19.2 Tbps Aggregate capacity
< 2 hours Provisioning time
Zero Customer downtime
8 years Capacity headroom
The Challenge
NordFiber's existing 10G CWDM transport was at 85% capacity across their 12-PoP metro ring. Enterprise customers were demanding 100G wavelength services, and 5G backhaul requirements were growing exponentially. A full optical layer refresh was needed without disrupting live traffic carrying 14,000 business customers.
Our Approach
We designed a parallel DWDM ring using Ciena 6500 Waveserver platforms with ROADM nodes at each PoP:
- 96-channel C-band DWDM with 400ZR coherent optics for 400G per wavelength
- Colorless-directionless ROADM at every node for on-demand wavelength provisioning
- Hitless migration — New optical layer built in parallel; customers migrated wavelength-by-wavelength over 4 months
- Photonic layer monitoring — OSNR, chromatic dispersion, and PMD telemetry streamed to the NOC
The Outcome
The new ring went live with zero customer-impacting events. NordFiber can now provision 400G wavelengths in under 2 hours instead of 6 weeks, and the ring has capacity headroom for the next 8 years of projected growth.