Tellabs, the network supplier, has announced that French ISP Celeste has appointed it to deploy an optical fibre transport network. The network expansion by Celeste is in response to demand from its business customers for greater bandwidth. As a result Celeste said it will be extending its fibre optic network to all major cities in France, stretching over 4,000Km in total, taking in Lille, Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille, Lyon and Strasbourg.

The operator said it will be deploying Tellabs 7100 Optical Transport System (OTS), and that it would be able to quickly and easily roll them out within 18 months. Celeste said that this would enable it to deliver a wider range of services with more reliability and at a lower cost.

“Celeste’s emergence as a nationwide competitor is a major revolution for the French broadband market,” said Nicolas Aubé, president of Celeste.  “With this deployment, medium sized enterprises across France can access competitively priced, high-bandwidth services quickly and easily. Tellabs’ extensive knowledge and experience of international enterprise markets is an invaluable part of our success in this ambitious venture.”

The Tellabs network will initially consist of ROADM-based, multi-channel nodes, and Optical Line Amplifier nodes that are designed to scale with network requirements.

“Celeste needed a partner that could rapidly deliver high quality infrastructure and support its aggressive deployment targets,” said Tarcisio Ribeiro, Tellabs’  vice president and general manager for EMEA. “Tellabs delivered a fast deployment, and offered a cost-effective solution that can scale with Celeste and its customers as the volume of traffic on the network increases.”