Lucent announced that it has been awarded a contract to supply optical line systems to KT, South Korea's largest communications service provider, to power KORNET, KT's Internet network. Lucent is a major provider of DWDM technology for KT's long-haul network. Under the terms of the contract, Lucent will deliver and deploy WaveStar OLS 1 .6T systems with the capacity of 800 gigabits per second (GbIs) in the major cities of Seoul, Bus an and Suwon by the end of August. By expanding KORNET's backbone network and adding capacity, KT will be able to efficiently manage broadband traffic growth and provide high-quality data services to its customers.
Developed by Bell Labs, Lucent's R&D arm, the WaveStar OLS 1.6T system is an ultrahigh-capacity DWDM system that offers up to 160 10-Gb/s wavelengths for a total capacity of 1.6 Tb/s on one fiber - the equivalent of transmitting 320 million one-page e-mails per second. It is based on an open architecture that enables it to operate in multi-vendor environments and helps carriers deliver high-bandwidth services to their customers while maximizing fiber performance, and improving the return on the existing network investment. The product architecture supports Gigabit Ethernet and lOGbE, SONET, SDH, and any mix of signals from 100Mbps to 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps in the same system. Bell Labs scientists pioneered optical networking, and Lucent was first to market with a DWDM system in 1995; it has since shipped more than 18,000 DWDM nodes.