Ciena will pay $769M for Nortel's metro Ethernet business.

Byline: [e-mail] (Staff)

Ciena will pay US$769 million for the optical networking and carrier Ethernet assets of Nortel Networks' Metro Ethernet Networks business, the two companies said. <p>Ciena emerged victorious from an auction that took place over the weekend, beating Nokia Siemens Networks. In the end Ciena had to pay about $248 million more for the Nortel business unit than its initial bid, made public on Oct. 7.<p>The approval of the deal is set to be heard by bankruptcy courts in the U.S. and Canada on Dec. 2, Nortel and Ciena said.<p>Nokia Siemens is now a two-time loser in the bidding for Nortel's assets. It previously lost out to Ericsson, which bid $1.13 billion for Nortel's CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and LTE (Long-Term Evolution) cellular network assets.<p>The market for carrier Ethernet equipment is growing, and has been defying the economic downturn, market researcher Infonetics said in a research note earlier this year. <p>Infonetics expects carrier Ethernet equipment r to grow to $34 billion by 2013, compared to $17 billion in 2008. That's a big cake, but many companies want a piece of it. Ciena will have to compete with the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Ericsson-Redback, Extreme Networks and Huawei, according to Infonetics. <p>As a part of its bankruptcy proceedings, Nortel has been selling off the company bit by bit. Besides the Ericsson deal, Nortel sold its Enterprise business to Avaya for $900 million and sold software for wireless networks to Hitachi for US$10 million.<p>There are some parts remaining to be sold: Nortel plans to say more about the sale of its GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) business this week.<p>Copyright 2009 IDG Middle East. All rights reserved.

Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company