Lucent Technologies and Time Warner Telecom Inc. (Littleton, CO) have signed an agreement to deploy the newest Lucent optical networking system, which has the 1.6-Tbit/s capacity to simultaneously transmit 320-million one-page e-mails across the same network.
Under the terms of the agreement, Time Warner Telecom, which provides local and regional optical broadband networks and services to business customers, will be among the first to deploy the Lucent WaveStar OLS 1.6T dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM)system. The three-year agreement is valued at up to $100 million.
Initially, Lucent is delivering and installing the system with 800 Gbit/s capacity. At this rate, a single fiber in a network could transmit the data contained on some 160 CD ROMs each second. The system includes a combiner/splitter that makes it terabit ready so the carrier can double its network capacity to 1.6 Tbit/s without interrupting service.
The WaveStar OLS 1.6T, scheduled for general release this spring, uses the firm�s L-Band optical amplifier, which enables network providers to transmit traffic through a previously unused frequency or wavelength range in a fiber. Combining the amplifier and combiner/splitter allows network providers to double the number of wavelengths transmitted on the fiber from 80 to 160.