Ekinops Wins in France

PARIS -- Ekinops (Globalcomm booth 55053), a leading provider of optical transport, DWDM and aggregation solutions, today announced that a major French utility and telecom wholesale carrier, REG.I.E.S, has deployed the Ekinops optical transport platform to create a new high-capacity 10 GbE network between the cities of Chartres and Paris.

REG.I.E.S is the utility and a telecom company that provides electrical, gas and high-speed broadband services to the Chartres region of northern France. Known for its rich history dating back to medieval times, the city of Chartres has experienced increasing demand for communications services from residents and businesses alike. To accommodate changing demands it was necessary to build an optical network that connects local customers to the major communication hub at the city of Paris, 140km away. REG.I.E.S’s objective was to develop a flexible, high-speed infrastructure with secure access to offer clients broadband services.

Thanks to this new redundant network, REG.I.E.S is now considered as a full featured and reliable local loop by its hosting provider, Telehouse 2 in Paris, which interconnects all the main carriers. The new network allows REG.I.E.S to improve service reliability to its existing customers and major operators, while attracting new businesses to the Chartres area.

“The new network provides the city of Chartres with ample bandwidth for the future as well as long-awaited high-capacity connectivity to Paris, enabling access to all the major service providers,” said M. Chamak, Program Director for REG.I.E.S. “The challenge was to build this network over a single fiber without in-line amplifiers. That way we save approximately 50% of our annual operating costs.”

The solution uses multiple wavelengths to transmit and receive signals bi-directionally over a single fiber. It is based on the Ekinops PM1008 Gigabit Ethernet aggregation modules and allows the network to transport multiple Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GbE services between the two cities. This card is using TDM technology to aggregate a mix of up to eight GbE, Gigabit Fibre Channel, and other protocols on a single fiber. Optical amplification combined with forward error correction (FEC) enables the transport over longer distances without repeaters. With a programmable architecture, the capabilities of the Ekinops PM series can be easily extended through in-service software upgrades.

Ekinops SA