Alca-Lu and Turk Telekom sign new optical supply deal

Alcatel-Lucent and Turk Telekom have announced that they have extended their long-standing partnership with the signing of a EUR21.6 million (USD33.7 million) contract to deploy an optical network with ‘intelligent control plane’ technology. Once completed, Alca-Lu claims this will be the first implementation of its kind in Turkey, allowing Turk Telekom to enable automatic traffic provisioning for enhanced network protection, operation, efficiency and maintenance. Alcatel-Lucent will deploy an optical networking solution in the cities of Ankara, Adana, Istanbul and Izmir, helping Telekom to deliver existing and new services, such as Ethernet, to business and residential users. The intelligent control plane system is based on automatically switched optical network/generalised multi-protocol label switching (ASON/GMPLS) technology, and will be deployed across Turk Telekom’s core transport network. Additionally, Alca-Lu will supply its Optical Multi-Service Node (OMSN) systems to extend the current transport infrastructure, based on the French-US vendor’s synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technologies. ‘Driven by IP-based video and multimedia high bandwidth services…huge traffic increases have to be supported along with high availability,’ said Frederic Rose, President of Alca-Lu’s business in Europe, Africa and Asia.