Vodacom awards Alcatel-Lucent GPON contract

Alcatel-Lucent has been selected by Vodacom, South Africa’s largest mobile service provider, to build a gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) solution to expand Vodacom’s enterprise and residential markets.

The new converged network enables Vodacom to provide customers with ultra-broadband needed to access bandwidth-hungry services and applications such as online gaming and streaming video.

Vodacom will deploy Alcatel-Lucent’s comprehensive end-to-end GPON solution, as well as the Motive customer experience platform to provide high-quality network performance through advanced performance management capabilities across both wireline and wireless. Vodacom expects to reach about 150,000 homes and 100,000 business within the next three years.