Alcatel- Lucent has extended its supply relationship with Qwest in a national network upgrade which will see the carrier deliver speeds of up to 100Gbps to its customer edge sites. Work on the network has already begun and it planned to be completed by 2010.
The new architecture is designed to reduce latency and add capacity to the core network to accommodate growth from video and other bandwidth-intensive applications.
Among other technologies, Qwest will deploy Alcatel-Lucent’s recently announced 100 Gbps Ethernet service routing capability. Terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
The network speeds which will be the fastest from any US carrier and more than double its existing 40Gps network. The network will support 2-hour HD movie or presentation downloads in less than 9 seconds or a fully-loaded 500 Gigabyte hard drive in 46 seconds.
Qwest CTO Pieter Poll said “this industry-leading upgrade, with the help of our partner Alcatel-Lucent, allows Qwest to meet the very real challenges of responding to data consumption trends. Qwest is satisfying customers’ appetites for increasingly sophisticated applications while honoring the need to be more resource-efficient.”