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.

Back in March 2008, I wrote one of my first posts on this Buzzboard blog called How about a little "rational exuberance". On that day, Nortel had just unveiled our new 40G Optical solution to the world, and my post suggested that maybe it was time to get excited again about Nortel's optical business. Of course, many things have changed since that time and I think we can all agree that from a Nortel corporate level there hasn't been a lot to be "exuberant" about over the last year.

But one thing that hasn't changed during that time is Nortel's grip on leading edge optical technology that allows us to do things with optical networks that no other vendor can do. That was reinforced once again this week when we loudly announced that Nortel was the world's first to have a commercially available 100G solution for the market.

Last week was a big one for our MEN business, as Nortel announced asset sale agreements for the proposed sale of our Optical and Carrier Ethernet businesses to Ciena. As with the various other businesses Nortel is in the process of selling, this sale to Ciena is subject to a competitive bidding process, with Ciena now identified as the "stalking horse".

One of the most interesting parts of the optical business that Ciena bid for is, of course, Nortel's 40G/100G technology. And it turns out that quite a few others like the technology, too, according to a new report from analyst firm Infonetics.

Infonetics has a new global optical survey that they are promoting here with the headline of "Carriers rank Nortel as top 40G/100G technology leader in optical equipment vendor survey". The survey polled purchase decision-makers at carriers in EMEA, North America, and Asia Pacific about optical transmission and switching equipment vendors. According to the highlights of the survey, in an open-ended question about 40G and 100G technology leaders, most service providers named Nortel as the top vendor.

I've been talking a lot about our optical group's 40G and 100G technology recently and how unique it is compared to our competitors. When you write so much about one topic, sometimes it's hard to strike a good balance between objectivity with the news and corporate "pom-pom waving" -- especially these days when there are precious few topics to wave your pom-poms about. I think 40G/100G is one of those topics worth a little pom-pom waving, so it's nice when you can point to the opinions of those outside of Nortel for some external validation.

2,038 kilometers is a long way to go in any situation. Apply that distance across the rugged outback of Australia and it seems even longer. Now take that distance, in that environment, and try to build a bleeding edge 100G optical network and you have yourself a real challenge.

But that's what Telstra and Nortel did last month when they set a 100G world distance record by crossing 2,038km of Australia with an "unregenerated" 100G trial network. The previous record distance for a 100G link of 1,244km was set not long ago when Nortel and SURFnet successfully tested a 100G link between Amsterdam and Hamburg.

Over on fibresystems.org, Pauline Rigby has an article about the timing of the 40G optical market versus the 100G market. She quotes multiple industry analysts in the story, and gets a general consensus from them that while some vendors may have 100G solutions available by the end of this year (that would include Nortel MEN by the way) or 2010, they don't expect sales of 100G to carriers to fully ramp up until several years later.

Here's one excerpt from the article:

"First deployments (of 100G) will definitely be in 2012, as some equipment will be available by end of this year, and some carriers will deploy it just to be 'first'," said Eve Griliches, program director for IDC's telecoms research. "But my guess is that real volume deployment will be in a third generation development of 100G, which will not be in 2012, but a year or two after that."

Last month I had this post about a successful 100G optical trail that Nortel had completed with SURFnet and Telindus. The trial used Nortel equipment to send one 100G and two 40G wavelengths across an impressive 1244km span over SURFnet's DWDM network from Amsterdam to Hamburg without using electrical regeneration equipment.

Below is a video clip from the trial, courtesy of SARA, who facilitated and recorded the trial.

One of the big debates going on in the optical industry right now is whether 40G services will take off, or if service providers around the world will just wait until 100G solutions are available.

This "skip 40G" debate is the focus of this recent video that Light Reading posted, and the idea of going straight to 100G is something that has been pushed -- not surprisingly -- by some of the industry's optical vendors that lack a viable 40G solution.

Nortel, of course, is not one of those. While we have plans to introduce a 100G solution later this year, Nortel is clearly on the side of "40G is a viable market."

While most of the attention for Nortel this week was focused on the INNUA Global Connect event for enterprise customers, Nortel's MEN business announced another significant step in the race towards 100G optical.

Earlier this week, Nortel issued this press release highlighting the successful completion of a 100G trial with SURFnet, which runs an advanced Research and Education (R&E) network in the Netherlands. Their network, by the way, already supports 10G and 40G connections using Nortel's OME 6500.

Nortel took another step in the race towards 100G last week. JANET, a research and education (R&E) network in the UK, announced with this press release last week that it was the first R&E network in the world to successfully complete a 100G network trial.

The trial, conducted in April with Nortel and Verizon, spanned a 103km link between London and Reading in the UK. Verizon Business operates JANET's UK backbone network, and supplied the fiber infrastructure for the trail. Nortel provided the 100G equipment.

The first part of this last week I was in San Diego helping support our media activities at OFC/NFOEC. I took advantage of the show from a social media perspective as well through Twitter, posts on this blog, as well at taking a bunch of pictures.

I've posted all my pictures from the trip to the Nortel Facebook page. You can see the entire album here. By the way, if you haven't tried out the Nortel Facebook page yet, give it a look. The number of people following it has recently jumped up, so apparently we're doing something right.

Ahhh Springtime... warmer days, green grass, birds chirping... and tradeshows - lots and lots of tradeshows.

Next week we march into the busiest events week of the year with stops in Orlando for VoiceCon, Washington for Cable Show 2009, and Vegas for CTIA. Be sure to check Buzzboard for more from the showroom floors - photos, videos, demos and on-site reports - but for now, here's a snapshot what's what next week:

CTIA Wireless 2009 - one of the year's best opportunities to engage face-to-face with current and prospective wireless customers. We'll be showing off our latest around GSM, CDMA, and especially LTE. The big focus though, will be on what has become the omnipresent question for operators - "Exactly how do we turn all these cool VoIP and multimedia applications into revenue?" And we'll also be looking at opportunities around mobile social networking and entertainment - see more here.

After he finished his plenary session on Tuesday morning, the next item on Philippe Morin's agenda was as a panel member for a media/analyst luncheon at OFC/NFOEC.

Daryl Inniss of Ovum was the panel moderator. The four panel members included Philippe; Matthew Ma, the VP of transport and network engineering at Tata Communications; Mike Nishiguchi, the general manager of transmission devices R&D labs at Sumitomo; and Andrew Odlyzko, the professor of the School of Mathematics and Digial Technology Center at the University of Minnesota.

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.

Earlier this morning Nortel issued this press release highlighting a successful 100G trial with Neos Networks in the UK. Neos tested a Nortel 100G DWDM optical solution in a live network trial over its existing optical backbone -- using a North/South route between Manchester and London (via Cambridge) in the UK over a fiber distance of 705km without signal regeneration.

The Neos trial helps prove that 100G technology works simply and effectively on Neos' existing 10G/40G backbone network. In fact Nortel has already been working with Neos on 10G and 40G, so this trial shows the migration path that is possible all the way to 100G with Nortel's solution.