Nortel’s 100G gear has certainly been making some waves lately. On Monday its gear went live between Frankfurt in Paris on Verizon’s network, and today we have regional fiber provider Lightower successfully testing it between Boston and New York City. This one isn’t live commercially yet, rather it was a 4 day test over a 600 mile span. Lightower already uses Nortel’s 40G solution, and all they had to do for the 100G test was to insert new line cards at each endpoint.
Given that Nortel MEN will in all likelihood be part of Ciena (CIEN: chart, news) in a few months, Nortel’s apparent head start in commercial 100G availability seems like a boon for them. I wonder how they will combine the product with their own 100G effort. I’m still expecting some sort of response from other 100G hopefuls, especially Alcatel-Lucent and Infinera. Those will probably show up after the holidays.
I am also curious what Lightower’s intentions are with 100G. As a regional and metro provider, they really have only those two major markets and therefore one route on which they might have need of a ULH 100G link. Are we in need of 100G in the metro already? Hmmm, perhaps things are moving quickly in the financial vertical.
re: the metro,
Enterprises have for some time now been deploying n-packs (e.g., ten-packs of 10G lambdas) between data centers and their larger office buildings. So yes, there’s demand, but it’s not likely that 100G line card price points for single-lambda applications will come down during the near term to address it. Sure enough, though, they will.
Lightower may have just been a conveniently located cheap outlet for Nortel to use to provide proof of concept. As you said, all it really required was for them to switch out line cards. Nortel gets good, real world data, in addition to the good press, and Lightower gets good press and the reputation as a tech frontrunner. All win-win