France Telecom to upgrade broadband backhaul

Word out of Broadband World Forum Europe is that France Telecom is planning a "significant upgrade" to its fixed broadband backhaul capabilities, which will include the purchase of a significant number of network edge boxes.

An extensive equipment tender process involving 20 vendors has taken place, says Light Reading, and FT is doing the deal in order to aggregate its growing volume of DSL traffic from rural and remote local exchanges. The plan is to dump ATM-based and IP DSLAMs (and their maintenance costs) by installing aggregation boxes to backhaul broadband traffic from multiple local exchanges to bigger metro networks via a single fiber.

These compression builds will likely take place in France and in other countries served under the Orange brand, including Poland, Spain and the U.K.

For more:
- Light Reading reports [1] on FT backhaul upgrades in the works.

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