Headquartered in Toronto, Canada’s main economic hub and most populous city, Acronym Solutions Inc. (Acronym) is an information and communications technology (ICT) company.

With roots in leveraging electrical infrastructure to provide utility-grade connectivity, the company previously operated under the name Hydro One Telecom (HOT). In October 2021, HOT rebranded to Acronym to represent its transformation to a full-service ICT solutions provider.

But why this particular name? The ICT provider reasons that acronyms (noun) provide an easier way to communicate in an industry that utilizes a lot of long technical terms. “Our new name demonstrates the simplicity, agility, and responsiveness that our teams provide to our customers,” said John Papadakis, President and CEO of Acronym.

The change to ‘Acronym’ signals the company’s intention to build on its rich legacy and continuously evolve to serve its customers.

Transforming for the future

Acronym operates an 8,700km fiber-optic network, with strategic connections to Montreal, Buffalo and Detroit. It also runs more than 80 points of presence (POPs), has 1,900+ on-net locations and offers connectivity through 42 data centers.

The extensive fiber network provides connectivity, cloud, data center interconnect (DCI) and other services to businesses, enterprises, service providers, financial institutions, public sector agencies, utilities and schools in the region.

With many of these organizations facing rapid growth, changing demands and digital transformation initiatives, Acronym recognized that its infrastructure needed to evolve to support customers’ needs for higher performance and advanced data services and cloud applications.

The ICT provider’s previous network was an optical transport network that scaled to 100Gbps. For the network upgrade, Acronym set out to find a networking systems company that could help it meet several key objectives:

• Integration of sub-100G client aggregation and OTN switching, coherent optics and optical line system in the same platform for operational and cost efficiencies
• Service delivery at speeds of 400Gbps and above with very low latency
• Minimal truck rolls and manual provisioning when turning up services
• End-to-end performance monitoring and network management capabilities

Acronym issued a request for proposal (RFP) for the project and after a rigorous evaluation process ultimately chose a coherent optical solution from Ciena. The two companies had worked together before, when Ciena supplied its Waveserver platform for Acronym’s transport network.

Ciena solutions supporting Acronym

For its network upgrade, Acronym is leveraging Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 and WaveLogic Ai coherent optics over a 6500 fully flexible colorless, directionless and contentionless photonic system. The ICT provider is also utilizing Ciena’s Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller for network management.

With MCP, Acronym gains centralized control of network resources and deployed services through real-time intelligence and visibility to proactively identify connectivity or performance issues. And MCP’s integrated lifecycle operations, including online planning, allow the ICT provider to speed up time-to-market of new customer services.

The high-capacity, programmable infrastructure makes it possible for Acronym to respond quickly to ever-changing bandwidth demands while maximizing operational efficiencies, providing its customers with reliable, high-speed services at speeds of 400Gbps and beyond with nearly zero delay.

“Ciena’s solution allowed us to consolidate functions into as few devices as possible,” said Papadakis. “We can now deliver multiple services on the same devices without any compromises—with a more than four-fold capacity increase.”

Additionally, Ciena Services is assisting with Acronym’s network upgrade and service migration, providing solution design, site engineering, installation, commissioning, technical support and maintenance services including managed spares.

Papadakis remarked, “Ciena helped us execute on our network evolution plans, allowing us to push the envelope with faster, more reliable bandwidth and greater capacity to support our customers’ digital transformation journeys.”

Acronym offers a full range of scalable and secure network connectivity, cloud, security, and operational solutions.