Nortel Buzzboard

Is Nigeria the next hot spot for telecom growth?  Until the last day or two I would have never thought so, but I’ve seen several news items that have popped the growing west African country on my radar.

Yesterday, Nortel issued this press release announcing that we have opened a new office in Lagos, Nigeria to meet increasing demand for communications in Western Africa.  Nortel also has offices in Johannesburg, Algiers, Tunis and Cairo.

In a conference this week in Barcelona, Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said that Nigeria was an attractive market, saying “”It doesn’t take a very sophisticated analysis to see [Nigeria] is one of the very few large markets with decent GDP, a …

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Since yesterday’s Nortel news, I’ve spend at ton of time on two things — listening and reading.  Like many of my fellow employees, I’ve been sitting in on several employee conference calls yesterday and today to hear directly from our leaders.  And like many of you, I’ve been reading all the coverage from the media about our news.

If you’re like me, all the articles have started running together that are covering the main news points: our revenue drop, our layoffs, economic conditions and cost cutting.  These are obviously very important topics — and you can read about them in articles from AP, the Ottawa Citizen, CNET, etc — but today I found myself looking for coverage that …

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A new report out by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) highlights the increasing growth of fiber as the preferred means for high-speed Internet access around the world.

According to the new OECD report that compiled the latest broadband figures from June 2008, fiber now accounts for 9% of the Internet access subscriptions across the 30 OECD member countries.  In fact, fiber has overtaken DSL as the predominant access technology in Japan and Korea (with a 45% and 39% share respectively).

Overall, the number of broadband subscribers in the OECD reached 251 million by June 2008, an increase of 14% from June 2007. Fiber access went from 8% to 9% of total lines in that same period.

Doing …

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Today on GigaOM, Stacey Higginbotham highlights a new report out on the global WiMAX market. The new study by TeleGeography Research says that the number of commercial WiMAX networks worldwide has jumped 82% in the last year — from 69 to 126.  Stacey’s post also has a really neat global map that shows the regional breakdown of those 126 deployments.  Take a look.

Adding to those 126 deployments is Fairpoint Communications, a service provider that offers a variety of comms services (local and long distance voice, data, Internet, television and broadband) across 18 states. Today, Nortel announced that Fairpoint was working with Nortel to build a WiMAX network to serve thousands of mainly rural customers across Vermont, …

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International market research firm Infonetics has issued a new report on the global packet optical transport market.  While the report itself is only available to subscribers, the Infonetics press release, as well as a few nuggets of info given to the press, provide some interesting details on the report.

The study found that 62% to 72% of service provider respondents plan to increase their 40gig spending each year between 2009 and 2011 and later, and forecasts a 59% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for 40gig from 2007 to 2011.
86% of service providers surveyed expect their packet optical transport networks to save them operational expenditures, of which more than two-thirds expect OPEX savings of at least 11% to over …

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The move of Virtual Worlds from gamer playground to business tool was the main topic of a Virtual Worlds event earlier this week in London.

Among the speakers at the event were Mark Kingdon of Linden Lab and John Hengeveld of Intel.  Paul McDonagh-Smith of Nortel also spoke at the event.  Paul is Notel’s director of learning applications, and is heavily involved with Nortel’s web.alive virtual collaboration tool.

web.alive was unveiled earlier this year as the first project to come out of Nortel’s incubation program.  The solution is targeted at helping businesses create a “better than reality” collaboration environment that blends 3D graphics with high-definition spatial audio.

…

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A new report today from analyst firm ABI Research says that Nortel has the industry’s greenest switches.

ABI Research issued this press release today, highlighting their new “Green Network Equipment” vendor matrix ranking.  You can see a summary of the report here.

The ABI report ranks vendor ‘greenness’ on two categories — each vendor’s internal green initiatives (how green they are) as well as the greenness of their switches (how green they make their customers).

Overall, the report ranked Cisco, Nortel and HP number one, two and three respectively.  However, the report gives Nortel top honors for the greenness of its switches, which takes into account power efficiency, value-add green features, certifications, and the greenness of power supplies and switching tools.

Stan …

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A few weeks ago, Nortel CTO John Roese joined other industry leaders at the GigaOM Mobilize conference in San Francisco.  I’ve already posted about the Q&A John had with Om Malik on-stage at the show.  But after that Q&A, John talked to GigaOM’s Carolyn Pritchard for a video interview.

Sometimes unscripted video interviews can be choppy and relatively uninformative — but this is a really interesting interview with some great questions from Carolyn and good insight from John.  In the interview, John talks about how 4G will enable an “equalization” between desktop and mobile experiences, and how that will help enterprises who have have fallen behind in providing their employees with effective mobile access to business applications.  See the …

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Yesterday I wrote about a recent Verizon field trial that used Nortel equipment to test the viability of sending 100gig rate traffic over “high loss” fiber.  Today at Light Reading’s Optical Expo 2008 in Dallas, Verizon’s director of Backbone Network Design, Glenn Wellbrock, said bandwidth demand is driving the need for 100gig now.

Glenn Wellbrock also provided more details on the field trial with Nortel, which were captured by Phil Harvey in this Light Reading article.  For the field trial, Verizon used the worst quality fiber they could find — which happened to be in Longview, Texas.  According to the article, Wellbrock said that “The fiber we found was not even being used for 10G, and we ran …

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This morning Verizon issued this press release highlighting the recent completion of a live field trial of 100 gig optical technology using Nortel equipment.  Using Nortel’s 40G/100G Adaptive Optical Engine cards on the Nortel Optical Multiservice Edge (OME) 6500, Verizon transported data error-free at a rate of 92 Gbps over a 73 kilometer stretch of fiber in northeastern Texas.

The critical finding in the trial was that the network demonstrated twice the tolerance for signal distortion when compared with today’s standard 10G signal.  This is quite a feat, as fiber distortion (also called polarization mode dispersion or PMD) increases by a factor of 4 and 10 when transmission rates are upped from 10G to 40G or 100G respectively.

PMD …

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