Nortel Buzzboard

Last week at Interop, Nortel was pretty aggressive in getting the word out with claims around the energy efficiency advantages that Nortel’s enterprise data solutions have over Cisco. We had a “Calculate your Cisco Energy Tax” demo at the Nortel booth, Joel Hackney had this guest blog on what customers are saying about Nortel versus Cisco, and we also issued a press release that included quotes from 50 customers that had chosen Nortel’s enterprise data solutions.

UPDATE: See Computerworld’s video from the Interop show floor on the Nortel energy efficiency calculator.

Apparently not everyone agrees with our energy efficiency claims. In this rather harsh comment, Roy Osterberg called our Nortel vs Cisco comparisons on the booth “stupid and deceptive,” and accused us of “lying and miss-representation” for the purposes of marketing.

Now I’m not 100% sure, but a quick Google search shows me that Roy Osterberg is likely a dedicated Cisco employee, though he didn’t call himself out as one in his post and didn’t use a Cisco email address.

But to ensure that we were being on the up-and-up with our Interop demo and to respond to some of the allegations that Roy made, I had our product expert respond - Vince Garr, our Lead Sustainability Engineer at Nortel:

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Virgin Media is using Nortel and Juniper equipment to trial what is believed to be the first-ever 40 gig optical network in the United Kingdom. The 40G trial was conducted in April over a 350km (217 mile) span of Virgin Media’s current UK 10G network between Manchester and London. Here’s the news release.

Virgin Media already has Nortel and Juniper equipment in its network, with a nationwide 2500km Nortel CPL (Common Photonic Layer) optical network and Juniper T-series core routers. To enable the 40 gig trail, Nortel provided its 40G Adaptive Optical Engine DWDM transponder cards which interconnected with Juniper Networks T-series routers …

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