As Belgacom International Carrier Services (ICS) sees it, the carrier that can respond quickly to customer needs at the lowest cost wins. With that mandate in hand, the carrier's carrier is expanding its suite of wavelength services by building a series of metro city WDM rings. Leveraging ADVA Optical Networking's FSP 3000, Belgacom ICS will now offer 1 Gbbs and 10 Gbps Ethernet and wholesale STM-1/4/16/64 wavelength services. And with network presence being a factor for its carrier and even large enterprise customers, Belgacom ICS has built more than 90 global points of presence in major cities including: Amsterdam, Brussels, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva, London, Milan, Paris and Zurich.
At these network center locations, Belgacom ICS built city metro rings that span up to 130 km to connect its local data centers through WDM-based network connections. Each of these connections then leverage Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) to automate service provisioning and reach remote locations. When Belgacom devised its city-ring approach, the service provider concluded that it needed a platform that could deliver various transmission speeds (100 Mbps to 40 Gbps) and do it with a small amount of channel cards. Automation and the ability to deliver 40 wavelengths at the optical layer were also factors Belgacom considered.
Patrick George, vice president of marketing and product management at Belgacom ICS, said in a release that the ADVA FSP 3000 "enabled us to increase the flexibility and overall quality of our network, while lowering power consumption, provisioning time and overall sparing and OPEX costs."
For more:
- see the release here
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