Lucent and Deutsche Telekom's T-Com team up to launch optical Ethernet service for LANs
21 October 2003 Bonn, Germany Lightwave- Lucent Technologies and T-Com, the fixed line business unit of Deutsche Telekom, joined forces to develop an Ethernet over optical service to enable T-Com's customers to connect their local area networks (LANs) across Germany. The T-Com DDV-M Ethernet100 service offers speeds of 10, 50 or 100 Mbits/sec, allowing sharing of resources and information across all locations. The service launch follows the completion of a successful customer pilot phase.
Developed with the help of scientists at Bell Labs, Lucent's research and development arm, the Lucent systems are designed so that the service is easily-installed and simple to operate, thus ensuring no significant down-time for the customer. T-Com provides an Ethernet socket at each of the customer's locations and the customer simply plugs a cable into this socket to create a connection to their Ethernet LAN. If the customer wishes to increase the bandwidth from the default 10 Mbits/sec to either 50 or 100 Mbits/sec, this is done without any hardware modifications.
Lucent is providing the technical basis for DDV-M Ethernet100 through its Metropolis AM multiplexers, which bundle various optical signals and, therefore, different network traffic, and then sends them via a single line. This is achieved using Lucent's TransLAN technology, that transports Ethernet signals using SDH.
In collaboration with Lucent, T-Com announced the new service at CeBIT 2003 in March and successfully demonstrated its potential to selected customers. Soon after CeBIT, T-Com reached agreement with several pilot customers. In addition to T-Com, the Deutsche Telekom business unit T-Systems will also sell DDV-M Ethernet100. Lucent supports both businesses through joint marketing activities and by organising and hosting sales training.
The service is transported on T-Com´s SDH2000+ high-speed backbone, which Lucent has extended to include the cross-platform TransLAN technology. The Metropolis AM systems are designed for customer-oriented applications and can be quickly integrated into the Telekom network. A Metropolis AM multiplexer fitted with TransLAN technology offers four fast Ethernet interfaces to which the customer's LANs can be connected directly.
Quality assurance for T-Com's new service is provided by Lucent's OSS software portfolio. T-Com can maximize their quality of service with real-time root-cause fault correlation for rapid trouble shooting, isolation, and resolution across their multi-vendor network domains.