Danish incumbent TDC has contracted Canadian vendor Nortel to provide a next-generation optical network across Europe that will provide up to four times the bandwidth of the telco’s current infrastructure. The new system will initially be used to carry TDC’s European network traffic across the UK, Netherlands and Germany, and TDC hopes to launch 40Gbps services in late 2008, with upgrades enabling speeds of up to 100Gbps in the future.
According to a press release, ‘Nortel’s unique 40G/100G Adaptive Optical Engine technology…leverages the full value of Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexing (ROADM) for all optical networking with its integrated dispersion compensation capabilities…10G and 40G transponders allow information-carrying lightwaves to be transmitted beyond 2,000km, nearly twice as far as competing approaches, without breaking down…This requires less equipment to plan for, deploy, and maintain.’