AT&T selects Lucent Technologies to provide next-generation SONET

9 September 2003 Murray Hill, NJ Lightwave-- Lucent Technologies today announced a multi-year agreement with AT&T to provide advanced optical technology as part of AT&T's next-generation intelligent optical network. Lucent is supplying the Metropolis DMX and DMXtend access multiplexers, SONET systems designed to increase network capacity and enable new revenue-generating, high-speed services in metropolitan networks. Lucent Worldwide Services also is providing program management, engineering, and installation services to support the implementation of the technology.

"Lucent's next-generation SONET technology is an excellent fit with AT&T's local network transformation and on-net plans, which enable benefits for AT&T customers in the form of higher reliability, shorter cycle times, and innovative end-to-end services," said Reed Harrison, who leads AT&T's worldwide network. "The DMX and DMXtend technology will play a key role in our overall program to converge and simplify products, networks, processes, systems, and organizations across our entire business."

The Metropolis DMX portfolio is being used by more than 70 customers worldwide to address the challenge they face in their metropolitan networks. Massive core communications networks meet the traffic demands of millions of individual businesses and residential customers in the nation's cities. Many of these major metropolitan areas have become networking bottlenecks, preventing the cost-effective delivery of high-bandwidth and IP services to businesses and consumers. Metropolis provides a broad portfolio of products that can eliminate the bottleneck in the metropolitan network, allowing service providers to deliver new high-speed, revenue-generating services such as gigabit Ethernet, virtual private networks, storage area networks, and DSL.

The Metropolis DMX family includes the DMX access multiplexer for central office and large enterprise applications, the DMXpress for customer premises applications, DMXtend, for enterprise and loop access applications, and DMXplore to deliver next-generation SONET services economically right to the customer's premises. All provide compatible next-generation SONET functionality and serve as integrated Ethernet over SONET metro platforms. When used together, the products in the portfolio create an end-to-end solution that allows carriers to offer faster, more sophisticated services while lowering operating costs.