Intensification optical fiber links will increase backbone capacity of hosting network.

LeaseWeb, a hosting provider, today announced that it; is going to intensify the existing optical fiber links in its hosting network by investing in optical DWDM (Dense Wavelength, Division Multiplexing) technology. The company states that this will allow it to create additional capacity and redundancy in the network's backbone.

The company explains that this investment in DWDM is part of a bigger investment plan for its new core-hosting network. Based on Cisco's showpiece CRS-1, the new network will be interlinked by means of 300 kilometers of optical fiber in the Amsterdam region. A total of 10 optical fiber links will each travel different paths, via the mesh protocol, to locations in Amsterdam Zuidoost, Amsterdam Science Park, Schiphol-Rijk and Haarlem.

"DWDM is a fairly expensive technology," says Bastiaan Spandaw, network architect for LeaseWeb. "But it significantly improves the scalability of our network instead of continuously having to add new cables. What's more, DWDM is relatively easy to implement. It's simply a matter of installing the DWDM equipment in our core datacenter locations at EvoSwitch, Telecity and Nihkef, and then switch our existing connections."

"Many of our clients want to be able to grow quickly when they need to," says Con Zwinkels, LeaseWeb's managing director. "It does not make any difference whether these are growth needs of Corporate enterprises, or Internet startups with growth needs in the area of streaming hosting. In order to be able to quickly meet those needs on an ad-hoc basis, our philosophy is that we always maintain twice as much bandwidth capacity in our network as our clients use. We are currently experiencing strong growth in bandwidth demand. DWDM will allow us to meet this demand for bandwidth at all times."