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New features for Nortel's optical network portfolio will add intelligence and agility that the company believes will lead to continued growth in revenue being garnered by the company's optical products, said Phillipe Morin, Nortel's general manager of optical networks.

"Existing solutions still have engineering challenges to be resolved," said Morin.

Based on wavelength selective switching, Nortel's enhanced reconfigurable optical add drop multiplexer (eROADM) provides mesh networking capability, he said.

"Now you can drop any wavelength on any port," he added.

Electronic dynamically compensating optics (eDCO) provides dispersion compensation on the optical transmitter itself, eliminating the need for dispersion compensation modules, Raman amplifiers and two-stage amplifiers. In addition to CapEx savings of 30% to 50%, Nortel's innovative dispersion compensation solution takes the drudgery out of deploying ROADMs in the optical network.

"Carriers no longer have to do all the pre-engineering and dispersion mapping to compensate for all the possible permutations of re-routing done by ROADMs," said Kevin Drury, director of marketing optical networks for Nortel.

As wavelengths travel dynamically determined distances over different varieties of fiber at speeds of 10 Gb/s, dispersion becomes a limiting factor, he explained. By mitigating all of the above, the eDCO optimizes ROADMs' functionality in the network.