MUMBAI: Alcatel-Lucent has introduced a converged IP/Optical backbone network solution. The solution is designed to relieve the strain on service providers‘ core networks caused by the explosive growth of video and other bandwidth-intensive applications.

The Converged Backbone Transformation solution is a key component of Alcatel-Lucent‘s High Leverage Network strategy, key elements of which have already been selected by service providers.

Internet video traffic is increasing dramatically. At the same time, demand is also increasing for IP-based services such as business data applications, tele-medicine, video surveillance, collaborative business applications (including telepresence), cloud computing, remote storage and backup and data center protection and more, all of which have very high quality of service (QoS) requirements. Backbone networks - also referred to as ‘core‘ networks - must be able to handle both types of traffic appropriately, which is increasing the strain on core routers - through which nearly all traffic passes. Continually adding core router capacity is expensive, and as a result the network backbone is becoming a significant cost center, providing poor return on investment.

Qwest CTO Pieter Poll says, "Core traffic continues to increase significantly and we don‘t see that changing. We need to ensure our capacity matches the needs of our customers and fulfils their expectations for growth.

"We‘ve been exploring new approaches to address traffic growth and customer demand and recently announced that Qwest is working with Alcatel-Lucent to evolve our nationwide backbone network to reach industry-leading 100 Gigabits per second speeds by implementing Alcatel-Lucent‘s LambdaXtreme and 7750 Service Routers."

The company adds that its new converged backbone transformation solution more tightly integrates IP and optical transport resources, enabling service providers to optimise and leverage their transport networks to deal with the rapid growth in traffic, while substantially cutting operational and maintenance costs. Alcatel-Lucent‘s new approach can reduce the number of required network elements, improve efficiencies in power and rack space, simplify network provisioning and fault management, minimise latency, and enhance reliability.

For the service provider, this will result in higher efficiency, greater resiliency, and lower complexity - culminating in CapEx cost savings of at least 30 per cent, in addition to savings in power, space and operational complexity claims the company.

Infonetics Research principal analyst Michael Howard says, "Internet, voice, data, and especially video traffic continue to increase, pressuring service providers to find ways to cut the cost of reliably transporting the traffic while simultaneously delivering new services.

"In a recent Infonetics survey, two-thirds of the service providers responded that they expect to combine their data and transport operations by 2010. Alcatel-Lucent‘s approach fits service provider goals of efficiently scaling many traffic types in a converged IP and optical architecture, while offloading the core routers, to help streamline their core networks."

The Converged Backbone Transformation solution is a key element of the Alcatel-Lucent High Leverage Network - a fully converged, scalable, next generation, all-IP multiservice infrastructure that enables operators to deliver traffic more reliably, efficiently and at the lowest cost, while also leveraging the network to generate revenue from sophisticated managed services and applications.

To enable its customers to fully benefit from this strategy, Alcatel-Lucent is providing professional services supporting multi-vendor environment - e.g. business case analysis, network design and implementation as well as managed services.