We consider a multi-layer network design model arising from a real-life telecommunication application where traffic routing decisions imply the installation of expensive nodal equipment. Customer requests come in the form of bandwidth reservations for a given origin destination pair. Bandwidth demands are expressed as a multiple of nominal granularities. Each request must be single-path routed. Grooming several requests on the same wavelength and multiplexing wavelengths in the same optical stream allow the packing of more traffic. However, each addition or withdrawal of a request from a wavelength requires optical to electrical conversion for which a specific portal equipment is needed. The objective is to minimize the number of such equipment. We deal with backbone optical networks, therefore with networks with a moderate number of nodes (14 to 20) but thousands of requests. Further difficulties arise from the symmetries in wavelength assignment and traffic loading. Traditional multi-commodity network flow approaches are not suited for this problem. Four alternative models relying on Dantzig-Wolfe and/or Benders' decomposition are introduced and compared. The formulations are strengthened using symmetry breaking restrictions, variable domain reduction, zero-one decomposition of integer variables, and cutting planes. The resulting dual bounds are compared to the values of primal solutions obtained through hierarchical optimization and rounding procedures. For realistic size instances, our best approaches provide solutions with optimality gap of approximately 5% on average in around 2 hours of computing time.