Covage Selects Infinera for Nationwide Network in France

NOVEMBER 17, 2008 -- Covage has selected the Infinera (search for Infinera) DTN optical system for a nationwide network across France to support its wholesale telecom business and help it fulfill its mission of bringing greater competition to the French telecom market.

Covage, which is involved in the acquisition, development, and operation of "Open Access Next Generation Networks" in France, provides wholesale bandwidth services to telecom operators, enabling communities to reduce the costs for communication services for enterprises and households, while extending broadband to a larger portion of the population and making new digital services available more widely. Covage is jointly owned by Axia Networks France, a wholly owned subsidiary of Axia NetMedia Corporation, and VINCI Networks, a wholly owned subsidiary of VINCI Construction France. It currently has interests in 12 regional networks and is building a national optical backbone to interconnect its regional networks and offer cost-effective carrier services to its customers nationwide.

Covage says it chose Infinera because of the speed, flexibility, and digital intelligence of the company's Digital Optical Networks. Infinera's use of photonic integration enables Covage to put more optical capacity in a smaller footprint than on competitor systems, helping it economize on operating expense. The separation between the line-side modules and the client-side modules enables Covage to offer many different services from the same system, offering further economies.

"Infinera's advanced technology, the intelligence in the platform, and the flexibility of the services allowed us to create a simple, straightforward, and very cost-effective offering for regional and national network traffic with traffic protection, which will be valuable to us in this highly competitive market," reports Norbert Blanchard, tTechnical operations director at Covage.

"Using Infinera on our backbone network helps us build local projects with scalable bandwidth capacity by providing us with a cost-effective backbone network, which is essential because local officials are very concerned to keep subscription costs low for the end-users of the network," he adds.

With Infinera's Bandwidth Virtualization, Infinera systems deploy a minimum of 100 Gbits/sec on every line card, and capacity can be quickly and flexibly deployed and reconfigured to deliver a wide variety of services, say company representatives.
Covage plans to be able to deliver services between most points on its network simply by fitting Infinera Tributary Adapter Modules (TAMs) at the endpoints of any circuit or service. This will enable it to deliver services in a matter of days, compared to most competitors in France who typically require around twelve weeks to deliver a service, says the carrier. Infinera's GMPLS network intelligence speeds up the deployment process by using software to recognize assets and configure services on the network.

"Covage's selection of Infinera for a nationwide French network reflects the continued momentum of Infinera's Digital Optical Networks paradigm with service providers across Europe," notes Infinera CEO Jagdeep Singh. "We are pleased to support Covage with this network and help them bring more choices and competition to the French market."

The Infinera DTN is a Digital ROADM for long-haul and metro core networks, combining high-capacity DWDM transport, integrated digital bandwidth management, and GMPLS-powered service intelligence in a single platform.

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