Judging from the interest in our booth at OFC, as well as some of the conversations I've heard, 100G is one of the hot topics of the show. In yesterday's Nortel press release, we highlighted that we had a live demo of 100G traffic going across a 1000km span right on our booth.

So how exactly do we actually create a 1000km fiber link for an on-booth demo? No, we don't have the world's largest booth in history...it's a rather cramped 20x20 space.

I'll admit, when writing the above-mentioned release, this question never entered my head. It wasn't until I got onsite and was walked through the 100G demo by one of our experts that the "how" of this demo became clear.

It turns out that to do this demo, our guys actually shipped 1000km of fiber to the show, and have it on the booth. See below for a few pictures. First is one of the visible spools of fiber in the rack. Second you'll see a stack of silver cases. At first they just look like equipment cases, but inside are even more spools of fiber...and there's another stack of cases just as high on the other side of the demo.

By stringing all these spools of fiber together, our optical gurus are able to create a real 1000km fiber span on the booth for our 100G demo.