On December 9, 2009, North-West Telecom completed one of the phases of the long-term project of updating of its own transport network based on the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM*) technology.

In the implementation of this updating phase in 2008-2009, interregional transport DWDM network sectors were commissioned to connect St. Petersburg and Petrozavodsk, St. Petersburg and Vologda , Vologda and Archangel, and Vologda and Syktyvkar. Data transmission at rates of up to 20 Gbit/s has been provided in these sectors via spectral channels of the DWDM network. The overall costs of the project implementation in the above sectors were about RUR 250 million.

In 2006-2007, the St. Petersburg–Pskov, St. Petersburg–Novgorod, St. Petersburg–Issad, and Cherepovets-Vologda DWDM-network segments were updated and commissioned under the project. Thus, as of this day, North-West Telecom owns a DWDM-based network of a total length of about 14.5 thousand kilometers with the most complex topological structure of all of Russia’s DWDM networks.

A feature of the project implementation was solution to the complicated problem of switching various network segments over to a new interregional transport network based on the PUSK***, equipment manufactured by the Russian company NTO IRE-Polyus. Front-end engineering and design, installation, pre-adjustment and startup were performed by specialists of the Russian company T-8.

Noted O. A. Semanov, Associate General Manager and Engineering Manager, “As the customer’s demand for communication channel capacity is constantly growing, and the nature of information to be transmitted has been drastically changing in the recent years due to active implementation of new services, the implementation of this project will increase the efficiency of our fiber-optic infrastructure, and will facilitate buildup of our data transmission networks’ capacity in the future. It is due to cooperation with high-skilled specialists of the Russian company T-8, the pre-adjustment and startup of sophisticated DWDM networks using the PUSK equipment were performed with a high quality and within a short time. The work did not involve any interruption of main-line traffic transmission, which demonstrates expandability of PUSK-based DWDM networks.”

* DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) is a technology intended for use in new generation optic lines operating at multi-gigabit and terabit rates.

** SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) is a technology developed for building reliable transport networks enabling flexible generation of digital channels in a broad rate range, from a few megabits to dozens of gigabits per second.

*** The PUSK equipment is intended for use in long-distance, zonal, and local optic networks. It uses DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) with spectral channel frequency spectra fully complying with IEC-T Recommendations G.694.1. It enables building very long fiber optic communication lines having spans of up to 1500 km between electric regenerators, and spans of up to 300-350 km between the network nodes where active network equipment is installed.