Farice has deployed Ciena’s 100G coherent optical transport technology to upgrade its submarine cable system that connects Iceland and Scotland.
With Ciena’s converged packet optical and Geomesh solutions, Farice ‘will be able to satisfy the growing and unpredictable bandwidth demands of both its traditional telecommunications carrier customers, as well as the rapidly growing Icelandic data center industry.’ 

The firm operates submarine cables between Iceland and both Scotland and Denmark and is the main provider of wholesale capacity in and out of Iceland. optimized for delivery of wholesale capacity to service providers, content providers, cloud service providers, and data center customers.

As part of the upgrade Farice selected Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, powered by 100G WaveLogic 3 Coherent Optical Processors, and GeoMesh optical bypass for deployment on its 1,200 km submarine cable system, FARICE-1, and almost 800 km of terrestrial backhaul network where Ciena is the alien wavelength.
This will provide high-bandwidth connectivity between Reykjavik and Keflavik, Iceland to Dunnet Bay, Scotland

Ciena’s GeoMesh solution incorporates an all-optical network design to connect submarine and terrestrial segments into a single link, with high-capacity optical signals carried as foreign wavelengths over the existing terrestrial backhaul network.

GeoMesh’s simplified all-optical design delivers lower power consumption, therefore supporting Iceland’s green data center goals, while also supporting lower latency to improve connectivity between Iceland’s data centers and the rest of the world, the company said.
The deployment builds on an earlier deal to enhance Farice’s submarine cable system DANICE, which connects Iceland with Denmark. The DANICE upgrade was completed in January 2013.

“To serve the needs of our growing data center and traditional telecommunications customers, we need to be able to offer maximum bandwidth, lower latencies and seamless scalability, while maintaining our higher uptimes. After extensive lab and field testing, it was clear that Ciena’s coherent optical technology and GeoMesh solution is the best option to meet our requirements because we can leverage our existing assets,” said Örn Orrason, vice president of sales and business development at Farice

“Ciena’s 100G-based GeoMesh solution allows Farice to create a seamless network of terrestrial and submarine links that is more responsive, resilient and scalable, with less incurred network latency. In addition, by applying Ciena’s OPⁿ architecture approach, we are showing how network operators can enjoy the benefits of a flexible network that has the ability to automatically adapt to changing conditions, making it possible to safely and easily add 100G services to its existing cables,” said Ed McCorm GM submarine cable systems at Ciena.