Nortel Buzzboard

Nortel’s much ballyhooed 40gig optical solution has a new customer. This morning we announced that Southern Cross was deploying Nortel’s 40gig technology. Southern Cross is an independent bandwidth wholesaler, and its network provides the major link for Internet traffic from Australia, New Zealand and Fiji to the US, as well as linking Hawaii to the US mainland.

Southern Cross is a longtime Nortel optical customer, and this latest announcement shows an interesting evolution of their optical network through Nortel. Southern Cross originally selected Nortel back in 2001 to provide optical equipment for the U.S. terrestrial part of its network. Then two years ago Southern Cross started deploying the Nortel Common Photonic Layer (CPL) and Nortel Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500, to connect its U.S. access points located in San Jose and Morro Bay, California, and Hillboro and Nedonna Beach, Oregon. With this latest deployment, Southern Cross will upgrade their OME 6500s to include Nortel’s 40G/100G Adaptive Optical Engine.

Dean Veverka, VP of Operations for Southern Cross, states in the release that “Nortel’s technology gives us a simple, cost-effective upgrade to 40G and an equally simple upgrade path to 100G in the future.” If you’ve followed Nortel’s 40gig news lately you know that’s the big differentiator with the Nortel solution.

But an equally interesting quote from Dean Veverka is this: “We are also looking at the potential for this 40G technology to be deployed on our longer distance submarine segments.”

Why that possibility? Most likely because Nortel’s 40gig solution is able to go 1800km distances or more without the need for costly regeneration, which is obviously a huge expense when you are talking about submarine networks.