Ailing Lucent gets multi-million dollar boost

Lucent has signed two multi-million dollar contracts with France Telecom and the Paris-based NETs, part of Tiscali.

The struggling telecommunications equipment manufacturer will supply France Telecom with a 10Gbps optical network - the WaveStar TDM 10G - to advance the telco's bandwidth.

A second contract is with NETs, a telecom and infrastructure operator for high-speed transmission, for the expansion of its pan-European optical network into Eastern Europe, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.

NETs will upgrade its current technology from a 400Gbps dense wavelength division multiplexing system (DWDM) to the Lucent WaveStar OLS 800G.

France Telecom has also begun testing Lucent's WaveStar LambdaRouter, an all-optical switch that can put the per second output of emails in the billions range by using tiny mirrors to route optical signals in a network without translating them into electrical signals.