New Caledonia’s state owned telecoms services provider, Office des Postes et Telecommunications de Nouvelle-Caledonie (OPT-NC), has awarded Alcatel-Lucent a three-year contract to extend its DWDM transport network across the South Pacific islands to support increasing demand for fixed and mobile broadband services. Under the deal, Alca-Lu will supply the PTO with an integrated packet solution based on optical transport technology in all inhabited territories of New Caledonia. The deal also includes an agreement to support OPT-NC via a newly established technical support services office opening in the capital Noumea.
The contract award forms part of the telco’s ongoing ‘2017 Strategic Plan’ which is designed to strengthen the national optical backbone, extend its mobile broadband coverage and migrate some 65,000 customers to fibre broadband over the next eight years. OPT-NC claims to have around 73,000 ADSL customers, and says that the DWDM upgrade will increase resilience and capacity to support anticipated demand and support the government’s digital development programme. As such, Alca-Lu is supplying the operator with a full turnkey solution, including migration of existing transport platforms to the Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) WDM platform, with its service router operating system (SROS)-compatible integrated packet transport technology, allowing the efficient transfer of packet traffic over the new network. OPT-NC Deputy CEO, Auxence Fafin, says that the upgrade will deliver ‘high levels of availability and throughput of up to 10Gbps to meet our future digital strategy directions’.
TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database notes that the new optical fibre backbone will cover the capital Noumea and the towns of Le Mont-Dore, Dumbea and Paita (i.e. Grand Noumea), and will meet the growing transportation needs in the country, and aggregate all telecoms services (e.g. voice, internet, mobile, data) from access providers over a ‘single interface’, as well as offering OPT-NC’s enterprise users point-to-point or multipoint fibre connections at speeds of up to 10Gbps. The tender was launched in February this year, with Alca-Lu being selected following a tenders committee meeting on 26 May. The value of the three-year deal ranges from a minimum XPF200 million (USD1.88 million) to a maximum XPF600 million, and will see the vendor expanding the WDM network across the territory of New Caledonia to provide a reliable, scalable transport solution forming the backbone of the future optical network transport needs. It will also allow OPT-NC to migrate its existing SDH and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) facilities to the WDM network.