BCE Inc's Bell Canada phone company unit has bought a new technology from Nortel Networks Corp that lets telecom firms quadruple the capacity of their networks, the companies said on Thursday.
Bell Canada is using 40G optical technology from Nortel, North America's biggest maker of telephone equipment, within its Montreal-New York, Toronto-Chicago and Toronto-Montreal network traffic corridors. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Nortel technology delivers speeds of 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) - about four times faster than today's high-end networking speeds - over fibre-optic cables thinner than a human hair.
Current high-end network speeds of 10 Gbps can support the bandwidth of 1,000 high-definition television channels simultaneously. Telecom companies are looking for ways to quickly and cheaply bulk up their networks as demand for bandwidth explodes, driven by the popularity of online video, music and gaming.
Nortel has bet the strain on bandwidth will push carriers to upgrade their networks, spurring sales.
While telecom companies elsewhere in the world have already invested in this technology, Bell Canada is the first Canadian deployment of 40G for Nortel.