Lucent upgrades DWDM system

(Telephony) Lucent Technologies announced an upgrade to its WaveStar dense wave division multiplexing system (DWDM) and a $100 million contract for that system with Time Warner Telecom.

Lucent’s WaveStar OLS 1.6T, which will be commercially available this spring, is capable of transmitting 1.6 terabits per second.

The system essentially works by combining two of Lucent’s 800 gigabit per second WaveStar systems, announced just this past April. Like most DWDM offerings, one of these systems will operate in the C-band frequency. It will also contain a combiner/splitter.

When a company is ready to upgrade its capacity, a second WaveStar OLS 800G, operating on the seldom-used L-band frequency, is plugged into the second via the combiner/splitter. The two then operate as a single unit, thereby doubling the optimum capacity of a single fiber to 1.6 terabits per second.

“This is a new level of performance here,” said Barry Weinebaum, Lucent’s vice president of long haul optical network. “With this combiner/splitter we can now mix up to 160 wavelengths of light onto a single fiber.”

Time Warner Telecom is currently installing the system for 800 Gb/s, and plans on upgrading to 1.6 Tbps as soon as it’s available, said a company spokesman. Deployment should be completed by mid-2001.

The system is being installed in Time Warner Telecom’s network in the western U.S., serving Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix, among others. Much of this network was recently acquired by Time Warner Telecom as part of its purchase of bankrupt GST Telecommunications.