February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — The U.S. telecommunications company Lucent Technologies is to invest another $150 million in its Irish operations over the next three years.
The investment by the New Jersey-based company will increase its workforce on a number of sites around Dublin from 600 to 1,100.
The expansion will be at the company’s 12-year-old Blanchardstown plant in west Dublin, where there are currently 250 employees.
Lucent recently moved its Bell Labs GSM software development facility and its regional shared services center to Dublin. It also has a customer-support operation in Dublin and another manufacturing plant in Bray, Co. Wicklow.
The new expansion will serve as an optical networking provisioning center for customers in Europe and the Asia/Pacific region.
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When completed, it will be capable of producing more than $2 billion dollars of equipment each year.
Lucent has recently tripled the output of high-speed optical systems at its Merrimack Valley operations in Massachusetts.
Eoin O’Driscoll, Irish managing director, said the technology enables carriers to zap information along a single wave length of light at a speed of 10 gigabits — which is fast enough to send 130,000 simultaneous phone calls or a two-million page document every second.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who made the announcement at a communications conference, said new legislation to facilitate the development of e-commerce and electronic administration would be "fast-tracked" through the Dail.
He urged Irish businesses to "leap forward" to join the e-business revolution "before the gap is too great to bridge."