Optic Challenges in France Telecom from Core to Access

France Telecom has been always at the front edge of the R&D on Optics and has gained a lot of experience in implementing them in long distance networks. Optics will continue to play a key role in today France Telecom challenges, namely new business enabler, cost reduction and infrastructure mutualisation. Backbone networks are opticsbased and remaining legacy transmission will migrate rapidly. If regional networks are still "ring oriented", a progressive come back of meshed schemes in the national part is foreseen. ASON (Automatic Switched Optical Networks) are used to terminate rings in Long Distance Termination Points. WDM evolution (IP over WDM, GEth over WDM,), GEth and SDH integration in cross connects, MSPP (Multi Service Provisioning Platforms), RPR (Resilient Packet Ring) ... are expected to bring also interesting advantages. In access networks, audiovisual services are requesting more and more downstream throughput while peer-to-peer and enterprises applications are pushing to more user flow symmetry. Different technological candidates have been evaluated and France Telecom is conducting a number of FTTH experiments in France from which technical, operational and usage feedbacks are expected. Optical accesses implying larger collect areas will lead to an increased concentration of active equipments in access networks. Development of Triple play services (increasing bit rate, multicast to unicast technology) will modify the structure of aggregation networks and optics technologies combined with others such as Giga bit Ethernet will play a role in this transformation.