Alcatel-Lucent Launches IP Optical Backbone

Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled a converged IP optical backbone product that is designed to trim transport costs, reduce operational capacity, and keep up with mounting demands on network transmission.

Announced Wednesday, Alcatel-Lucent's Converged Backbone Transformation is part of the firm's High-Leverage Network strategy, key pieces of which have already been selected by some service providers.

Qwest Communications is using the Alcatel-Lucent solution to help roll out Qwest's nationwide backbone network. In a statement, Qwest chief technology officer Pieter Poll said, "Qwest is working with Alcatel-Lucent to evolve our nationwide backbone network to reach industry-leading 100 gigabits per second speeds by implementing Alcatel-Lucent's LambdaXtreme and 7750 Service Routers."

The Alcatel-Lucent solution is designed to more tightly integrate IP and optical transport resources to help deal with the rapid growth of traffic over networks. The company -- formed by a merger of France's Alcatel and the United States' Lucent Technologies -- is situating intelligent control plane integration between optical and IP layers. In the process, optical and IP portfolios are on the way to supporting 40-gigabit and 100-gigabit speeds in data planes.

Alcatel-Lucent noted that its Converged Backbone Transformation product features a broad range of traffic solutions that are aimed at increasing network efficiency and help pinpoint the most economical layers in networks. These include wavelength-level, port-level, and sub-port-level grooming of IP traffic.

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