Korea's SK Broadband orders 100G fibre network

Paris-based telecoms equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent has won an order for its 100G fibre optic technology from Korean service provider SK Broadband, as part of efforts to deliver a wider variety of consumer and business broadband services in the country.

The new network will be used to deliver IPTV, high-definition video, high-speed internet access, Voice over IP, and advanced business services, and is being deployed in the capital city of Seoul and the neighbouring GyungGi province.

The enhanced network is also expected to give SK Broadband the ability to adapt the network quickly to meet rapidly changing patterns in data traffic and customer demand, and offers the capability to support very high-capacity data transmission capacity up to 8.8 terabits in the future.

Alcatel-Lucent is supplying SK Broadband with its 100G optical coherent technology employed in the 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS), developed using the company’s recently introduced Photonic Service Engine (PSE), 400G chip.

The 1830 PSS is a central component of Alcatel-Lucent’s Converged Backbone Transformation (CBT) Solution, a key domain of the Alcatel-Lucent High Leverage Network (HLN) architecture, designed to slash transport costs and dramatically reduce operational complexity in core networks.

According to research from Informa Telecoms & Media, SK Broadband was the second-largest broadband provider in Korea by the end of 2011 with around 3.3mn subs, far behind dominant telco KT which had 7.8mn.