Ciena announced that Bouygues Telecom of France, serving over 3 million fixed broadband and around 13 million mobile subscribers, has selected its 6500 Packet-Optical Platform to help improve the efficiency, scalability and reliability of its current network backhaul and aggregation infrastructure, as well as to support the creation of its new SuperCore network.
Deployment of the Ciena platform is designed to increase capacity to up to 400 Gbit/s to support increasing capacity demands and new high-bandwidth services, as well as allow Bouygues Telecom to continue to expand its mobile and ISP offerings and establish the foundations for a future 5G network.
This network upgrade will also support Bouygues Telecom's efforts to offer customers improved quality of service on its 4G network and also enable the company to attain its goals for the fixed network, including through the expansion of FTTH services.
Earlier this year, Bouygues Telecom and Ericsson announced a demonstration of 5G technology at the operator's Technopôle complex in Meudon-la-Forêt, France. The demonstration featured prototype mobile devices simultaneously connected to an Ericsson radio base station equipped with active 5G antennas.
During the tests, a team from Bouygues Telecom and Ericsson performed simultaneous data transfers and 4K video streaming to the two devices with aggregate throughput of over 25,2 Gbit/s via the 5G antenna system, with a latency of around 3 ms. The demonstration specifically involved adaptive beamforming technology, combined with massive MIMO at centimetre-wave frequencies.
