Silk Telecom rolls fibre into regional Vic & SA

Stuart Corner
Monday, 22 May 2006 11:00

Business IT - Networking

Silk Telecom - the telco formed by the recent merger of two power company telcos both owned by ETSA Utilities is building a new 720Gbps optical network in regional Victoria and South Australia to support a new range of high-speed managed services for its enterprise customers. It will be the first in Australia to use Nortel's Common Photonic Layer (CPL) technology. "We needed to rapidly ramp up the capacity of our Victoria regional network to bridge the digital divide between customers in metro and regional areas," said Simon Perkins, CEO, Silk Telecom. "With its CPL platform, Nortel has provided us with the flexibility to do this cost-effectively, enabling us to balance the cost of transmission with the bandwidth we need for our regional customers."

Mark Stevens, president, of Nortel ANZ, said "The Common Photonic Layer fundamentally changes the way optical networks transmit information by reducing the number of amplifiers needed for long-range, high bandwidth transmissions. This makes it particularly suited to sparsely populated, expansive regions like Australia, where getting high bandwidth services to regional areas can be cost-prohibitive."

Nortel is providing network integration and maintenance services including network engineering and testing, technical support and repair, and product technical training.

According to Nortel, the key goal of CPL is "to dramatically simplify the transport layer to ensure that the multiservice switches, DWDM terminals, optical core switches and other service elements that connect into it can have their services carried end-to-end."

With CPL the optical transport layer is separated from the service layer and Nortel claims this enables it to offer "a highly flexible, optimised and intelligent common photonic layer to metro, regional and long haul networks [which] eliminates the boundaries between each, thereby creating one converged, easy-to-operate, all-optical network."