XO fulfills its fiber fantasies with 100-gigabit long-haul network

Nationwide fiber backbone provider XO claims it is the first US operator to build an inter-city 100-gigabit fiber network — other carriers have performed the feats in the confines of big cities, but XO has gone coast to coast. The upgrade boosts XO’s capacity by a factor of 10.

XO sells transport and intra-city capacity to enterprises, cable companies, wireless and wireline carriers, and Internet companies looking to move massive amounts of traffic between point A and point B. For the upgrade, XO is using Nokia Siemens Networks’ latest-generation dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology to boost the bandwidth carried by a single wavelength of light from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps. NSN’s platform can support 96 simultaneous wavelengths so the theoretical total capacity of the network is 9.6 Terabits per second.