The ring routing and wavelength assignment problem arose in the planning of optical communication networks which use WDM rings. Traffic demands are given for each pair of nodes in an ring : each demand must be routed one of the two possible connections round the ring and the wavelength assignments must be made so that there are no conflicts : that is. no two connections whose routes share a link can be assigned the same wavelength along that link. The objective is to minimize the number of used wavelengths. We propose the local optimal routing for the problem and show that there always exists an optimal solution satisfying it. Furthermore we suggest a new lower bound for the problem and show that it is very efficient for the worst case example.