Telefonica to deploy Alcatel-Lucent's 7950 core router in Argentina, Czech Republic

Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) on Tuesday named Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) as its new core router supplier for networks in Argentina and the Czech Republic.

The telco will use the router to deal with the ongoing growth of data traffic driven by the adoption of wireless smartphones, tablets in addition to video, gaming services, and IPTV.

In this deployment, Alcatel-Lucent will provide the telco with its new 7950 XRS router family, which is based on the 400G FP3 chipset. Alcatel-Lucent claims that the router's design enables it to reduce power consumption by 66 percent over traditional core routers.

Supporting the 7950 XRS family and the Service Router portfolio is Alcatel-Lucent's network management system, the 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM).

Albeit still a relatively new player, this deployment with a tier one provider validates the vendor's role as a core routing vendor. Traditionally, the core routing market has been a two-horse race between Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Juniper (NYSE: JNPR).

This win with Telefonica reflects the ongoing growth of Alcatel-Lucent's IP portfolio. During the third quarter, revenues for the IP division were €490 million ($641 million), up 30.3 percent from Q3 2011.

While growth in the IP division was mainly driven by its edge routing platform, it added that it was seeing "strong demand" for trials of its "7950 XRS core router in all regions."

For more:
- see the release

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