On Monday Nortel officially announced the commercial availability of our 100G solution. However, our optical team has been working to get that 100G product to market for years, and that includes trials with service providers around the world.

Yesterday, we added a name to that list of successful trials with the announcement that Lightower had completed a successful trial of our 100G solution in their network.

Lightower is an existing Nortel optical customer, and their path to evolve and upgrade their network provides a unique view to one of the key benefits of Nortel's 100G solution.

Lightower is a fiber network and bandwidth provider in the U.S. Northeast, with over 4,400 fiber route miles that extend from Boston and southern New Hampshire, to eastern New York State, northern New Jersey, Long Island, and New York City.

Earlier this year, Lightower upgraded its optical infrastructure to 40G speeds using Nortel's 40G solution, becoming the first in the region to offer a 40G bandwidth service. At the time of that deployment, their Senior VP, Jason Campbell, highlighted the "plug and play" nature of installing Nortel's 40G.

Today, Lightower now has over 1,250 route miles of it's network at 40G speeds, but the continued demand for bandwidth has them planning for 100G.

For the 100G trial they just completed, Lightower sent production network traffic error-free for four days over a 100G link spanning 600 kilometers from New York to Boston. Once again, the process of upgrading was painless and simple, with "scaling from 40G to 100G as simple as adding a card" to their existing Nortel OME 6500 platforms.

This simplicity to deploy is a key consideration for service providers. By adding in a few 100G cards, providers can deploy 100G wavelengths over their existing infrastructure with no network engineering, and even without disturbing any existing 10G and 40G wavelengths already in place.

Below are a few pictures from the trial. In the pictures you'll see Dave Pho, Director of Engineering at Lightower, and Michal Samborski, System Engineer at Nortel (in the grey Nortel shirt).