Nortel Buzzboard

There were a ton of articles that came out from yesterday’s news. Here’s my list of the more insightful ones:

Reuters has a nice summary of the news with quotes from the IR day event and several analysts, as does the Globe & Mail.
Telephony did a nice feature on the LTE/WiMAX news that included an interview with Scott Wickware.
Light Reading provided probably the most in-depth coverage of the Carrier Ethernet win with Verizon.
Barron’s debated which piece of Nortel news was responsible for the stock price increase.
The LTE vs. WiMAX debate raged on, with Network World talking about what it means to Nortel, and Tech Observer talking about what it means to the industry.
Total …

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One of yesterday’s big announcements was the news that Verizon had chosen Nortel as a supplier for its next-generation metro network backbone. While the 4G/WiMAX/LTE news got more media coverage, some suggest it’s really this big win with Verizon that is fueling some of the “excitement” about Nortel.

The actual press release didn’t get into a lot of detail on the win, so some of the media coverage and spokesperson comments fill out some of the story a little more. Light Reading covered the story and talked to Philippe Morin, Nortel’s president of Metro Ethernet Networks. In the article, Philippe highlights how Verizon choosing PBB over MPLS is a big endorsement since “the biggest …

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Things that stood out for me in Philippe Morin’s presentation on our Metro Ethernet Business:

3G and 4G is driving 25-40% a year growth in mobile backhaul traffic. Pretty impressive when you think that, really, 3G traffic is only now becoming mainstream in North America. The graph below shows some of our projections.
The Carrier Ethernet market is expected to grow 76% by 2011. As Philippe said in his preso, “If you’re going to bet on a technology, bet on Ethernet.” Kind of like what Verizon did this morning.
We’re expecting the market for 40G/100G to grow from $0.3B in 2008 to $2B in 2001. And we want to have a 30% share of that 2011 market.

…

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It was already going to be a busy day here on Buzzboard with the Investment Analysts meeting hosted by Mike Z and company all day at Nortel’s headquarters in Toronto. Now in addition to that, this morning Nortel issued multiple press releases that include some significant news.

Here’s a quick summary of the news with links to the releases. I’ll be going through these in more detail as we get through the day with commentary and analysis:

First Nortel issued this release highlighting the Investor Meeting. All this release does is reconfirmed Nortel’s previously stated full year 2008 outlook in advance of this meeting between investment analysts and Nortel’s senior team.
Next, Nortel announced that Verizon had …

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The big news that came out yesterday from Verizon is that VZW is buying Alltel in a deal valued at $28.1 billion. But completely crushed underneath the weight of that big news was another announcement that Verizon made yesterday. While it didn’t have the glamor of a multi-billion dollar acquisition, Verizon’s other release should be of interest to this blog’s readers, as well as the equipment vendors that sell to Verizon.

Yesterday, Verizon announced that it had provided the manufacturers of certain equipment a “target” for getting 20 percent greater efficiency than today’s gear does by January 1, 2009.

For those of you without a calendar, that’s just over 6 months away.

To do this, Verizon said that it …

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The highly-anticipated U.S. 700 MHz spectrum auction finally begins today with much of the promise overshadowed by a frigid economic climate. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin remains optimistic, but concedes the timing may not be ideal.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless are expected to dominate. Google has deep pockets, but may not see the need to bid more than is required to ensure open access. Paul Allen, the cable giants, EchoStar and QUALCOMM are in. Sprint, T-Mobile and promising start-up Frontline Wireless are out.

Jeffrey Silva at RCRWirelessNews.com calls it March Madness, but with a twist. Since the auction will be ‘blind,’ it will be “like …

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It’s not often that you can hear our CTO John Roese and our CSO George Riedel provide their perspectives and updates on Nortel. So I thought this new podcast would be of interest.

This is a 36 minute, very conversational audio podcast that goes into detail on a variety of Nortel focused topics and questions, including: What is Nortel’s overall strategy, why did we pull out of 3G wireless and where are we going with 4G wireless and LTE, where Nortel is focused in the Enterprise, why UC and SOA are important, our IBM alliance, Nortel’s optical and 40gig activities, productivity and margin improvement, Nortel global services, and our acquisition strategy.

This is a really deep podcast, and well …

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US-China relations are improving. Or so one would assume after seeing Verizon announce that they will be installing a new submarine cable connecting the two countries in anticipation of future call growth. The new connection can support the equivalent of 62 million simultaneous phone calls, more than 60 times the capacity of the existing cable.

Voice lines were also what telecom analyst firm In-Stat focused on with their new report on the Worldwide PBX Market. According to In-Stat, 11.1 million voice lines were shipped in the first half of 2007, and 80% of those were VoIP lines.

Of course, there is still a huge installed base of traditional voice lines out there today that dwarfs the VoIP numbers, but …

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