The main proposal of this work is to show the importance of using simulation tools to project optical networks. The simulation method supports the investigation of several system and network parameters, such as bit error rate, blocking probability as well as physical layer issues, such as attenuation, dispersion, and nonlinearities, as these are all important to evaluate and validate the operability of optical networks. The work was divided into two parts: firstly, physical layer preplanning was proposed for the distribution of amplifiers and compensating for the attenuation and dispersion effects in span transmission; in this part, we also analyzed the quality of the transmitted signal. In the second part, an analysis of the transport layer was completed, proposing wavelength distribution planning, according to the total utilization of each link. The main network parameters used to evaluate the transport and physical layer design were delay (latency), blocking probability, and bit error rate (BER). This work was carried out with commercially available simulation tools.