Roughly 1,000 jobs are at stake in Ottawa pending the auction of the optical/metro ethernet divisions of Nortel, which started on Friday. No end date has yet been set.
New Jersey's Ciena set the opening bid at $551 million; in better days, that division would have been worth between $1 billion and $2 billion. Ciena already has 200 employees in Ottawa.
Nokia Siemens is also said to be the other bidder, but the company has not yet confirmed its interest. It tried to buy the wireless unit that Ericsson just took over last week.
