News

17 November 2008

 

Covage chooses Infinera system for French network

Infinera Corp of Sunnyvale, CA, USA, a vertically integrated manufacturer of digital optical network systems incorporating its own indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs), says that France’s Covage has selected its DTN optical system for a nationwide network to help it fulfill its aim of bringing greater competition to the French telecom market.

Covage, which is involved in the acquisition, development and operation of ‘open-access next-generation networks’ in France, provides wholesale bandwidth services to telecom operators, enabling communities to reduce the costs for communication services for enterprises and households, while extending broadband to a larger portion of the population and making new digital services available more widely.

Covage is jointly owned by Axia NetMedia Corp subsidiary Axia Networks France and VINCI Construction France subsidiary VINCI Networks. The firm has interests in 12 regional networks and is building a national optical backbone to interconnect its regional networks and offer cost-effective carrier services nationwide.

Covage says that it chose Infinera because of the speed, flexibility, and digital intelligence of its digital optical networks. Infinera claims that its use of photonic integration will enable Covage to put more optical capacity in a smaller footprint than on competitor systems, helping it to economize on operating expense. Also, the separation between the line-side modules and the client-side modules enables Covage to offer different services from the same system.

Infinera’s DTN is a digital reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) for long-haul and metro core networks, combining high-capacity DWDM transport, integrated digital bandwidth management, and GMPLS-powered service intelligence in a single platform.

“Infinera's advanced technology, the intelligence in the platform, and the flexibility of the services allowed us to create a simple, straightforward, and very cost-effective offering for regional & national network traffic with traffic protection, which will be valuable to us in this highly competitive market,” says Norbert Blanchard, Covage’s technical operations director. “Using Infinera on our backbone network helps us build local projects with scalable bandwidth capacity by providing us with a cost-effective backbone network, which is essential because local officials are very concerned to keep subscription costs low for the end-users of the network,” he adds.

With Infinera’s Bandwidth Virtualization, its systems deploy a minimum of 100Gb/s on every line card, and capacity can be quickly and flexibly deployed and reconfigured to deliver a wide variety of services. Covage plans to deliver services between most points on its network by fitting Infinera Tributary Adapter Modules (TAMs) at the endpoints of any circuit or service. This will enable it to deliver services in just days, compared to most competitors in France who typically require about 12 weeks to deliver a service, it is claimed. Also, Infinera’s GMPLS network intelligence speeds up the deployment process by using software to recognize assets and configure services on the network.

See related items:

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NTNC selects Infinera for multi-state research network

Search: Infinera InP PICs

Visit: www.infinera.com

Visit: www.covage.fr