Vendor Bytes: Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Ciena, ADVA

Here’s a look at a bunch of interesting news from the vendors to start the week:

In Italy, Alcatel-Lucent has picked up an optical backbone deal with Tiscali. Tiscali will be using Alcatel’s gear to deploy a 100G terrestrial network and upgrade existing submarine cable links to Sarcinia and Sicily. Alcatel-Lucent is in the process of being bought by Nokia of course, a deal which will reshape the European vendor space.

In Germany, China’s Huawei and Denmark’s TDC said this past weekend they have successfuly completed an early field test of DOCSIS 3.1. The upcoming protocol promises to offer MSOs the bility to sell links of 840Mbps downstream. That’s not quite a gigabit, and it’s not symmetric of course, but it’s still a whole lot of bandwidth the cable guys might have soon to counter FTTH buildouts.

Ciena has picked up a converged packet-optical customer in the UK. Telefonica’s O2 is deploying their gear for a 100G backbone connecting the major cities of London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Liverpool, etc. Like pretty much everyone else in the UK, O2 has been the subject of M&A rumors over the past quarter or two. But traffic growth is traffic growth, and capex for network expansions and upgrades never ends.

And ADVA has launched a new NFV product family that combines IP and Carrier Ethernet demarcation into one network element. They’ve been working with several carriers and to create something that will do the job right in existing access networks with an open platform. I continue to feel that NFV rollouts will be a much less hesitant industry-wide trend than many other new technologies have been.

If you haven't already, please take our Reader Survey! Just 3 questions to help us better understand who is reading Telecom Ramblings so we can serve you better!

Categories: Cable · NFV · Telecom Equipment