“Wireless users seem to have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth, whether they’re watching videos, sending pictures to friends, playing games online – you name it,” said Roland Thorton, executive vice president for Qwest Wholesale.

Qwest says this new infrastructure is ideal for providers looking to migrate from existing SONET based services due to greater flexibility.

The new service will allow scalable bandwidth, enabling providers to increase capacity to sites on an incremental and as-needed basis. The bandwidth is managed by software, rather than hardware so the time required to perform provisioning of increased speed is reduced and operations are simplified.

Previously 10GbE adapters required the purchase of an additional SR adapter to function, the X520 is compatable with SR, LR or SFP+ direct attach cable all from the same card. This allows administrators to switch back and forth after purchase without buying all new cards, just new optics.

The card is based on the Intel 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller and also has backwards compatible support for 1GbE, which Intel claims is an industry first.