STOCKHOLM -- TDC Song has signed an agreement with SUNET for the supply of dark fibre for building the next generation of university network. The agreement runs for 8.5 years, at a value of SEK 235 million.

SUNET (Swedish University Computer Network) is the network that links together all Swedish colleges and universities, along with a dozen museums and certain other external organisations, including The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education. This is one of the world's most powerful university networks and can handle speeds of 2.5 Gbit/s per university. The network is now being updated to become the next generation university computer network, with speeds of up to 40 Gbit/s per university.

"This is a strategic and long-term agreement with TDC Song, whereby we are now building a very powerful and advanced network which shall be flexible and suit all our users for many years," says Hans Wallberg, responsible for development and co-ordination of SUNET. "We are constructing the network both for those research groups who need to send large amounts of data without interference from other traffic, as well as for those research groups who require not so much capacity."

"To succeed in building up the next generation university networks we have, during negotiations, placed high demands on the quality of the fibre-optic network, and ensured that it will have redundancy, in practice having dual fibre-optic connections to all the sites. This will give us the highest possible operating reliability," concludes Hans Wallberg.

The network is being upgraded by SUNET leasing the TDC Song fibre-optic network, themselves connecting equipment to the network and being responsible for its operation.

The technology that the network is based on is the new generation of DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing), which separates traffic into different wavelengths in the fibre-optic network. This technology permits extremely large traffic transfers, whereby a fibre-optic cable can handle up to 80 wavelengths, each wavelength having a capacity of 40 Gbit/s, compared to the 2.5 Gbit/s that the SUNET network can currently manage.

"The fact that SUNET has chosen TDC Song as its supplier to upgrade the university network that is already the most powerful in the world, is proof that we have an exceedingly good network," says Mats Lundquist, CEO of TDC Song. "We have both the net coverage that SUNET requires to be able to connect all its universities, and at the same time our infrastructure can manage the quality requirements that are needed by the new DWDM equipment."

TDC Song