Russian telecommunications company OJSC Rostelecom has chosen French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent to increase the speed and capacity of Rostelecom optical backbone network, which moves vast amounts of data from Europe through Russia to the Middle East.

Alacatel-Lucent said the two companies will establish a superfast "100G"connection covering 3,500 kilometers of Russian territory.

Alcatel-Lucent added it will provide Rostelecom with 100G (gigabits) optical coherent technology to support 100G of data per second on each of the 80 wavelengths of an optical fiber.

The boost in network capacity and performance will provide enough bandwidth to support the streaming of more than 15,000 high-definition TV channels simultaneously on each wavelength, said Alacatel-Lucent.

Rostelecom Communication Networks Planning and Development executive director Ivan Zima said to grow Rosetelecom’s business in line with the market demand for communications services, the company needs to cost-efficiently increase the capacity and throughput of key backbone routes.

"Proactive investments in the development of Rostelecom optical transport network will improve its performance and flexibility and enable the company to address the rapid growth in demand for high speed data transmission," Zima said.

Alcatel-Lucent CIS head Alexander Tikhonov said the company’s 100G technology perfectly fits Rostelecom’s goal to increase its backbone network capacity while minimising cost per bit of transmitted data.

Alcatel-Lucent said it provides 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS), a central element of Alcatel-Lucent’s Converged Backbone Transformation (CBT) offering, designed to cut transport costs and reduce operational complexity in core networks.1830 PSS brings together optical transport network (OTN) and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology onto a single platform.

Rostelecom supports a mixture of 10G, 40G and 100G channels on the same fiber pair with the help of 1830 PSS, said Alcatel-Lucent.