Update

The management board of Infineon Technologies(Munich, Germany) terminated the agreement to sell the company’s fiber-optic business to Finisar(Sunnyvale, CA). Citing delays in filing the proxy statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Infineon said the deal’s closing could be expected no earlier than the end of March, nearly a year after the signing of the initial paperwork last April. Infineon also claimed that Finisar said its board was likely to withdraw its recommendation in favor of the transaction. Finally, Infineon said it would “assess its legal options” to recover resulting damages via an arbitration proceeding in Germany. Finisar responded that it had not breached the purchase agreement and that its board was merely reviewing its recommendation. The company said it has repeatedly assured Infineon that it would “follow its obligations” under the agreement, including bringing the deal to a vote of shareholders.

WilTel Communications (Tulsa, OK) is providing National LambdaRail (NLR), a consortium of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, with OC-192 services to help complete the consortium’s nationwide fiber-optic-network infrastructure. NLR’s network provides the research community with direct control over a wide range of network facilities, capabilities, and services. NLR’s services will support both application- and networking-level experiments and serve diverse communities of computational scientists, distributed systems researchers, and networking researchers.

EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering (Quebec City) announced that a suite of FTTX (fiber to the premises, curb, and node) test instruments has been selected by a U.S.-based tier one network service provider (NSP) for fiber deployments in access networks. The NSP certified five of EXFO’s products on an exclusive basis for the next four years, including the PPM-350B PON power meter as well as the FOT-930 MaxTester, an automated multifunction loss test set. That is the second U.S.-based tier one NSP to certify the company’s FTTX equipment. Meanwhile, the MTS-5100e handheld field tester from Acterna (Germantown, MD) has been selected as the sole optical time-domain reflectometer tester for FTTX cable maintenance by what the company described as “one of the largest communications service providers in the United States.”

AltaLink Management, Alberta’s largest electric transmission provider, deployed the High-Speed Metro-Regional Architecture from Meriton Networks (Ottawa) for its high-speed backbone. AltaLink will use the WDM equipment to support Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and internal data applications such as intranet communications, voice, and storage. AltaLink’s high-speed network was built by SNC Lavalin ATP.

Tellabs (Naperville, IL) acquired Vinci Systems (Vienna, VA), a privately held developer of optical-networking terminals (ONTs) for fiber to the home access systems. Under the agreement, Tellabs will pay up to $52.5 million in cash and restricted Tellabs stock. The move brings Tellabs a family of third generation ONTs that complements the Tellabs FiberDirect line.

ECI Telecom (Petah Tikva, Israel), through Canada-based Nortel Networks, has been selected to provide fiber to the home (FTTH) equipment to support a European utility FTTH deployment. The identity of the utility was not revealed. In addition, Telekomunikacja Polska (TP-Warsaw) chose optical equipment from Nortel to help meet growing demand from large enterprises in Poland for advanced high-speed data services like real time storage and business continuity and disaster recovery.

The Italian-based international research center CREATE-NET selected the optical-network platform from Lumentis (Stockholm) for use in a LAN that will support data traffic as well as experiments and advanced research on optical networks. CREATE-NET consists of European academic institutions and research centers, performing research and experimentation activities coordinated through the central research location in Trento, Italy. The center will use the platform to do advanced research on optical networking as well as provide the opportunity to test communications services for commercial networks.

The China Ministry of Commerce (MOC) determined that Corning (Corning, NY) did not dump standard singlemode optical fiber into the Chinese market. The MOC concluded that the margin between Corning’s home country pricing and its pricing into China was less than the statutory de minimis threshold. The government ministry thereby eliminated its preliminary determination of a 16% dumping margin, which means that no dumping margin will be applied against Corning imports, effective immediately with the ruling in early January.

FONS (Marlborough, MA) formed a joint venture with Nitta, a global manufacturing corporation. The new corporation, FONS-Nitta Asia-Pacific, based in Tokyo, will focus on bringing high-performance optical-assembly products to the Asia-Pacific market, particularly passive connectivity products for fiber to the premises applications.