Alcatel-Lucent upgrades Orange Romania’s long-haul microwave transport network

Alcatel-Lucent is upgrading Orange Romania’s existing long-haul microwave transport network, allowing Orange to enhance its 4G network capacity and performance as it continues to expand high-speed ultra-broadband services to enterprises and consumers.

Orange Romania launched its 4G service in 2012 in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. Today it covers 70 percent of the population and 96 percent of those in urban locations, with higher speeds of up to 300 Mbps now available in six major cities as well as throughout Bucharest’s metro rail network. Now, with demand for data services continuing to rise, Orange Romania is increasing the capacity of its network to ensure better performance of voice and data services as well as an improved user experience.

Under the project, which will be completed in 2016, Alcatel-Lucent will migrate its own microwave links to the 9500 Microwave Packet Radio technology, continuing the transformation of the Orange Romania network to ultra-broadband performance. The mechanical compatibility between Alcatel-Lucent legacy products and the 9500 MPR will allow for the reuse of passive equipment, yielding significant total-cost-of-ownership savings compared to a new installation. Alcatel-Lucent will also carry out installation and commissioning, migration, deployment and maintenance services.

As part of this initiative, Alcatel-Lucent will deploy its 9500 MPR nationwide across Romania, replacing existing Alcatel-Lucent microwave transport links. Additionally, network management will be provided by the 5620 Service Aware Manager.

The 9500 MPR offers superior capacity for legacy TDM and new Ethernet traffic, supporting 2G, 3G and 4G LTE services. Orange Romania currently offers speeds of up to 300 Mbps in the six major cities of Bucharest, Brasov, Cluj-Napoca, Galati, Iasi and Timisoara.

Ionut Dobrescu, Head of Infrastructure Expansion of Orange Romania said: “We are committed to evolving our network to provide the highest capacity and quality to our customers as we expand our service offer. Alcatel-Lucent’s expertise in microwave transport is helping us to meet our commitments.”

Sergiu Secareanu, Key Account Manager for Orange Romania of Alcatel-Lucent said: “By deploying our market leading 9500 Microwave transport technology we can help service providers like Orange Romania deliver ultra-broadband services everywhere. Our work with this customer reinforces our strategy for deploying microwave technology to meet long-haul transport requirements for packet data.”