By Bill Gartner, Vice President Cisco's Optical Systems and Transceivers Group

At Cisco, we pride ourselves on being true business collaborators with our service provider customers.

And we relish any opportunity to work side-by-side with a leading global service provider on a technology program with the potential to advance the entire telecommunications industry.

These opportunities are rare indeed. And today at OFC, the largest global conference and exposition for optical communications and networking professionals, Cisco was fortunate enough to receive such an opportunity.

Verizon announced that it would be working with Cisco and one other supplier to design and build a next-generation 100G metro network in the United States that will deliver improved scalability, functionality and efficiency. To meet Verizon's mission of offering its customers high-capacity video and wireless solutions, it has decided to modernize its metro optical network.  Cisco is honored to be part of this important network transformation.

Using 100G flexible CDC ROADMs and packet aggregation will enable Verizon to advance and scale its network while maintaining existing services and reducing service-activation times as well as network operation and maintenance costs.

"Deploying a new coherent, optimized and highly scalable metro network means Verizon stays ahead of the growth trajectory while providing an even more robust network infrastructure for future demand," said Lee Hicks, vice president of Verizon network planning. "Cisco met not only our technology requirements but the aggressive timeline to deploy our next-generation 100G-and-above metro network."

Verizon will test and deploy the Cisco Network Convergence System and the secondsupplier's equipment on portions of its 100G metro network this year, with plans to turn up live traffic in 2016. Supplier volumes will be guided by ongoing testing, support and performance.

Verizon and Cisco are long-standing technology and business partners, and we are pleased to play a key role in Verizon's optical network modernization program.

Cisco has made investments in next-generation optical technologies to help Verizon realize its vision to transform its network architecture to achieve the speed and operational efficiency required to meet the demands of today, while capturing growth opportunities over the next decade.

This new architecture gives Verizon advantages in its metro network including increased capacity, superior latency and improved scalability.

Verizon is a leader in 100G technology having successfully completed several industry firsts, beginning in 2007 with a successful field trial of 100G optical traffic on a live system.

Cisco is very pleased to be working closely with Verizon on its landmark network build-out, and we are committed to making it successful so that Verizon customers will reap its benefits for decades to come!