APRIL 14, 2010 – Cube Optics says it has collaborated with Neo Telecoms, a French wholesale network operator, to commission Neo’s new WDM optical fiber backbones in Paris and Amsterdam. In addition to accommodating Internet traffic growth, the upgrade provides greater transport capacity for video-intensive services and improves Neo’s ability to add new subscribers and increase connectivity among current clients.
The passive WDM vendor says that Neo Telecoms’ objectives for the upgrade included:
- Limited initial investment, coupled with the ability to support anticipated future growth. Using passive ultra-low-loss optical multiplexers “proved essential” in minimizing transceiver optical power requirements and reducing reliance on regeneration or amplification stages, Cube Optics asserts.
- Low operational costs, through the occupation of minimal rack space and low-power operation.
- Independence from an active equipment layer.
Neo Telecoms operates in “all significant Paris data centers” according to Cube Optics, so provisioning multiple 10-Gbps circuits between any of these data centers must happen quickly. Neo Telecoms considered using ROADM technology, says Cube Optics, which called such a plan “a technically elegant solution.” However, deploying ROADM equipment would have been prohibitively expensive, the vendor asserts, both in terms of the initial investments and engineering as well as operational expense.
Instead, Neo Telecoms worked together with Cube Optics and a complementary active WDM equipment supplier whose identity has not been revealed to devise a customized network architecture. The approach involves dividing the optical spectrum into five optical bands, each comprising eight DWDM transmission channels, and providing up to 40 channels or 400 Gbps per fiber pair. Individual optical bands may be treated as an aggregate, thus facilitating pass-through functionality at intermediate nodes. Each band may also be sub-divided into eight DWDM channels to terminate 10-Gbps circuits where desired.
Didier Soucheyre, Neo Telecoms’ CEO, declared, “We have been relying on Cube Optics’ passive WDM products for over four years now since supplying our first CWDM backbone in 2006. Due to the hence tremendous expansion of our customers’ traffic, it was clearly the right time to attempt a radically different backbone design. Cube Optics have once again delivered a superior solution, which will be a key enabler of Neo Telecoms’ growth in the coming years.”
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