Alcatel-Lucent has partnered with France Telecom-Orange, to increase the capacity of its optical fiber network linking Paris and London and therefore meet increasing demand by its customers in bandwidth.

After a field trial carried out in the autumn, a first 100 Gigabit per second (100G) connection was put into operation at the end of last November and a second connection will be available by the end of December.

For this field trial Alcatel-Lucent upgraded France Telecom-Orange’s 720 km Paris-London connection, which was already supporting 10Gb/s channels. The successful trial demonstrated that Alcatel-Lucent’s 100G optical coherent technology increases the traffic handling capacity of optical fiber links that are already in service by a factor of 10. At the same time it dramatically reduces operations and maintenance costs as well as it lowers power consumption. 

“100G technologies can expand the data capacity of our existing fiber links to the multi-terabit capacity necessary to handle exploding traffic growth over longer distances, with an optimized investment”, said Didier Duriez, Senior Vice President International and Backbone Networks Factory at France Telecom-Orange.

“This 100G field trial further demonstrates our leadership in optical networking, and highlights our ability to enable service providers to quickly and seamlessly transform their networks to support much higher capacities in a fast and reliably way. This project is another clear example of how Alcatel-Lucent is building the networks that are at the heart of tomorrow’s digital economy, ” Philippe Keryer, President of the Networks Group at Alcatel-Lucent.

For this trial, Alcatel-Lucent enhanced its existing 1626 Light Manager with 100G next-generation coherent technology through the 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS). Designed to address the booming demand for more bandwidth driven by video streaming, web applications and cloud services, Alcatel-Lucent’s single-carrier 100G coherent technology offers unprecedented performance in existing 10G and 40G networks as well as brand new networks.

The solution deployed is part of Alcatel-Lucent’s Converged Backbone Transformation Solution, a key domain of the Alcatel-Lucent High Leverage Network (HLN) architecture, which is designed to slash transport costs and dramatically reduce operational complexity in core networks.