The balance of Lucent's additional investment will be allocated to Lucent's worldwide operations. The Norcross facility is the hub of Lucent's global fiber optics manufacturing operations and is the world's largest combined fiber and fiber cable plant. Since its opening in 1972, the Norcross plant has shipped enough kilometers of fiber to customers worldwide to circle the earth over 1,000 times. Lucent's extensive fiber product line is designed and developed by Bell Laboratories which has won more than 1,600 patents in optical networking. When used with high speed DWDM transmission systems, such as Lucent's Optical Line System, TrueWave fiber can save 40 percent of transmission equipment costs and enables easy upgrade to higher capacity transmission.
Optical fibers are thin strands of glass used for transmitting light signals used in communications.
Fiber is found throughout the world in public and private communication networks, on campuses, within buildings and on desktops for applications such as long distance communication, medical imaging and interactive media. A single strand is thinner than a hair but has the capacity to carry three episodes of a half-hour television show in one second. Fiber is used to transmit simultaneous voice, data and video at speeds up to 100 Gigabits per second. Last year, Bell Labs demonstrated innovative switching technologies that could enable next generation communications networks to handle a trillion bits of information on a single fiber. The locations include Japan, China, Germany, Ireland, Venezuela, Australia, Thailand, India, Denmark and the United States.