NTT America (News - Alert) Talks Transport

By Paula Bernier (News - Alert)

It's been a busy few months for NTT America, the U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications (News - Alert) Corp., which is comprised of the Enterprise Solutions and the Global IP Network business units. The company last month installed a new leader, Kazuhiro Gomi, as president, CEO and a member of the board. And in recent months NTT America's Global IP Network business unit has deployed Cisco (News - Alert) Systems ASR 9000 routers, which are helping scale its network and add further support for IPv6 addressing, while preparing for the next big thing in transport.

NGN Magazine recently spoke with Michael Wheeler (News - Alert), vice president of the GIN business unit, about what's new and what's next for NTT America in the areas of transport and value-added services.

What's new?
Wheeler: Earlier this year we announced a 300-gigabit level; we put that much IP-specific capacity in place that we were running our global network on top of. In a short period of time, from February to now, we've grown that by almost 20 percent, so by the end of the year I think we'll be in the 400-gigabit range.

Where is NTT America in the great debate over whether we should go from 10gigE to 40gigE, or just right to 100gigE? Wheeler: One of the things that allows us to do this, and kind of the next level of this, is the ASR 9000 platform from Cisco. Certainly it's capable of handling the 10gig interconnects that we have today as well as transpacific. But the next level of deployment for us is at the 100gigE level.

When does NTT America expect to move to 100gigE?
Wheeler: Later this year and early into next year if the costs of optics come down and we see more real demand, we'll be implementing 100gigE ports not only in our backbone network but ultimately we believe very quickly to customers. A year from now we'll have customers on 100gigE ports on the network in the U.S. and Tokyo…. When we get to 400 gigabits of transpacific capacity, we'd much rather have a smaller number of 100gigE circuits transpacific than 40-plus 10gigE circuits essentially spanning that ocean.

What has been the company's strategy for migrating its network to enable larger payloads over time?
Wheeler: We did a lot of the testing on the ASR 9000 platform last year and went through the lab process that we go through with any new platform we're deploying, and we were pretty happy with the results and have been talking quite a bit about it this year. It's an important thing for our customers. We went to the [Cisco] 6509 platform about four years ago and had a lot of customers going from single gigE to 10gigE ports. It was a pretty progressive thing to do at the time; not a lot of people were doing that. That was just four years ago. And we're really looking at the same thing being the case – going from 10gigE to 100gigE in the next 12 months.

What value-added services does GIN offer and to whom?
Wheeler: It's actually quite a lot. On the Global IP Network side we offer some high-level pieces, like we have a content delivery service called Smart Content Delivery. Instead of deploying 20,000 servers around the world like Akamai (News - Alert) does, we leverage off of the network itself and have caching and some of those pieces. Another primary category is a product we call VLink, a long-haul Ethernet service. It doesn't have to be long-haul, but for our network in the U.S. it essentially is…. We have also for our more traditional enterprise-type customers value-added services like intrusion detection, managed router, those types of things as well.

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