March 12, 2002--British Telecommunications PLC (BT; www.bt.com) and Lucent Technologies (www.lucent.com) today announced the successful implementation of a high-capacity optical network designed to support BT's growing international requirements and expansion into the provisioning and services sector. The network is already supporting its first customers and will continue to be developed over an initial five-year period.
"There is noticeable demand from customers such as service providers who require international backhaul services and large-scale traffic management on a global level," said Ron McArthur, international business development manager for BT Wholesale. "The introduction of this Global Transport Network (GTN) ensures that we can satisfy this demand and also provided us the opportunity to introduce new network services and to manage these capabilities with lower incremental cost."
The implementation of the network is the largest yet for BT and stretches across the South of England connecting to a transatlantic sub-sea cable network constructed by the TAT-14 Consortium.
The overland network has been constructed using such Lucent optical products as the company's WaveStar BandWidth Manager, WaveStar OLS 400G system, and WaveStar TDM 10G. It and has been designed to be scalable to fulfill BT's current and future bandwidth needs as the company expands into the services sector, estimated to be valued at 1 billion British pounds annually in the UK alone.
For the BT transport network, Lucent has supplied Lucent WaveStar BandWidth Manager to provide an optical networking bandwidth management facility, which carries out multiplexing, grooming and bandwidth management functions, ensuring the reliability and manageability of the network. Lucent is providing ongoing maintenance and services support for the GTN following the implementation.