Fiber Optek Offers $7.3B Reorg Plan for Global Crossing
Fiber Optek Interconnect Corp. has made public a plan of reorganization for Global Crossing Ltd., which it intends to sponsor. Fiber Optek's plan is to provide "a sizeable current cash payment, a significant ownership position to the creditors as well as a meaningful equity position for existing Global Crossing shareholders."

Among other things, the plan calls for existing Global Crossing shareholders to retain approximately 25% equity in the company, and would be allowed to purchase warrants convertible to an additional approximate 25% of the equity in the reorganized company. The name "Global Crossing" would be changed to "Fiber Optek Networks Ltd." since "Global Crossing" has become a negative brand, officials at the privately held Fiber Optek also said.

Fiber Optek projects that the restructured company will have a book value of approximately $9.7 billion, and that the per share common stock price will rise approximately 10,000 percent from the current level ($0.05 to $5.00) after the restructuring.

Under Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules, Global Crossing's management has an exclusive right for 120 days to submit a formal plan of reorganization. Pascazi asserted that as soon as that period of exclusivity ends, now expected to be in late June, Fiber Optek intends to submit its competing plan to the bankruptcy court. Fiber Optek also intends to appoint Pascazi as Chairman and CEO and Frank P. Zarzeka Jr. as COO of the reorganized company. Both men were with IBM before founding Wappingers Falls, N.Y.-based Fiber Optek, a developer and installer of fiber-optic-telecommunications networks.

Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa and Singapore Technologies Telemedia have already signed letters of intent in a $750 million bid for the company. And for its part, Global Crossing has said more than 60 potential investors expressed interest in company as it implemented cost cutting measures in the first quarter.

Metromedia Files for Bankruptcy
Surprising virtually no one, the long haul fiber carrier seeks Chapter 11 protection after missing one debt payment after another. (more)

Juniper Snaps Up Siemens' IP Networking Unit
Juniper Networks will pay a cash and stock total of $740 million for the IP infrastructure unit of Siemens. (more)

Nokia Takes Equity Stake in Redback
Nokia hedges bets on broadband and acquires a 10 percent stake in the Calif.-based telco equipment firm. (more)

Alcatel Asks: Who Else Is As Switch-Committed?
Parisian equipment maker Alcatel said it would launch its non-stop routing platform using a breakthrough software schema on its 7670 routing switch platform. (more)

Qwest, MSN Forge Broadband Deal
MSN signs on to become the inaugural customer of Qwest's new Broadband Access Aggregation Services. (more)

Venture Capital News

Celite Systems Grabs $15.9M
Residential broadband-access products provider Celite Systems has raised $12.15 million in Series A financing and $3.75 million in debt financing, according to VentureWire. Additional information was not immediately available.

Product News

Agilent Intros 2 Gb/s Transceivers for Fibre Channel SANs
Agilent Technologies Inc. The new 2 Gb/s SFP transceivers' extended operating temperature range reduces the need for system cooling, and their extended operating voltage simplifies board layout and power supply design. In high-density applications where transceivers are packed closely together on both sides of a circuit board, network operators often have a hard time grasping transceivers in order to unplug them. Agilent's new pull de-latch feature solves this problem, officials said.

Cypress Samples New Optical Chips
Cypress Semiconductor Corp. said it is sampling POSIC10G (CY7C9547-FAC), a single-chip framer that makes it possible to extend 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) LANs over standard SONET/SDH networks. Supporting 10 GbE WAN PHY, 10 GbE LAN PHY, OC-192c/STM-64 and direct mode, POSIC10G reduces network and linecard complexity while enabling carriers to offer cost competitive 10 GbE services over MAN/WAN networks. POSIC10G follows closely on the heels of Cypress's sampling of POSIC2GVC, its full-featured OC-48/STM-16 framer with virtual concatenation.

Operating in four modes, POSIC10G enables edge and core router designers to use the same design for multiple cards in their system, considerably simplifying linecard design. POSIC10G is a true single-chip 10 GbE solution that integrates a 10 GbE media access controller (MAC), a SONET/SDH framer, a Physical Coding Sub-Layer (PCS), and a WAN Interface Sub-layer (WIS). The device efficiently handles 10 GbE packets, supporting jumbo frames and address filtering. POSIC10G supports SPI 4.2, the industry standard for network processor interface on 10 Gbps linecards. The chip provides advanced support for SONET's automatic protection service (APS), having two on-chip SONET/SDH framer blocks. The APS switching/recovery is both manual and automatic, enabling flexible redundancy options for customer networks.

Do the Schott Shuffle
Schtt Optovance Inc., an optical interconnect company, said it has extended its Optical Shuffle product family into the planar lightwave circuits (PLCs) arena. As channel counts increase for integrated optical devices, such as arrayed waveguides (AWGs) and other PLCs, the fiber management to interconnect these devices becomes a cost and design issue, Schott said. Schott Optovance's Optical Shuffle for PLCs is a compact fiber management product that interconnects high-channel count devices. The product, which aligns fiber ribbons to waveguides and re-routes the fibers, will initially be used for AWGs.

Schott Optovance offers its Optical Shuffle fiber management product for PLCs with industry standard terminations and in various design configurations. The Optical Shuffle for PLCs has already been designed in for use by several AWG manufacturers. The Optical Shuffle for PLCs is used for a fiber pitch of 250 and 127 mm. This new Shuffle can also be used for other high-channel devices, such as VOAs and Dynamic Gain Equalizers (DGE).

Other News

Ciena Extends Features
Ciena Corp., which supplies intelligent optical networking systems and software, said it is extending its distributed intelligence features of its CoreDirector optical switch to MetroDirector K2, a next-generation multi-service access and switching platform. The action will let service providers automate the software provisioning process network wide, including circuit set-up and discovery of network topology.