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Nortel Providing 40G Optical to Bell
By Mark Evans | September 4, 2008
On the surface, Nortel selling 40G optical technology to Bell Canada isn’t terribly newsworthy. If you look a little deeper, however, it’s pretty interesting.
First, the optical market has been showing signs of life after the bandwidth glut caused during the telecom boom saw a tremendous amount of dark fiber created. As online video, particularly high-definition, becomes more popular, the need for more bandwidth is growing. Many carriers and cablecos realize they need to invest in their optical infrastructure to meet consumer demand. Nortel has enthusiastically been talking about a bandwidth boom so perhaps this is a positive sign.
The fact Bell is investing in 40G optical should not be a surprise given it needs to upgrade its infrastructure to compete against Rogers and Videotron (two large cablecos in Ontario and Quebec). But Bell has more than $30-billion of debt after a leveraged buyout, and it recently conceded it isn’t going to be as aggressive as many people expected about upgrading its infrastructure.
Nortel’s solution will enable 40G transmission to co-exist within Bell’s current 10G network. Bell expects to have significant cost savings by using the existing infrastructure rather than deploying new fibre or alternate solutions for the metro and long haul parts of its network.
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