Lucent tries to clean up 'metro mess'

Jun 5, 2001 12:00 PM, Donny Jackson, News Editor

ATLANTA--One week after breaking off merger talks with fellow equipment giant Alcatel, Lucent Technologies today announced five new “Metropolis” products designed to help service providers leverage often disparate network elements while improving traffic flow in metropolitan areas.

“We’ve been quiet in the metro for a while, but we wanted to go with a broad portfolio” indicating Lucent’s vision to “clean up the metro mess” instead of releasing products individually, said Brian Dunlap, vice president of metro networks.

With this in mind, Lucent announced products in three categories:

• the metroDMX and metroDMXpress as solutions for next-generation Sonet solutions;

• the metroEON and metroMLS to address metro WDM needs; and

• the metroMSX for integrated multiservice functionality.

While leveraging carriers’ existing infrastructures, the metroDMX will let carriers offer Ethernet over Sonet, provision faster and migrate from TDM to IP services.

Based on the technology purchased from Chromatis, the metroMSX handles a wide variety of traffic--ATM, TDM, Ethernet and IP—and allows carriers to speed provisioning and provide leading-edge wavelength services.

The metro WDM solution provide lets carriers provide flexible bandwidth from the metro core to customers premises while allowing service providers to reuse up to 75% of their installed WDM equipment. The metro WDM also cuts capital expenditures by maximizing transmission distances without amplification, according to Dunlap.

All the products are available today. Lucent expects to announce “contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars” with unnamed carriers within the next few weeks, Dunlap said.
Donny Jackson is News Editor for Telephony. He can be reached at donny_jackson@intertec.com.