across a company in the communications sector that designs and manufactures its devices in house and then only sells these parts in end user equipment that it also has designed in house. And, in the up and down world of optical communications of the last few years, it is even rarer for a start up founded in 2000 to manage to raise more than $200million, a large part of which has been spent fitting out its own indium phosphide (InP) wafer fab. Infinera, based in Sunnyvale, California, has managed both these tricks and has just announced that its Digital Transport Network (DTN) system – which is powered by the company's 'breakthrough' tightly integrated photonic ics – has gone live at freenet, one of Germany's largest internet service providers. The DTN – basically a wavelength division multiplexing (wdm) system with novel add/drop multiplexing capabilities – is being deployed in a multiwavelength 1800km core ring backbone network that will support DSL and voice services. The network supports a mix of 2.5Gbit/s and 10Gbit Ethernet transmission across a network linking six of Germany's largest cities. Click here to request this article by email