On Wednesday, according to the International multimedia news agency Reuters, telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent’s (News 
- Alert) credit facility raised $2.714 billion from an initial $2.171 billion following strong investor demand.
Funds were underwritten by Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs.
According to Alcatel-Lucent, the proceeds will be used for the refinancing of certain existing indebtedness and for working capital and general corporate purposes.
Last week, the bankers said the growing investor demand for riskier assets had allowed Alcatel-Lucent to increase the debt it planned to raise in a refinancing bid. It’ll give a boost to its turnaround efforts, according to Reuters (News - Alert) reporter Dominique Vidalon.
Concurrently, the French telecom equipment provider is closely working with Latin America’s wireless services provider América Móvil in actively constructing the world’s first 17,500-km submarine cable system designed for 100 Gigabit per second (100G) transmission.
Spanning over transoceanic distances, from the U.S. to Central America and Brazil, the AMX-1 system will enable América Móvil to provide international connectivity to all its subsidiaries, ushering in a new era of service creation and innovation for all its customers.
Alcatel-Lucent said the AMX-1 system will connect seven countries with eleven landing points. These include Miami and Jacksonville (United States), Barranquilla and Cartagena (Colombia), Fortaleza, Salvador & Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic), Cancun (Mexico), San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Puerto Barrios (Guatemala).
The cable route and landing surveys are reportedly complete and manufacturing of cable and repeaters is well underway. Commercial operation of the network comprising the AMX-1 System is planned to start in late 2013, said Alcatel-Lucent.
The AMX-1 System design is optimized for 100G transmission, with an ultimate trunk capacity of over 50 Tbps, underpinning the continued growth of new applications such as corporate cloud services and the delivery of premium services to América Móvil’s 256 million wireless subscribers, and 62 million fixed lines, as well as enhancing its existing fixed voice, broadband and pay TV services.
Philippe Dumont, president of Alcatel-Lucent submarine networks, said, “100G technology is playing a fundamental role in scalability as operators are seeking to manage their bandwidth expansion to meet increasing demands for content-rich services and to address new applications such as data center interconnection needs.”
“As a leader in advanced coherent technology, Alcatel-Lucent’s 100G technology for submarine cable systems sets a new benchmark for the efficient supply of high capacity systems and seamless system upgrades,” added Dumont.
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Edited by
Braden Becker
