Nortel confirms Comcast optical deal

Nearly a year after rumors suggested it, Nortel Networks confirmed today it is supplying optical equipment for Comcast’s nationwide backbone network in what some analysts believe may be the industry’s largest deployment yet of reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs).

Lehman Brothers first suggested that Nortel and Cisco Systems were the winners of the Comcast optical contracts back in January. Cisco went public with the news earlier this month.

Deployment began early in the second quarter with a vendor “bake-off” to build a trial network between Boston and Washington, D.C., Nortel said. That trial network was then expanded as part of the actual deployment.

“We were joking about this being the most anticlimactic announcement we’ve had in a long time,” said Dan Mondor, general manager of Nortel’s global cable solutions business. “People were congratulating us a long time ago.”

In addition to Cisco’s CRS-1 optical backbone router, Comcast is deploying Nortel’s Common Photonic Layer (CPL) platform and its Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 product. According to Nortel, the OME 6500s will be used to aggregate traffic from Cisco’s CRS-1s and hand it off to Nortel’s CPL in the backbone.

“The 6500 does the wavelength capture and aggregation and becomes the optical service terminal for the network, and the CPL is the backbone for the DWDM transport, the amplification technology,” Mondor said. “The Cisco router interfaces into the national optical backbone network with a 10 Gb/s spigot, if you will.”

The CPL is being deployed with wavelength-selective switching functionality, which Nortel calls “eROADM.” With more than 100 access sites and 30,000 kilometers of fiber, some analysts believe Comcast’s network could be the largest ROADM deployment to date.

Nortel and Cisco have both agreed to participate in a Comcast initiative to foster better interoperability between optical and IP network layers and among multiple vendors’ equipment. The three will begin by attempting to define a set of common interfaces among Cisco and Nortel gear, but the initiative is expected to include other vendors going forward.

“It’s all about developing the specifications so you can operate and manage these fundamental parts of the network as one network as opposed to two or three or four,” Mondor said. “We’ll be taking the jointly developed specifications to various standards bodies as appropriate.”

“It’s not meant to be a closed ecosystem,” he added, in response to a question. “It’s meant to ultimately lead to specifications and open standards.”

The deal is Nortel’s largest optical cable contract this year.