CenturyLink has been busy again

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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From today, CenturyLink has now deployed SDN, NFV in 36 network locations

http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/centurylinks-feger-we-hav…

“One of our clients is extremely predictable and the traffic changes exponentially for a short amount of time and giving them the ability to add in WAN acceleration or additional data center to their infrastructure is a powerful thing,” Feger said. “That’s the difference the customers will see.”

The service provider has set an aggressive SDN and NFV network plan, announcing that it will virtualize 40 percent of its global IP core network by the end of this year and plans to have full global virtualization of its IP core network and data centers by 2018.

Why do we care about this? CenturyLink is Infinera’s Tier 1 customer (http://www.infinera.com/and-infineras-tier-1-customer-is-cen…).

From this time last year, we had the following tip off to a solid 2014 third quarter:

http://www.barrons.com/articles/infinera-will-stand-out-in-e…

Our Infinera-specific checks at CenturyLink and Level 3 have come back strong, and we expect these two carriers to be 10%-plus customers in the third-quarter on the strength of their 100G long-haul footprint builds.

This time around, we’re looking at Data Center builds. I wouldn’t be surprised if CenturyLink was one of the customers holding out for the 100G version of Cloud Xpress.

Time will tell?

Best,
–Kevin

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Background from when 100G Cloud Xpress hit the streets in June, leaving these last 3 months for customers to take them all in.

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/optical-networks-in…

This week, Infinera expanded the Cloud Xpress to include 100 gigabit-per-sec (Gbit/sec) Ethernet (GbE) circuits. Previously it supported 10 Gbit/sec and 40 Gbit/sec circuits. With the addition of the new 100 B, the Cloud Xpress family now supports 10 GbE, 40 GbE and 100 GbE interfaces to match a variety of applications. The platform uses Infinera’s proprietary chip, an oPIC-500 optical engine, and Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology to connect at up to 500 gigabits per second (Gb/s) using a two-rack unit hardware chassis. It also added MACsec encryption for improved security, NETCONF & YANG support for software-defined networking (SDN) and ease of use, and LLDP discovery protocols, targeted at data-center configuration.

This all lends itself to the discussion about the integration of SDN technology and optical. Many of these improvements have helped boost Infinera, but more importantly, its technology is well positioned for the data center Interconnect (DCI) market — as well as other data-hungry markets such as mobile.

t’s part of a resurgence of optical technology, in general, and Infinera’s technology specifically. First of all, 500 Gbit/sec is without a doubt the highest capacity in this condensed format on the market. Second, the flexibility of Infinera’s technology allows optical wavelengths carrying massive amounts of data to be switched and mapped into new networks on the fly.

The massive growth of data pulsing through data centers, social networks, and consumer mobile networks will continue to fuel the need for high-capacity, software-configurable bandwidth. By 2019, mobile network traffic is forecasted to increase tenfold, according to ACG research. Business cloud computing services are expected to increase at a 40 percent average annual rate. ACG says that by 2019, there will be 60 percent more data centers in the world’s metropolitan areas. Data center interconnect volumes will increase by more than 400 percent.

Infinera’s aggressively gone after the DCI market, and Cloud Xpress is the product.

Best,
–Kevin

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Century Link is one of the “rural” companies that gets huge tax payer subsidies for the “farmer high-bandwidth” initiative, or whatever it is called. They are a customer of Dycom that lays the fiber in the ground :wink: