Smartoptics has announced that GleSYS, the Swedish cloud and data center operator with a footprint stretching across Sweden and Finland, has streamlined its backbone by moving to IP over DWDM. At first glance this sounds technical, maybe even routine, but dig a little and it becomes clear this is really about architectural clarity and operational sanity. GleSYS runs its own cross-border backbone in-house, serving customers in more than sixty countries, and as traffic kept climbing the old assumptions around optical transport started to feel heavy, overbuilt, almost designed for someone else’s problems.
The new setup replaces that weight with something closer to a clean sketch. Smartoptics’ open line system, paired with 400ZR+ coherent pluggables, strips the transport layer down to what actually matters: predictable optical performance, higher capacity, and far fewer moving parts to babysit day to day. In the visual language of the network, think fewer boxes, shorter signal paths, and light that behaves exactly as expected from span to span. The deployment, carried out with support from Conscia, creates a transport layer that feels almost passive in how little attention it demands, while still being very much ready for the next wave of coherent technologies waiting just around the corner.
What makes this interesting is not just the technology choice but the mindset behind it. GleSYS is not a national telco with layers of optical specialists; it is a data center operator running lean teams where the network exists to serve hosting, not the other way around. Traditional optical systems, with their service-provider DNA, often assume complexity as a given. Here, the appeal of Smartoptics is precisely the opposite. As Eric Löwgren from GleSYS puts it, the platform feels as easy to operate as a passive mux, which is about as high praise as you can get from someone responsible for keeping traffic flowing without drama at three in the morning. There’s a sense, almost understated, that this is how the network should have looked all along.
Zooming out a bit, IP over DWDM has been gaining momentum for exactly these reasons. Coherent pluggables promise enormous capacity in small, efficient form factors, but they also raise the bar for signal quality and consistency. You can’t just drop them into any old optical layer and hope for the best. Open line systems provide that steady, predictable foundation, letting the optics do what they’re designed to do without unnecessary amplification stages or proprietary constraints. In networks like GleSYS’, regional, metro, cross-border but not sprawling continents, this approach feels less like an optimization and more like a natural evolution.
From Smartoptics’ perspective, this deployment reinforces a long-standing positioning choice: focusing on regional and metro networks where simplicity and cost efficiency matter as much as raw performance. Magnus Grenfeldt’s comments hint at a broader confidence that as coherent optics continue to mature, more operators will question why their transport layers are still so complicated. The GleSYS backbone upgrade doesn’t shout; it quietly demonstrates that a cleaner architecture can support growth, reduce operational load, and still leave plenty of headroom for whatever the next generation of optics decides to bring along.
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