It’s always better when two strong individuals team up. Whether it was Michael Jordan’s successful partnership with Scottie Pippen, or Batman and Superman joining forces to form the world’s finest duo, a successful pairing of two experts or specialists can lead to great things. The same is true for innovative companies that work together to achieve new heights, like metro Ethernet specialist FiberLight (News - Alert), which has joined forces with networking specialist Ciena to address the nation’s growing thirst for mobile data.

FiberLight will deploy Ciena’s packet networking solutions to create a strong mobile backhaul network for two major U.S. wireless operators. These networks will provide fiber to over 450 cell towers, giving customers 100Mb/s connectivity at each, scalable to 1Gb/s.

"By deploying Ciena's packet networking infrastructure at the vast majority of towers we serve, we are enabling our customers to quickly scale from 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s per tower, eliminate bandwidth restrictions and reduce the potential for data bottlenecks,” said Andrew Stravelli, vice president of Network Engineering at FiberLight, in a statement. “Additionally, the automation, remote provisioning and reporting features provided by Ciena's management solution allows us to proactively monitor, maintain and troubleshoot our customers' networks. Our end customers can then use the secure, cloud-based portal to confirm that we are meeting SLA requirements."

The packet networking solutions from Ciena will help FiberLight serve its mobile operator customers, replacing overtaxed T1 lines and microwave connections, in addition to providing state-of-the-art metro Ethernet connections to over 450 cell towers. This will support FiberLight’s west Texas initiative, where it is working to build a dedicated fiber-optic backhaul network for a national LTE (News - Alert) wireless provider.