Rascom turns to Nortel for optical upgrade

24 JULY 2008 -- Rascom (search for Rascom) will deploy Nortel's (search for Nortel) 40G Adaptive Optical Engine in its long-haul network. The network will deliver 40G connectivity among sites in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, and Stockholm.

ZAO Rascom was established in June 1993. It supplies international capacity for communications operators, with its own communications facilities and structures in Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Russia-Finland border, Helsinki, and Stockholm, as well as its own communications facilities in Frankfurt. The company provides communication channels and internet access and a range of integrated networking offerings in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tver, Novgorod, and other cities of the central and northwestern regions of Russia.

"We selected Nortel's 40G solution because it was timely, simple, and cost-effective to do so today. Our investment in this 40G network will enable Rascom to meet the growing bandwidth demand of our customers," says Vitaly Ivanovich Kireev, general director of Rascom. "We were the first company in Russia to build SDH and DWDM fiber-optic networks and we are still a leading innovator in both the Russian and European markets."

"Some experts predict that the Internet may be swamped with traffic in a few years if operators fail to upgrade their infrastructures in advance," says Sorin Lupu, Eastern European markets leader, Nortel. "The Nortel solution delivers competitive advantage for Rascom and other innovative operators of transport networks by modernising existing optical networks quickly and cost-effectively, optimising management processes and quadrupling throughput."

With Nortel 40G Adaptive Optical Engine, Rascom has increased available bandwidth four-fold without modifying their network architecture or laying or renting new fiber, the systems vendor says. The company will thus avoid many of the costs typically associated with fibre-optic network modernization, Nortel adds.

Transponder cards incorporating the Nortel 40G Adaptive Optical Engine are deployed in the Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500 and operate over a Nortel Common Photonic Layer (CPL) line system. Rascom is using Nortel's Optical Network Manager to conduct network-wide administration, monitoring, and planning from a single management centre at St. Petersburg. This enables rapid troubleshooting, fault resolution and traffic management with no need for technical personnel to visit individual network nodes.

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