Well, at least has filed for bankruptcy protection.
Are non-Canadians very familiar with this icon that has been around for almost as long as the telephone? And what are your thoughts?
I’ve heard of them and have seen their logo around. I think they are an ISP where I live (Northern Michigan). I would rate myself as not very familiar with this company. I hope Canada will be doing ok after this, I kind of like that country and hope to visit it again some day when they add something new to the attractions.
Logging into our office voice mail, we’re greeted with “Nortel Call Pilot” so they at least made that portion - I assume they built the rest of the system.
That’s really about all I know about Nortel.
The are makers of telecom equipment. SONET, DWDM, phone switches. My company has quite a bit of their stuff.
They absorbed Standard Telephones & Cables here, who had a big factory at Southgate (closed in 1992). It’s now a business park.
I work directly with them in support of a huge global client. We hired them to handle the voice portion of our contract.
Their performance is spotty, at best. They downright suck in Europe.
Nortel was the former Northern Telecom, maker of phone switching equipment for Bell Canada among others. They used to be legendary before they decided to go after the IP networking market in the late nineties and got lost competing with such as Cisco and, later, Vonage and Skype. They built the equipment that Bell used to digitize the traditional phone system in the eighties.
I once saw the Bell Northern Research R&D campus outside Ottawa; it was immense. Ottawa was one of the places where they tested new phone features; as a result my friends there had things like caller-ID years before the rest of the country ever saw them, if at all. (I seem to remember a feature on a payphone in Ottawa where you could send a voice message to another Bell landline; I don’t ever remember seeing that elsewhere.) My sister’s best friend was a software engineer from Queen’s University who worked on programming the phone switches.
I took some training for the DMS 100, but I always liked the Lucent 5ESS better.
No they are not.
This is a shame. Back in the day, I read a lot of good research papers that came out of studies done there.
[sarcasm]A whole lotta good that did.[/sarcasm] Thanks anyway.
I’ve been to the former Nortel headquarters in Brampton several times for work. The place is IMMENSE - it was built in the 90s when the fad was to have huge campuses a-la-Microsoft, and it was meant to show that Nortel was playing on the same field as the big boys… they had to sell it off, complete with contents, back when they started the downward spiral 4 years ago.
It’s kind of sad to see how little time (relatively speaking) it took to for the giant to fall. Sad times for telecom. 