Alcatel-Lucent announced key contracts to supply its 7950 Extensible Routing System (XRS) to four major carriers: CenturyLink, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Alcatel-Lucent said the deployments in China will help the nation address the expected explosion of demand for capacity over the next five years, as well as supporting the operators’ contributions to China’s national ‘Broadband China’ strategy. The contracts results from a recent central bidding process for IP core routers. The deployments will mark the first scale commercial use of the system in China.
Some highlights:
- CenturyLink, the third largest telecommunications company in the U.S., has deployed the 7950 XRS in its IP core network. CenturyLink obtains an end-to-end managed IP/MPLS network. The deployment enables the company to scale its network and provide services to its customers that support their growing broadband needs, including 1 Gbps service which was recently made available to residential and business customers in 16 cities. CenturyLink’s IP network also has a direct connection into its 57 worldwide data centers.
- In the China Telecom 2014 400G-enabled core router central bid, Alcatel-Lucent successfully secured Jiangsu province and Shanghai city, two areas with the highest demand for network traffic, out of the five bidding areas.
- In the China Unicom 2014 all Ethernet core router central bid, Alcatel-Lucent was selected as the sole supplier.
- Alcatel-Lucent was also selected as the sole supplier for the China Mobile 2014 high-performance Ethernet router central bid.
“As a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions, we are focused on ensuring we have the speed and capacity to meet the data demands of our customers,” said James Feger, vice president, CenturyLink network strategy and development. “This new platform is flexible and supports our IP networking needs as we continue to grow and transform our network.”
“These first scale commercial deployments in China of the world’s most powerful core router will provide China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, with the increased capacity needed to meet internet service demand in the world’s largest market. The experience gained in China will lay a solid foundation for future deployments of the 7950 XRS across the entire region of APAC,” stated Michel Combes, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent.
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/products/7950-extensible-routing-system
- In August, Alcatel-Lucent announced that Turk Telekom had deployed its 7950 Extensible Routing Platform (XRS) to provide core routing for its growing base of more than 13.5 million access lines and 7.4 million ultra-broad band subscribers. Turk Telekom initially deployed the 7950 XRS in three major locations in Istanbul and in Ankara . At the time, Alcatel-Lucent said the 7950 was deployed by more than 24 Service Providers worldwide.