Pirelli Goes to ECOCPirelli Goes to ECOC

RIMINI, Italy -- Pirelli launches its next generation telecom equipment at the ECOC – European Conference on Optical Communication - taking place in Rimini, Italy from September 22nd to 24th. Pirelli is showing its new products – systems, modules and components based on the advanced research of Pirelli Labs – in its own stand 615.

Pirelli pioneered photonics and drove the evolution of Optical Communications in early 90s, with the first EDFA developed and the first DWDM systems installed in operators' live networks. Pirelli is now on the road again, and is ready to play a leading role in the future of Telecommunications.

With innovative ideas and state of the art technology, Pirelli develops products supporting its customers to pursue the key economic targets of optimizing investment, speeding up time to revenue and increasing profitability.

“We are very proud to introduce our new solutions just 18 months after Pirelli Labs were established” – stated Giorgio Grasso, Chief Executive Officer of Pirelli Labs. “Our trials have given us very positive feedback and the interest shown by prospective customers testifies that we are moving in the right direction: flexibility, speed and low costs for next generation optical networks”, added Mauro Sacchetto, CEO of Pirelli Telecom Systems.

Pirelli tunable optical components (laser, OADM) boast superior performance while the adoption of Nanotechnologies allows unprecedented compactness. These are fundamental bricks in the building of new networks, whose characteristics (flexibility, easy reconfigurability, fast provisioning) support operators in reducing OPEX.

Pirelli Metro systems, while slashing down operator's capital expenditure (thanks to CWDM adoption and innovative architecture), offers a carrier class equipment, with networking features exploitable in Metro Access as well as in Metro Core scenarios. Pirelli portfolio of access modules and systems opens the way for new broadband services, the engine for increasing the operators' profitability.

In particular, Pirelli introduces new Pirelli Dynamically Tunable Laser, a CW external cavity laser for advanced optical network systems. It provides high output optical power and wavelength tunability over a wide band range with very high spectral purity and frequency stability. These characteristics make Pirelli DTL ideally suitable for applications that spread from Metro to Ultra Long Haul transmission systems at 2.5 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s and beyond. Pirelli DTL is designed to provide fast switching on the ITU-T 50 GHz channel grid. No wavelength locker is needed to achieve frequency stability compatible with 25 GHz DWDM channel spacing.

Among its new modules, Pirelli presents Radio Over Fiber (ROF) technology based modules, that enable the transmission of radio signals directly over optical fiber. The application of this technology to wireless networks allows the remotization of the radio frequency (RF) processing part, or Antenna Units (AU), from the related base band (BB) processing part, or Base Station (BS), with the following main advantages for the Mobile Operator during the deployment of a new network. The Pirelli ROF product line is intended to enable the remotization through optical fiber of the Antenna Unit from the related Base Station of an UMTS (3G) wireless communication system. It is based on a self-contained electro-optic module to be integrated inside the UMTS equipment of the system vendor in order to provide the ROF remotization function.

Finally, Pirelli is presenting its new P-MAS system, targeted to cope with the issues of metropolitan scenarios, where synchronous traffic (like the voice telephony) and asynchronous (or packet, as IP) traffic are present and mixed. P-MAS provides the Layer 1 CWDM multiplexing and transport functionality (transponder) over an optical fibre support to digital client signal of different protocol and bit rate. The typical applications is the fibre capacity increase in the Metro area with transport of client protocols like SDH STM-4/STM-16 and/or Sonet OC-12/OC-48 (up to 2.7 Gb/s), Gigabit Ethernet, ESCON, Fiber Channel, etc. Metro (access and core) rings and ring or point-to-point customer premises (CPE) are the main applications for the P-MAS products. Traditional metro access and enterprise networks (based on TDM technology) suffer from some serious technical limitations: TDM networks in fact rely on very costly network timing provisions and are extremely bandwidth-inefficient and restrictive in supporting a diverse array of end-user services.

Pirelli SpA