By Pia Heikkila, 29 June 2000 11:50
NEWS KPNQwest has launched its fiber optic ring which is a high-speed network linking 16 cities across Europe on a 2,700km route. The company claims the ring is one of the largest in Europe and it can carry 96 Terabits of data per second simultaneously through its pulsing pipes. It is a triple ring structure that cost the company E400m (£250m). Jack McMaster, CEO at KPNQWest, told silicon.com: "Half of the fifty cities we aim to serve are now connected by our fiber network. We are aiming to offer 2MB per second per person as the demand for high-speed access increases with households shortly using streaming video over the internet." He added: "The market will see increased consolidation: as the need for bandwidth increases some of the smaller players will be swallowed by the bigger, more established ones." Senior analyst Tim Johnson at Ovum told silicon.com: "Consolidation of the market is likely and could go both ways: horizontal - which sees companies of the same kind getting together - and vertical - companies serving different levels of the market end user access networks, and backbone networks.
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