Verizon and Lucent in metro optical pact

Lucent Technologies today announced a three-year agreement with Verizon Communications that makes Lucent the exclusive provider for future deployments of dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) technology. Verizon plans to use the Lucent equipment to expand the capacity of its regional interoffice core network throughout the U.S.

Lucent will provide Verizon with its Metropolis enhanced optical networking (EON) system, which is designed to eliminate bottlenecks in metropolitan networks caused by increasing data traffic. The Metropolis EON is a 32-channel DWDM system that supports a wide range of transport rates, from 16 MB/s to 10 GB/s---the latter of which is the equivalent of transmitting a 2 million page document every second, according to Lucent.

Verizon's first deployments of the technology will occur in Philadelphia later this spring, with future rollouts targeted at large data markets.

--Glenn Bischoff, senior news writer