AllWave Fiber Selected for Intra-City Fiber Links in Europe

Viatel Inc. (New York) will use Lucent Technologies' (Murray Hill, NJ) AllWave fiber for its intra-city links in Europe. AllWave fiber is the industry's first fiber specially designed for metropolitan networks, harnessing a previously untapped region in the fiber spectrum, an area associated with the water peak.

By implementing a new ultra-purifying manufacturing process from Bell Labs, Lucent has been able to virtually eliminate water molecules in the glass fiber that made some light regions in the fiber spectrum previously unusable, resulting in 50% more useable wavelengths than today's conventional single-mode fiber.

Viatel initially will deploy the AllWave fiber in Paris, one of the six cities that are linked together on the first phase of Viatel's Circe Pan-European Network. The other cities on the 1,850 route km first phase are London; Amsterdam and Rotterdam, The Netherlands; and Antwerp and Brussels, Belgium; and Amiens, France. Construction of Ring One was completed in February of this year and began carrying commercial traffic in March. Viatel intends to use the fiber to connect select business centers in Paris to its Circe broadband backbone.

The Circe Pan-European Network is an 8,700 route km broadband infrastructure that will soon connect more than 40 European cities in the UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and The Netherlands.