With users consuming increasingly higher-quality broadband content, fatter pipes are always a key consideration for carriers. And while its undersea deployments still remain limited to smaller paths, NTT America is turning to 100 Gigabit Ethernet for its U.S. backbone. Enterprise Networking Planet takes a look.
Network carrier NTT America plans to make a considerable investment in networking equipment this year to accommodate expected growth in traffic. While that’s standard fare for a carrier, the kind of traffic the telco is expecting is different.
NTT America is the U.S. division of Japanese service provider NTT Communications. Among their big networking routes is a trans-Pacific connection between Japan and the U.S., one that will be expanded in 2010 along with rest of NTT America’s network.
“We’re still holding the same growth pattern that we’ve seen for years and years now,” Doug Junkins, NTT America’s CTO and vice president of IP development, told InternetNews.com. “No matter how much we grow, it seems like the next year we always grow 80 to 100 percent more.”
For NTT America’s backbone in the U.S., the plan is to take advantage of emerging 100 Gbps technology. Numerous vendors including Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco and Juniper have all made announcements about the pending deployments of 100 Gbps networking gear.