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To: Glenn McDougall who wrote (10800)	6/7/2000 7:21:00 AM
From: Glenn McDougall	Respond to of 24042

Nortel to re-enter undersea fibre market Company sees 'huge' market with bandwidth growth Michael Lewis Financial Post ATLANTA - Nortel Networks Corp. said yesterday it is returning to the undersea communications business it abandoned five years ago when it sold its submarine unit to France's Alcatel SA, now the clear leader among service providers in the sector. Clarence Chandran, president of Nortel's carrier group, said the Brampton, Ont.-based global telecommunications equipment supplier will use the expertise and technologies of recently-acquired companies to re-enter the now lucrative field. He said Nortel has already started to bid on contracts to provide technologies needed to activate undersea fibre-optic cable being laid around the globe by such companies as Montreal's Teleglobe Inc. and Global Crossings of the U.S. He said Nortel will get its feet wet by "lighting" cable first along coastal regions, and ultimately, over trans-oceanic networks. Near term, he said the market for the software and electronics that activate the undersea systems will be worth more US$6-billion per year over the next five to seven years. "It's going to be huge," Mr. Chandran said at the SuperComm trade show and conference here, billed as the largest in the world with more than 50,000 attendees. "There is just a ton of new cable systems being built." An estimated 38,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable currently rings the earth above ground and undersea, but analysts say a great deal more will be needed to handle the so-called bandwidth explosion. Spurred by the Internet, network operators are rushing to assemble the high-speed systems that move information as laser-generated light along silicon strands. The networks will be needed, telecommunications industry analysts say, to accommodate the data, voice and multimedia transmissions originating on the Internet and displayed on the next generation of wireless devices. Mr. Chandran said it sold its underseas unit for US$900-million because "there wasn't an Internet then," but said the company always intended to return to the bottom of the sea. He said Nortel acquired companies whose products direct light along fibre networks with terrestrial and sub-oceanic applications in mind. Nortel, whose corporate image is omnipresent this week in Atlanta, told delegates to last year's SuperComm trade show that it would enter 2000 as the world market leader in optical telecommunications based on the Internet, ahead of rivals Lucent Technologies Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. The company yesterday cited a report by consulting firm The Dell'Oro Groupo that placed Nortel in first spot in the sector in the first quarter of this year, and made several announcements it said would solidify the position: Nortel said it will conduct non-commercial trials of general packet radio service (GPRS) core networks with AT&T Wireless Services, recently spun off from AT&T Corp., in several major U.S. cities beginning this summer. The trials are intended to provide live experience with high-speed, broadband wireless network design and deployment that can be applied when full third-generation technology is commercially available. The trials will demonstrate the ability to provide consumers and businesses with speedy downloads and high-capacity connections on wireless devices, Nortel said, whether they be mobile phones, handheld devices or laptop computers.