After the bickering reported last month, Finisar (Sunnyvale, CA) and Infineon Technologies (Munich) amended their acquisition agreement. Finisar now will acquire only Infineon’s optical-transceiver business, leaving the latter with its plastic-optical-fiber, parallel optics, and FTTH-component product lines intact. Infineon received 34 million shares of Finisar common stock; the total represents a 13% share in Finisar worth nearly $50 million.
Molex (Lisle, IL) added copper and fiber cables to its structured cabling systems in the U.S. market. The fiber cable is available in several performance grades, including OM1, OM2, OM3, and OS1 variants. Molex has sold its own cable throughout Europe and Asia-Pacific for several years.
Cox Communications (Atlanta) adopted the Fujitsu Flexible Architecture for Subscriber Service Termination (FASST) strategy. Cox has completed deployment of Atrica’s (Santa Clara, CA) optical Ethernet products, a key component of the FASST portfolio, for a converged voice, video, and data services network that serves the New Orleans Public Schools. FASST, executed as a partnership of companies and led by Fujitsu Network Communications (Richardson, TX), is an architecture and solution suite optimized for transition management.
Infinera (Sunnyvale, CA), provider of digital optical-networking systems, announced that freenet (Hamburg, Germany) is operating a nationwide network of Infinera DTNs. This network serves as the backbone of freenet’s IP service offerings. The Infinera DTN supports 400 Gbits/sec (40 10-Gbit/sec channels) in a half-rack and 800 Gbits/sec (80 10-Gbit/sec channels) in a full rack.
Calient Networks (San Jose, CA) announced that its DiamondWave photonic-switching and GMPLS network-control systems have been deployed in the UltraLight 10 Gigabit Grid network. The network is operated by a consortium of U.S. universities, with multiple nodes in California, Illinois, Michigan, and Massachusetts, and interfaces to other research and education networks worldwide. The UltraLight network will use the Calient equipment to enhance and extend the network’s Cisco Systems (San Jose) ONS 15454 and 15540 multiservice provisioning platforms.
Infonet Services(Oakbrook Terrace, IL), provider of global communications services for multinationals, chose Acterna’s (Germantown, MD) ANT-5 SDH access tester and the FST-2510A TestPad, a DS-1 to OC-192/STM-64 tester, to support the delivery of managed IP services.
Verrillon (North Grafton, MA) acquired certain business assets of the 3M (St. Paul, MN) specialty fiber product line, including equipment and exclusive access to certain intellectual property. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The intellectual property and supporting assets purchased by Verrillon relate to a broad range of specialty optical fiber and component designs, including elliptical cladding polarization-maintaining fibers, polarizing fibers, advanced fused couplers, and various singlemode fibers and components.
Polaris Networks (San Jose, CA), provider of next generation crossconnects, entered a three-year agreement with McLeodUSA (Cedar Rapids, IA), one of the nation’s larger independent competitive telecom services providers, for the purchase of Polaris’s OMX (optical metro switch) for deployment in McLeodUSA’s metro networks.
Edmonton Economic Development installed Canada’s first Canon (Lake Success, NY) Canobeam DT-130 to provide gigabit connectivity via free-space optics between its newly renovated offices.
Cegetel (Paris), the French alternative telecom carrier, will deploy Ciena’s (Linthicum, MD) CoreStream Agility for increased capacity and flexibility in its core network to support the adoption of high-capacity services at the network edge.
T-Com, the broadband/fixed-network business field of Deutsche Telekom (Munich), signed a three-year framework contract with Siemens Communications (Munich) for optical transmission technology for use in its WAN. This technology, incorporated within the company’s Surpass hiT 7500 DWDM system, supports 3,000-km transmission at speeds up to 40 Gbits/sec.
Norrsken, a regional operator in Sweden, selected Transmode Systems (Stockholm) and Lidéndata (Enköping, Sweden) to upgrade its backbone network using WDM to support Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) services. Lidéndata and Norrsken installed Transmode’s System 1100 C/DWDM platform over Norrsken’s existing fiber. The joint team migrated Norrsken’s SDH network onto a lambda, allowing the carriage of GbE on the remaining wavelengths.
OFS (Avon, CT) licensed its air-clad microstructured fiber patents and its broad family of fundamental optical-fiber grating manufacturing patents to NKT subsidiary Koheras A/S(Birkerød, Denmark). Microstructured fibers are being used to develop high-power cladding pumped optical-fiber amplifiers and lasers.
Agilent Technologies(Palo Alto, CA) formed Agilent Technologies China Holding Co., based in Shanghai, to consolidate its entities in China. Agilent’s businesses in China employ 1,100 people and are centered in Beijing and Shanghai, with other offices located throughout the country.
LG Electronics (Seoul, Korea) and Nortel Networks (Brampton, Ontario) will establish a joint venture for providing telecom equipment and networking solutions to Korea and other markets globally. Nortel expects the proposed joint venture will market the company’s entire portfolio of optical, wireless, wireline, and enterprise products in Korea and, based on mutual discussion, in other markets.