Ciena Selected to Power AboveNet’s Ultra-Low Latency Network

Ciena Selected to Power AboveNet’s Ultra-Low Latency Network

Here's a Press Release from NEF Partner, Ciena Corporation

Ciena announced today that AboveNet, a leading provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions, has deployed Ciena’s 2RS module as part of the service provider’s new Agility Guarantee program.  The CN4200 module helps lower delays in optical connections by up to 20%, helping AboveNet to offers customers high bandwidth connectivity with optimum speed and performance for latency-sensitive applications.

“When tiny fractions of a second can mean the difference in huge amounts of revenue, latency is by far the top priority and key decision criteria for our target customers,” said MaryBeth Nance, Executive Director of Business Development & Marketing at AboveNet, “which is why our fiber-intensive private optical network gives us a huge advantage over competitors that have lots of intermediary routers, switches and other equipment that simply add more latency and potential points of failure to the network.”

AboveNet serves its business and carrier customers over a private fiber optic network that delivers network connectivity and IP services in and among top U.S. metro markets and globally. The company’s private metro optical networks offer a variety of Metro Wave and Metro Ethernet services. With the Agility Guarantee program, AboveNet is now offering its financial services, energy trading, online gaming, and media and entertainment customers a network solution that delivers round-trip latencies as low as sub-1 millisecond for some services. The program uses real-world, round-trip numbers for the end-to-end network – not one-way metrics, averages or SLAs for only part of the network, such as between points of presence.

“AboveNet is a long-time customer that has chosen Ciena to be among the select few vendors to provide equipment to support its network. The deployment of Ciena’s 2RS modules on AboveNet’s base of CN 4200s underscores the ongoing value of that network investment and our mutual goal of enabling high-capacity, low-latency connectivity for end customers,” said Mike Aquino, Senior Vice President of Global Field Operations at Ciena. “The enhanced capabilities of CN 4200 demonstrates our commitment to continued research and development in increasing network capacity and reducing latency from our existing platforms for creating service-driven networks with unparalleled performance.”