Lucent, Tellium ink optical deal

To ensure a more complete optical equipment portfolio and a wider customer base, Lucent Technologies and Tellium last week said they will team to market Tellium's Aurora optical switches and StarNet restoration software to Lucent's customers.

The partnership lets Tellium sell its products to Lucent customers, and gives the company a more extensive support and sales staff. "It's hard for a company like Tellium to have that kind of reach on our own," said Nick DeVito, director of marketing for Tellium. "This enables us to have it." Lucent, in turn, "gets a product today that it doesn't have," he added.

Lucent plans to provide the Tellium optical switch as an alternative for providers running at speeds of 10 Gb/s or less.

The Tellium switch has an electronic core, which currently prevents it from surpassing the 10 Gb/s level, said Kathy Szelag, vice president of marketing for Lucent's optical networking group.

"You have to be all-optical to do that. There's a huge number of networks that will run at 2.5 Gb/s forever," she said, adding that the Tellium product will enable Lucent to address those environments without having to develop a product internally.

For service providers that need speeds of 10 Gb/s or greater, Lucent will rely on its WaveStar LambdaRouter, which is all-optical. "It would be overkill to put something like the Lambda in a network running less than 10 Gb/s," Szelag said.

But the big issue is that Tellium's product is available now with restoration, Szelag said. Tellium's optical layer restoration lets providers quickly reroute traffic if a fiber is cut.