NEW MONEY TO BURN

As NFOEC convenes this week, all minds are on the RBOCs' ongoing consideration of a collective investment in FTTP. But there are other signs that three years of anarchy in optical are coming to an end. For example, companies are actually raising new money. Now they just have to make sure they put to use lessons learned during the thrifty downturn days.

One of these lessons is “Don't spend it all in one place,” and another is, “If you do spend it all in one place, at least invest in innovation.” Corvis, the company that has been built up and beaten down more times than a reality show contestant, managed to earn $70 million more in financing. That should be enough to keep even Corvis CEO David “Hot Wallet” Huber in cash reserves for a spell. With carriers certain to upgrade their long-haul systems sometime soon, it's time for Corvis to sit tight and not go buying any more of its struggling carrier customers.

Meanwhile, long-haul vendor Xtera raised $30 million and promptly used some of it to buy something it didn't have much of already—income. Maybe it did spend a lot of its dough in one place by acquiring Metro-Optix, but analysts have suggested the vendor can innovate on the investment by integrating switching and cross-connect functions for carriers. So far, Xtera hasn't indicated that it will follow that advice, saying it will keep new metro product line separate from the long-haul stuff for now. Some optical companies may have survived the telecom crash while others died, but that doesn't give them license to repeat any of the industry's old mistakes.