June 16, 2005 Paris, France -- Alcatel recently announced that it will deploy its optical transport platform for France's RENATER (National Telecom Network for Technology, Education, and Research). The project, set for completion by the end of the year, will connect major universities and research centers throughout France.

The company won the project through Communication et Systèmes, a major French designer and integrator for industrial and critical applications. Alcatel says the scalable platform will be based on its 1696 Metro Span and 1626 Light Manager DWDM systems for metro to long-haul applications, and supervised by its 1350 management suite.

Alcatel says deploying the optical networking platform will enhance interconnection between major French and European sites, including Caen, Geneva, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Nancy Nice, Paris, Rennes, Rouen, Strasbourg, and Toulouse, enabling rapid access and transfer of new services and applications to a broad research community.

The company says the equipment will provide RENATER with secure high-speed optical connectivity to meet the requirements of French universities and research centers for increased broadband communications and information sharing. The platform will support applications such as distributed grid computing (the sharing of network resources across geographically dispersed organizations to process information and create virtual laboratories), for advanced e-science programs, including radio astronomy projects.

"Alcatel's solution will enable RENATER to offer high-speed communication services to researchers with the highest quality, [while] overcoming location boundaries," concludes Olivier Baujard, CTO of Alcatel. "The reliability and scalability offered by Alcatel's optical technology is perfectly adapted to large national research and education networks that need very high capacity infrastructures, able to support the most sophisticated computer and communication applications."