France Telecom invests in North American network

NEWS The French telco intends the 1,500km, 28-city transmission backbone, capable of supporting all types of traffic, to be connected to the company's European backbone. Services available will include Global One's IP, VPN, ATM and Frame Relay, as well as a range of France Telecom's carrier services, marketed under the Open Transit trademark. The North American network will offer capacity services up to 10Gbps and will be monitored and supported around the clock by local maintenance teams. It will also have up to 1.6Tbps capacity for all services. Alcatel has been chosen to provide dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment, Nortel will lay the synchronised optical network (SONET) and Level 3 is to install the dark fibre network. The network is expected to be complete by the end of 2001.