Global Crossing Launches LambdaUnite Upgrade

Global Crossing (www.globalcrossing.com) today announced an upgrade to its 10,000-km UK backbone that paves the way for an eight-fold increase in core network capacity.

"We take pride in being the first to deploy this world-leading technology in the UK. This carefully targeted investment in our core network assets is in line with the growth we expect from the UK business," said Phil Metcalf, managing director of Global Crossing UK.

This additional bandwidth will support the introduction of new services and the migration of existing managed service customers to a converged IP environment. Upgrade of the UK core network supports managed IP services to the government, rail and enterprise sectors. In the government sector alone, Global Crossing delivers services to more than 116,000 users in 100 departments.

Global Crossing has contracted Lucent Technologies to implement the new dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) core based on the LambdaUnite® Multi-Service Switch (MSS) and the Navis® Optical Management System (OMS).

This will raise the potential capacity of each of the seven core nodes to 320 Gbps, with the capability of supporting 40 10-Gbps channels on any route. The new UK core will interconnect with Global Crossing's international optical transmission network, allowing for seamless global service delivery.

The network upgrade is scheduled for completion during the second quarter of 2005.

The upgrade to the core network enables the delivery of high bandwidth managed services. The UK network has been designed to support managed services and the additional capacity will make it possible to satisfy the growing demand from enterprises for access speeds in the range of two to 34 Mbps.

In the government sector, Global Crossing's Managed Telecommunications Services (Mts) give users access to a suite of IP-enabled services, ultimately leading to full convergence over a highly secure, segregated IP VPN. Mts is one of the largest private managed networks in Europe, handling in excess of 20 million voice calls a month.

The LambdaUnite network makes it cost-effective to inject large amounts of capacity to meet the increasing trend in customers requesting higher bandwidth services, overcoming any potential issues with network congestion and freeing capacity in the SDH access network.