Alcatel moves on the metro

ATLANTA--With metro optical equipment as hot as Atlanta at this year's Supercomm, Alcatel is adding more fuel to the fire with the release of its new metro DWDM system. The 1696 Metro Span system is targeted at metro and enterprise DWDM applications.

"It's a 32-wavelength machine," said Glenn W. Nelson, director of strategic marketing and requirements for Alcatel Optics, who noted that the goal with the product is to help deliver new revenue-generating services in the metro area.

"A lot of [equipment] providers offer Gig E services, but not everyone offers restoration [of wavelengths]," Nelson said.

Considering that the main owners of the metro space are the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs), the product fits their applications well because of that ability to perform not only DWDM but switching and restoration too, Nelson said.

To that end, Alcatel is hoping the new platform will make expansion from the core to the metro far more efficient and cost effective as they look to turn up new services. The 1696 won’t limit the direction of traffic flow and will allow traffic to move freely on a network. And according to Nelson, the Metro Span is capable of routing traffic non-amplified over short distances or amplified over long distances.

The system, which can handle Sonet, IP, ATM and Gigabit Ethernet, will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
Liane LaBarba is Senior Editor at Telephony. She can be reached at labarba@airmail.net.