Telia Lithuania offers businesses country-wide 800 Gbps service

The Baltics is increasingly becoming a digital technology hotspots, with resiliency being of great importance for all networks in the region. To offer assured connectivity for its users, leading local supplier of telecom services Telia Lithuania has deployed coherent optics technology to upgrade its countrywide network to support 400G and higher services and deploy the first 800Gbps wavelength service between major cities in Lithuania. 

Telia Lithuania is the only telecommunications company in Lithuania with a full-scale offering of fixed and mobile telephony, broadband internet, and television services. It boasts a strong presence in the IT sector, providing tailored solutions for local and international businesses.

With this deployment, the Telia Company subsidiary is using Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme (WL5e) technology in a bid to deliver more flexible, higher capacity, and cost-effective transport services with the resiliency and power efficiency required by 5G, internet of things (IoT) and other bandwidth-intensive applications.

Telia Lithuania’s new network will use additional optical and network management solutions that make possible increased capacity, network reach, and power efficiency with the 6500 packet-optical platform powered by WL5e and WaveLogic Ai programmable coherent optics.

The technology claims faster wavelength restoration with the platform’s flexible photonics and intelligent Layer 0 control plane. The platform is attributed with bringing quicker issue resolution and improved timing distribution for applications requiring highly reliable synchronisation, as well as simpler service deployment and network operations with Navigator Network Control Suite (Navigator NCS).

“Our mission is to be the most innovative operator in the Baltics – not just for 5G, but also transmission,” said Telia Lithuania head of technology Andrius Šemeškevičius. “We chose to work with Ciena because innovation is in their DNA too. Ciena’s industry-leading optical technology allows us to reliably and efficiently meet our customers’ varied transport requirements – whether for access, metro, long haul, or enterprise data centre interconnect.”

Ciena vice-president of EMEA, Virginie Hollebecque, added: “Network resiliency is of great importance for all networks in the Baltic region, considering the region’s heavy reliance on digital technologies.

“With an optical solution from Ciena, Telia Lithuania has a resilient network foundation that can instantly bounce back from any disruptions, minimising downtime, ensuring service continuity, and safeguarding its communication infrastructure.”

The deal with Telia in Lithuania is the latest in a series of wins for Ciena with European telcos. In November 2023, Liberty Global company Telenet announced that it would be deploying Ciena optical and network management solutions to support its network expansion across Belgium.

The deal sees Ciena upgrading Telenet’s optical network, which connects consumers and businesses in metro areas, with a suite of solutions, including WaveLogic 5 Nano (WL5n) which provides 400G connectivity, while delivering “significant power, space and operational efficiencies”.

The 400G QSFP-DD coherent pluggable transceivers are said to offer higher-performance, interoperable transmission to deliver 400G connectivity across all links in the network.