OCTOBER 8, 2007 -- Nortel (search for Nortel) says it has landed a pair of contracts with European carriers for its metro Ethernet equipment. The new customers include Sapphire of Gibraltar and Banverket Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of Sweden.
Sapphire plans to bring affordable communications services such as high-bandwidth Internet connectivity to businesses in Gibraltar. It also plans to add VoIP and multimedia services in the near future.
"Gibraltar's economy is experiencing an upturn with tourism, construction, financial, and on-line gaming companies leading the way," said Lawrence Isola, CEO Sapphire Networks. "These dynamic businesses are dependent on real-time communications delivered cost-effectively and we're using our Nortel Metro Ethernet Networks solution to deliver them."
Located near the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar, Gibraltar shares a border with Spain to the north. In order to deliver international connectivity, and ensure interoperability with other carriers, Sapphire has deployed an external point of presence (PoP) in Madrid, Spain, and intends to add another in Barcelona.
Sapphire is using IEEE 802.1ah Provider Backbone Bridges (PBB) to create a core network supporting multiple customers. By using different addressing schemes for the core of the network and the customers, PBB enables Sapphire to deliver secure and scalable Ethernet business services.
Nortel is providing its Metro Ethernet Routing Switch 8600, Metro Ethernet Services Unit 1800/1850 as a customer premises device, and Optical Metro 4150 compact STM-4 add/drop multiplexer for the core network. The Nortel Multiservice Switch 15000 will enable future VoIP implementation by acting as a media gateway, Nortel says.
In Sweden, Banverket ICT, one of the country's largest suppliers of network capacity, plans to use optical networking systems from Nortel to enable Sweden's cable-TV and other service providers to deliver new multimedia services across the country.
"We've had a continuing relationship with Nortel since 1994 when they introduced the 2.5-Gbit/sec optical solution in Sweden and in 1998 we installed the first Nortel wavelength system in our network," said Thomas Sjostrand manager technical and network strategy at Banverket ICT. "We first saw Nortel's Common Photonic Layer and Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 solution demonstrated at a Nortel Advanced Technology Summit in Ottawa and were excited about the opportunities it presented. Competition in the Swedish telecom market is tough, and this new platform gives us the chance to introduce cutting-edge communications services without incurring massive infrastructure costs."
Banverket ICT is a subsidiary of Banverket, the authority responsible for Sweden's railways; it provides services such as signaling, track radio, and other communications requirements to the railway service. It also offers broadband-based services to external customers delivered by its transport and communications network that runs along the length of the 12,000-km rail network.
Banverket ICT's current infrastructure will evolve from its original 10-Gbit/sec DWDM network to one based on Nortel's Common Photonic Layer (CPL) and Optical Multiservice Edge 6500. The network upgrade with Nortel's CPL provides a self-optimizing transport for cost-effective metro, regional, and long-haul networks, Nortel says. The Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 is a convergence optical platform that supports TDM, data, and wavelength services. The new optical layer leverages eDCO (electronic Dynamically Compensating Optics) enabled DWDM transponders to manage dispersion compensation electronically and together with eROADM (enhanced Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexer) enables seamless "optical bypass" for express wavelengths and optical branching for fast connections to anywhere, the systems vendor adds.
Visit Nortel