New Alcatel-Lucent optical transport platforms for deployment in dense metros
In the race to keep up with growing demand for data from enterprises and individuals, Alcatel-Lucent has created new optical transport platforms that it said are optimized for deployment in dense metro networks.
The products were designed with the goal of giving flexibility and economy of scale to service providers, which can then be passed on to the end-user by way of improved network experience. Specifically, Alcatel-Lucent built on its 1830 Photonic Service Switch with the 1830 PSS-4, 1830 PSS-8 and 1830 PSS-16.
In addition to integrating cloud-based services, the platforms can support any mix of packet, optical and photonic services.
Sam Bucci, Alcatel-Lucent’s SVP and GM for terrestrial optics, said that “operators and enterprises need to deploy optical transport switches specifically tuned for metro applications.”
“By optimizing our 1830 PSS for the metro environment, we are able to offer solutions that are right-sized to help meet transport demand now at low initial cost, with the right scale and switching flexibility, allowing them to grow capacity and deliver services rapidly as demand grows,” he said.
The new platforms are designed to accommodate carrier access aggregation, content delivery and mobile backhaul, as well as data center interconnectivity and wide-area networking.
Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst of carrier transport networking for Infonetics Research pegged metro WEDM investment at a staggering $35 billion over the next five years.
“After spending the last few years renovating their core networks for 100G, operators are now moving to upgrade their metro networks,” Schmitt said. “Alcatel-Lucent positioned itself for this opportunity by offering support for photonics, OTN and packet-switched services in a single metro platform, a feature that in our research we find operators prefer in the metro.”
This is just the latest in forward-leaning moves from Alcatel-Lucent geared toward dense metropolitan networks. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the firm demoed its ability to use unlicensed spectrum to provide complementary Wi-Fi boost to cellular or cellular boost to Wi-Fi. That technology was developed with dense network deployment scenarios in mind.
