Nortel, Touch America ink long haul deal

Anaheim, Calif.--Long-haul equipment deals may be harder to come by now, but Nortel Networks opened up OFC with an agreement with service provider Touch America. Terms for the deal weren’t disclosed although deployment is set to begin in the second quarter.

Touch America will be Nortel’s first customer to publicly decree deployment of its new OPTera Connect HDX optical switches. The equipment will go into multiple locations within Touch America’s existing infrastructure. The idea behind those installations is to lower manual tasks and consolidate racks, according to Phillipe Morin, vice president of next generation optical networking at Nortel. “Smaller cabinets mean less space and less energy,” Morin said.

But the HDX deal is not the first for the two companies. Back in 1996, Touch America was the first to implement Nortel’s 10 Gb/s solution and they were also Nortel’s first 2.5 Gb/s U.S. customer before that.

“We are pretty excited because we are getting a lot of traction,” Morin said. “We are keeping the momentum going.”

A lot of that traction comes from the scalability of the product and the greatly reduced time needed to provision services, according to Morin. Those factors, paired with the cost savings and flexibility to support either mesh or ring topologies, give the product even more punch, he said.