Colt Technology Services is riding a tight relationship with Cisco to manage the European-based network service provider (NSP)’s surging network traffic demands while also managing network efficiency.

Colt currently provides enterprise-focused network access across more than 40 countries and linking more than 1,100 data centers in the United States and Asia-Pacific region. That reach was expanded by its acquisition of Lumen Technologies’ European, Middle East, and Africa operations that closed late last year.

Vertical Systems Group recently ranked Colt as the largest global provider of Ethernet services, topping such operators as Orange, Verizon, and AT&T. Colt is also active in providing SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) products to customers.

Bart Janssens, senior specialist for packet architecture at Colt, explained that the networking provider has worked with many different equipment and software vendors over the years, both through its own deployments and agreements it inherited when it acquired assets. This included early work with Cisco, before moving to Juniper and then to Nokia.

“But [since] 2016, it has been greenfield Cisco,” Janssens said.

A big chunk of that work came in 2021, when Colt announced plans to deploy Cisco’s Silicon One switching and routing portfolio including the vendor’s Acacia 400ZR pluggable optics and segment routing MPLS software to power Colt’s move to a 400-gigabut networking architecture.

Colt has also deployed Cisco’s network assurance platform that the vendor bolstered through its acquisition of Accedian last year.

Janssens noted that Cisco’s stability in the market was one part of Colt’s reason to go with the networking giant, but also the vendor was open to a broader partnership opportunity with customers that want to jump early on new innovation.

“Obviously, that has pros and cons because being early also means you have to discover the bugs or discover the limits,” Janssens said of this arrangement. “But the pro is if it works out you gain from it as well. And currently, our relationship with Cisco is mainly driven by that. We are very early getting access to technology or ideas that we mutually work on.”

An example of that early work and innovation was the ability to expose network topology SLAs using Colt’s network data to help Cisco innovate its application. This provided Colt with access to a new potentially revenue-generating application that allowed it to punch above its weight.

“That's why we need partners to help us with that,” Janssens explained. “If it will be the other way around, and if I would be, let's say, a massive hyperscaler, I would only care about cost because I'm consuming tens-of-thousands of boxes and maybe like 25,000 plugs, and I have different priorities. But with Colt it's about the innovation, early adoption, and trying out things together. That's why, on this piece, we are a Cisco shop.”

Efficiency and sustainability gains This tight relationship is also benefiting Colt’s efficiency goals. Janssens said the network provider is working toward a renewable energy goal by 2030 and a net-zero goal by 2045.

Colt has been able to glean a 97% increase in energy savings since moving to Cisco’s routed optical networking platform. This is on the back of replacing transponders with pluggable optics and using higher-density Cisco Silicon One routers, which has reduced its power and space requirements.

Colt is also using Cisco’s back-end platform to help power its ability to measure true energy usage of its network, which is becoming increasingly important for end-users that have similar network efficiency goals.

“Next we are going to expose wattage per wave, and then it will be interesting because then I can map what I’m consumer with through optical with packets and bring that together so that the customer gets an honest view,” Janssens said. “But it’s also interesting because then, as a customer, you can compare, you can say ‘show me the wave value, show me packet service value,’ and then you can decide if you prefer dedicated bandwidth because you have very strict jitter constraints or you can choose to have the least amount of power consumed because you have sustainability goals to achieve.”

Colt’s Cisco path to 800G Colt has recently thrown its support behind Cisco’s recently updated 8000 Series routers. That update was announced earlier this year and injects 800-gigabit (800G) performance into the vendor’s long-standing 8000 Series routers that are targeted at hyperscalers, service providers, and enterprises supporting bandwidth-intensive network applications like 5G, IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).

The updated routers were boosted by Cisco’s new line card that are built on the vendor’s Silicon One P100 ASIC. The new card supports 28.8 terabits of capacity with 36 ports of 800G, and the 8000 Series router can house up to 18 of those line cards to provide up to 518 terabits of system capacity.

Cisco has been working with some network service providers on so-called “hero experiments” using 800G equipment that have shown robust results. This includes a test with Windstream that used Cisco’s NCS 1014 C-band wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transponder line card and Acacia’s Coherent Interconnect Module 8 (CIM 8) to support a 1 Tb/s wavelength across a 1,100-kilometer roundtrip section of Windstream’s ICON infrastructure.

Analysts have noted the move toward these 800G systems will further their drive toward greater network efficiencies.

“These plans are being made in the context of limited per-customer revenue growth,” Simon Sherrington, research director at Analysys Mason, wrote in a report last year. “Operators must devise an evolution strategy for their transport networks that will enable them to meet cost per bit, power, and space efficiency goals, while ensuring improved quality of service and resiliency, as well as supporting the launch of new wholesale and retail services.”

Janssens said that Colt does have the Cisco 800G routers in its labs and in “proof-of-concept production, but the network will naturally have to evolve into those.”

“We plan to validate links this year, and then I think where we see benefits next year, and that could be on some of the hot sections” of our network, Janssens said. “This could come into play, linked to moving to the denser silicon routers. So I would not be surprised to see production late next year and we will benefit from this.”