Alcatel-Lucent, France Telecom take Paris-London link to 100 Gbps

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) says it has been chosen by France Telecom-Orange to increase the capacity of its fiber-optic network linking Paris and London. After a field trial carried out in the autumn, a first 100-Gbps connection was put into operation at the end of last November and a second connection will be available by the end of December.

The 100G connection will strengthen digital ties between Paris and London, the companies say.

For the field trial, Alcatel-Lucent upgraded France Telecom-Orange’s 720-km Paris-London connection, which was already supporting 10-Gbps channels. The successful trial demonstrated that Alcatel-Lucent’s 100G optical coherent technology increases the traffic handling capacity of optical fiber links that are already in service by a factor of 10. At the same time it dramatically reduces operations and maintenance costs as well as lowering power consumption, the vendor claims.

Didier Duriez, senior vice president international and backbone networks factory at France Telecom-Orange said, "The deployment of a 100G optical transmission demonstrates our Group’s commitment to improve the performance of our networks on a long-term basis in order to address the exponential bandwidth needs of our customers. 100G technologies can expand the data capacity of our existing fiber links to the multi-terabit capacity necessary to handle exploding traffic growth over longer distances, with an optimized investment."

For this trial, Alcatel-Lucent enhanced its existing 1626 Light Manager DWDM platform with 100G coherent technology through the 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS). The products are part of Alcatel-Lucent’s Converged Backbone Transformation Solution and High Leverage Network (HLN) architecture.

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