[Lucent to offer new fiber-optic networking system]
MURRAY HILL, N.J., Jan 26 (Reuters) - Lucent Technologies on Monday unveiled a global optical networking system that it says delivers five times the bandwidth of currently available commercial fiber-optic systems and provides up to 400 gigabit-per-second capacity over a single strand of fiber.
AT&T Corp will be the first company to test and deploy the new system, which is called WaveStar OLS 400G.
Lucent said its new optical networking system can be configured to handle up to eight such fibers to give communications providers a maximum capacity of 3.2 terabits, or 3.2 trillion bits, per second of voice, video and data traffic.
Separately, AT&T said that after incorporating the Lucent system into its own network structure, it will be able to handle any type of traffic its customers have, in unlimited amounts.
The company says it is greatly boosting the capacity of its 40,000 route miles of fiber installed in the U.S. through a new Synchronous Optical Network, or SONET, photonics technology and is providing its various voice, data and Internet networks over a common fiber transport system.
AT&T said it will be the first carrier to test and deploy a system that can carry more than 3 million simultaneous calls on a single SONET fiber.
"To meet our customers' expectations, AT&T's network needs to carry every type of traffic they want and in the capacities they want -- high usage at the lowest cost - and that's what our new network architecture lets us do," AT&T Chairman C. Michael Armstrong said in a press release. |
