The Works of DANTE - Issue 4

Alcatel to contribute to GÉANT2 infrastructure

 Alcatel transmission equipment has been selected to light the dark fibre routes on the GÉANT2 network.

Dai Davies, DANTE’s General Manager said, “They offered us a cost-effective and technically advanced set of products with a strong and well defined development path to ensure that the GÉANT2 network would remain a network with a high level of technical and service innovation.”

"The Alcatel solution will help gradually migrate the GÉANT network to new services while leveraging the existing infrastructure, and ensure a high performance network with a long operational lifetime," said Romano Valussi, President of Alcatel’s optical networking activities.

Alcatel’s solution will enable the transformation of GÉANT’s current infrastructure to a converged optical and IP network over a single platform. The addition of a new optical Ethernet network layer will provide direct optical connectivity to the existing IP network and will enhance service performances to support the increasing demand for broadband IP applications in the research and education domain. Supporting a distributed optical GMPLS-based control plane, the Alcatel solution will also offer highly reliable network protection and fast re-routing of traffic in failure conditions, essential for sensitive or research-critical data.

The technical solution is managed by the Alcatel 1350 management suite, and will deploy the Alcatel 1626 Light Manager (LM) DWDM platform for ultra long-haul applications and the 1678 Metro Core Connect (MCC), which converges optical transport and switching over a single future-proof optical platform.