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.

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.

This week I'm helping with PR and social media support at the OFC/NFOEC optical conference. This morning, Nortel president of the Metro Ethernet Networks business Philippe Morin will be a main speaker at the plenary session.

Below is a "live blog" of the speaker presentations this morning. Read from the bottom up for my updates in chronological order, and hit refresh to see the latest updates.

• 9:50 - Well my PC battery is almost gone so I'm finishing off this live blog now that Philippe's preso is over.

• 9:45am - Philippe just finished his preso. More housekeeping items before the next speaker.

• 9:42am - Philippe: what's the next frontier...what are the next "impossible" challenges that the industry needs to solve to address this global bandwidth demand?

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.

On Tuesday in San Diego, Philippe Morin will be a plenary speaker at OFC/NFOEC. I spent a decent part of my day Monday helping as needed for the preparation and dry run of his speech, which will focus on the factors that are driving bandwidth demand even during this global economic recession.

Late last week I recorded a short podcast with Philippe on the topics and messages he was going to focus on for his plenary. You can hear that podcast here.

Later this week marks the first official day of Spring. The beginning of Spring means different things to different people: sunshine, flowers, Spring Break, etc. But for those of us in the telecom space, Spring brings an onslaught of tradeshows.

We've already had Mobile World Congress a few weeks ago. Next we have OFC/NFOEC next week in San Diego, the year's biggest optical event.