ACG Research compared the nLight approach to protection and restoration to the widely used 1+1 optical protection scheme. A sample 12 node core network was used to make the comparison. ACG's study showed that by enabling the two-way flow of information between the routing and optical layers the number of transponders was reduced by 63 percent and the number of router interfaces was reduced by 26 percent. nLight improvements in the capacity planning process resulted in a TCO savings of up to 50 percent.