“Nortel’s 100G optical solution uses groundbreaking technology that allows service providers to meet the demands that high bandwidth applications like HD video on demand, online gaming and cloud computing are putting on their network,” Philippe Morin, president, Metro Ethernet Networks, said in a press release. “Our 100G solution is the result of years of dedicated research and development into this cutting-edge technology, and builds on two decades of innovation leadership in the optical industry.”

Nortel also announced that Verizon is the first service provider to turn up 100G on its live in-service customer network. Using Nortel’s 100G solution, Verizon is carrying live enterprise customer Private IP traffic over a 100G wavelength on an 893km link between Paris and Frankfurt.

In the press release, Nortel cited Ovum estimates that global demand for 100G line side DWDM transponders will grow rapidly over the next five years, reaching US$455 million by 2014.

For more, check out this Light Reading story.

Infonetics Research, for example, issued a new report on the optical equipment market that they consider Nortel to be the leader in 40G and 100G technology. Other companies making the list include ADVA, Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Infinera, Juniper, Mintera, NEC, Nokia Siemens, and StrataLight/Opnext

“Carriers by and large see Alcatel-Lucent as both a commercial and technological leader in the optical equipment market, but they have issues with their pricing. Huawei performed surprisingly well in our open-ended questions about leading optical equipment vendors, especially considering most of the carriers we interviewed are based in North America and EMEA, where Huawei has little to no presence,” notes Andrew Schmitt, Infonetics Research’s directing analyst for optical.

LightReading reports that Jefferies & Co. analyst George Notter believes Ciena and a private equity investor have made an offer.

During Ciena’s third-quarter results conference call, CEO Gary Smith suggested that industry “consolidation is helpful” within the telecom equipment market.

Nortel put MEN on the block last September, so it’s nearly been a year without a deal being completed.

This is, after all, a business that was seen as Nortel’s crown jewel (before the LTE patents were thrust into the spotlight), and it attracted several bidders when Nortel put MEN on the block last year.

These days, however, MEN has been thrust out of the spotlight while most of the attention about the Nortel Garage Sale is focused on the sale of the Nortel’s enterprise business.

That said, LightReading has a story suggesting that Ericsson could emerge as a potential buyer for MEN.

“Ericsson still seems to be the best fit for MEN, based on Nortel’s North American presence in optical and Ericsson’s lack of optical networking market share,” Heavy Reading analyst Sterling Perrin told LightReading. “Most other potential suitors have a fair amount of overlap and so would really only buy or need bits and pieces of MEN.”

In the second-quarter, MEN sales dropped 27% to $330-million as “revenues from certain customers in the second quarter of 2008 that did not repeat to the same extent in the second quarter of 2009″.

Still, MEN is a solid asset that will eventually find a new home when all is said and done. Of course, Nortel will get nowhere near the $1-billion to $2-billion that it hoped to attract last Fall.

“In the fourth quarter, we saw flat sequential growth in North America and EMEA and strong sequential growth in sales to Asia Pacific,” said Jimmy Yu, director of Optical Transport research with Dell’Oro Group. “As anticipated, due to a weakening economy, the fourth quarter did not have a large seasonal uplift that is typical at the end of the year. However, there were a couple of bright spots in the fourth quarter. One was increased revenues in Asia Pacific, which accounted for nearly one-third of the worldwide market in the fourth quarter.”

The leading vendors in Q4 were Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Nortel, and Ericsson, which account for more than half of the entire market. Huawei, Nortel, ZTE and Ericsson posted market share gains.

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The latest customer for its 40G optical technology is Telus, which announced yesterday plans to deploy it as a way to expand the capacity of its existing fiber-optic network.

“With demand for bandwidth continuing to increase, companies like Telus are looking to enhance network capacity and enable more bandwidth for their customer’s needs,” said MEN president Philippe Morin. “Nortel’s 40G is a plug, play and evolve technology that is deployable over any fiber in a simple network design, giving operators an easy and efficient way to quadruple their network capacity and meet future bandwidth demands.”

Nortel also signed a 40G deal with Surf Telecoms, which supplies managed service in the U.K. It plans to use Nortel technology to deal with growing demand for high-bandwidth services in the southwest U.K.

As well, Nortel’s 40G technology was selected by Mediacom Communications to power a new high-speed network in Chicago, Des Moines and Omaha.

Update: MEN president Phillippe Morin talked with Telephony Online about the 40G market.

Technorati Tags: 40G, Nortel

It’s not surprising Nortel loves this kind of report, which just by coincidence involves Nortel executive Philippe Morin, given it just came out with some new whiz-bang technology that will make all those “Series of Tubes” bigger and faster.

For more, check out the Ottawa Citizen’s coverage.

Technorati Tags: CBC, Nortel

“Given these recent developments, we are immediately undertaking an aggressive overhead cost reduction plan, which when fully implemented is designed to save an additional $6 million to $7 million per quarter in the September 2007 quarter, said Bookham CEO Dr. Giorgio Anania. “By taking these additional actions, we believe our adjusted EBITDA quarterly breakeven level can be achieved at a quarterly revenue level of approximately $55 million to $57 million.

The Bookham-Nortel relationship was spawned in 2002 when Bookham bought some of Nortel’s optical components business for $112-million in stock, which gave Nortel about 30% of the business. The deal also included a supply agreement that required Nortel to purchase at least $120-million of Bookham products over the first 18 months.

In after-hours trading yesterday, Bookham shares fell about 9%, or 26 cents, $2.65.

Technorati Tags: Bookham, Nortel

After being pushed aside since the end of the telecom boom, fiber-optic network equipment is staging a comeback. So says Nortel CTO John Roese who said demand is increasing as the amount of Internet traffic steadily increases. “That Internet bubble that happened in 2000, where we over-built the optical domain, and everybody said we’d never catch up — we are,” he told Reuters today. ”I’ve talked to CTOs and CEOs of large carriers over the last two months and … a couple have said ‘We’re not sure why, but our pipes are filling up’.” Roese said Nortel is spending heavily on R&D to make sure it has the next-generation optical equipment for the Internet.