nortel on SWiK

BCM 50, Nortel BCM 400, Norstar Business Phone System, NORTEL IP Telephone, Nortel Networks Telephone

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:01:59 -0700

BCM 50 – Contact ABIS today and get the nortel bcm 50 or the nortel bcm 400 installed in your organization. Looking for the nortel VOIP, nortel ip telephone, nortel networks telephone, telecommunication equipment services, VOIP business phone systems, office communications systems and telephone systems small business.

Wireless Hit by Economic Worries

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:02:32 -0700

After a few quarters of nonchalant statements that the sub-prime mortgage crisis and rising oil prices weren’t going to affect the tech stocks, the bloom is off the rose. The lowered sales forecasts and lackluster quarters are trickling in, and the trend for wireless companies is clear. This morning, networking equipment maker Ciena said in its earnings release that it expected lowered sales for the coming quarter. Gary Smith, Ciena president and CEO said:

“In addition to existing customer-specific challenges, we have recently begun to experience order delays from many of our Tier One service provider customers, which we attribute to their guarded approach to capital expenditures given the uncertain macroeconomic environment. While we’ve seen no project or order cancellations, sales cycles are lengthening and some deployments are slowing.”

Yesterday Qualcomm sent lower the shares of fellow chip maker Texas Instruments, as well as those of handset maker Nokia, after Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said the replacement cycle for cell phones in developed countries was lengthening. If phone sales drop, chipmakers, handset makers from Motorola to Samsung, and carriers will lose. Worries from the carriers will also affect Ciena’s competitors, among them Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and the troubled Nortel, which has been trading below its cash value intermittently throughout the last month.

Preparations for a downturn began earlier this year at Cisco, but it still reported record-breaking sales for its second quarter earlier this month, and CEO John Chambers said any economic downturn would be short lived. However, it did lower its revenue forecasts slightly for the second half of the year. With consumers tightening their belts, an industry that has grown to rely more heavily on the Average Jane and Joe forking over money for the latest gadget might find themselves doing a little belt-tightening of its own.

If this story interests you, check out our upcoming conference:
Mobilize — The Next Generation Mobile Conference

Desktop Virtualization: Where Thin Clients Meet the Cloud

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:11:51 -0700

Today the organization behind the popular Xen open-source hypervisor announced the latest release of its virtualization software. It’s smaller, has better power management and graphics capabilities, and can run on machines ranging from servers to laptops and mobile phones.

Also, Nortel announced today a product it calls an “office-on-a-stick.” I would call it a virtualized desktop. Nortel joins companies large and small pushing products that can replicate your computer and information anywhere on computers, thin clients and even cell phones. Desktop virtualization competitors MokaFive, Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, Desktone and Pano Logic are trying to grow the market as well.

Participating in a call related to the semiconductor industry earlier this week, I heard from one of the analyst participants that thin-client sales were on the upswing as management focused on power savings, security and manageability. A virtualized desktop can be delivered via a USB drive, a thin client, and on hypervisor-equipped laptops. The benefit of virtualization to most companies is that mobile users can take USB drives, thin-clients or laptops and recreate the corporate compute environment in a secure and controlled setting. This takes a lot of the expense out of managing hundreds or thousands of desktops.

There are several ways to virtualize desktops. In the old thin-client model of computing, the client was connected to a server though the corporate LAN, making it a good choice for some companies worried about security, but less compelling for widespread use. Then products that allowed clients or computers to connect to virtualized computing environments located on a central server emerged. But Ian Pratt, founder of Xen.org, points out that as hypervisors start to ship on laptops and other devices (Samsung is putting a hypervisor on ARM processors for some of its smart phones) a form of two-way virtualization and syncing can occur that’s far more secure and flexible.

As virtualized servers have been gathered into computing clouds, hooking some kind of virtual desktop to that cloud has become easier to implement and manage, making desktop virtualization more interesting for corporate buyers. That was a reason Microsoft found startup Kidaro interesting enough to acquire in March and is also the value proposition behind MokaFive. The next few years could see some real changes in corporate computing.

photo of Ian Pratt courtesy of Citrix

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

Mobilize 08: More Speakers Added, Early Bird Special To End Soon

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:05:57 -0700

We are working hard to prepare for our Mobilize 08 conference scheduled to be held on September 18 in San Francisco. You already know about Rich Miner (Google), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco Systems) and John Roese (Nortel). Today we are adding more awesome speakers to our growing lineup:

* Scott Richardson - Chief Strategy Officer of Clearwire
* Fred Kitson - VP, Applications Research, Motorola
* Marc Davis - Chief Scientist of Yahoo! Connected Life.

We are going to announce a few more in coming days including some candidate for fireside chats. Stay tuned, and if you haven’t bought your tickets already, it might be a good a time since our early bird special is ending soon. If you sign up now, you can save some money off the full price. (Ticketing information here.)

For mobile startups cooking up new products, iPhone apps or simply looking to launch in front of an influential audience, it might be a good time to apply for our LaunchPad, a free contest that will feature startups picked by our elite panel of judges. Entry form is here.

When It Comes to Broadband, There’s Never Enough

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:19:20 -0700

Anyone questioning the need for more fiber or wireless backhaul, or even 4G wireless broadband, need only look at a recent survey from IDC that finds that a constant connection is becoming the expected norm for almost a fifth of the world’s population. Sure, the study was funded by Nortel Networks, a telecommunications gear maker, but I don’t doubt the general theme of hyperconnectivity at all.

Some findings include:

16 percent of the global workforce is hyperconnected today, a number that will grow to 40 percent in five years.
64 percent of the workforce in Latin America is either hyperconnected or increasingly connected, compared to 59 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, 50 percent in Europe, and 44 percent in North America
Hyperconnectivity varies by industry, from 9 percent in health care to 25 percent in high tech and 21 percent in finance industries

Nortel CTO John Roese says improved capacity at the core of the Internet and an upgrade to 4G wireless will take care of the infrastructure requirements of hyperconencted individuals, but calls for software companies and enterprises to rethink enterprise software.

He envisions communications-from voice to social networking-built into always-on applications for the enterprise. While many companies may not view social networking or virtual worlds as integral to their corporate IT strategy, he points out that the younger generation of workers will demand this from employers.

4G Wireless & the Ensuing Bandwidth Boom

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:48:13 -0700

My previous post about LTE taking the lead in the 4G wireless sweepstakes prompted some interesting comments, including those of sharp readers who pointed out the pokey nature of the wireless backhaul networks. As luck would have it, I had a breakfast meeting this week with John Roese, chief technology officer of Nortel and one of the most astute people I know in the broadband business.

Whether because of a perceived fear of WiMAX or a sudden spurt in data revenues, the LTE announcements made earlier this year didn’t come as a surprise. In the U.S., two major carriers, Verizon and AT&T, are looking to roll out their LTE networks in the early part of the next decade.

Roese had correctly predicted that LTE would arrive much faster than people thought, and he seems to have a much better handle on the 4G timeline than others in the wireless industry. It seemed appropriate to ask him about the wireless backhaul business and the bandwidth demand that LTE will create.

Instead of giving me a pithy quote, Roese laid out the kind of compelling argument only an engineer can make. He pointed out that the wireless carriers are currently using around 3 T-1 or DSL-type connections to connect their 3G base stations. (In some cases they use microwave or passive optical network connections.) A 3G network base station typically has 10 Mbps of capacity.

In a 4G world, where three antennas will form an arc to provide coverage, each antenna will need a 100 Mbps, or about 300 Mbps total, Roese explained to me. The carriers would prefer more headroom, for if there are four carriers per base station, the bandwidth demand per base station could run closer to about 2 gigabits per second.

Clearly today’s pipes aren’t going to be enough. Optical/metro Ethernet might be one of the better options for the 4G bandwidth needs, according to Roese. There are point-to-point wireless backhaul solutions that could come in handy as well, but he said fiber is the real answer. Even at slower 3G speeds, today’s backhaul infrastructure isn’t ready to do the hard work. Level 3 is one bandwidth provider that could benefit from the LTE-driven demand in the U.S.; we’re told the company has fiber as close as 1,000 feet to most base stations in the country.

From an equipment standpoint, the wireless broadband buildout spells opportunity. Infonetics reports that spending on backhaul equipment will grow to $8.2 billion in 2010 from $4.5 billion in 2007. Juniper Networks wants a piece of that; it recently started offering the BX7000 family of products. (More on this @ Search Telecom)

Moto’s Slow Death By RAZR Cuts

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:54:19 -0700

Motorola has announced the spinout of its handset division, continuing a history of divesting itself from troubled business lines and isolating its potentially attractive networking and equipment business for a future buyer.

Details about the spinout are few and far between, but Greg Brown, Motorola’s CEO, plans to stay with the network and equipment division, which posted profits of $192 million in the set-top-box arena and profits of $451 million in the two-way radio and scanning divisions last quarter. A new CEO is being sought for the handset unit, which lost $388 million last quarter. The key question of who will get the Motorola brand is uncertain, but I think it should probably go to the handset business, if only because it’s the most consumer-facing one. (I will miss my Moto walkie-talkies, though.)

Brown believes the spinout will create “two industry-leading companies,” while the rest of the world recognizes this as an attempt to put a dog of a business unit out, in order to keep shareholders happy. The split comes after activist investor Carl Icahn spent months pressuring the Motorola board to sell off the handset division, which never rebounded after RAZR phones stopped being the next new thing. Motorola rode that wave all the way to the shore and, after trying to sell the division for the last few months, is now spinning it off into a new public company. I’ll pass on those shares, thanks.

A similar fate befell Freescale Semiconductor, formerly Motorola’s semiconductor products sector, back in 2004. As a spinout, the chip company went public in a tax-friendly deal for Motorola. Freescale got certain intellectual property, a new name and Motorola as a customer. But it also had to deal with a bloated management structure and find the attitude needed to fight it out in the tough chip industry as an independent player. Frankly, it was a mediocre business and managed to get bought out by a private equity firm a little more than two years after its IPO. The handset business will face the same challenges.

The networking and equipment business, however, might soon find itself a target for another buyer. The RFID business, which Motorola expanded after a $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies, is growing. Additionally, the set-top-box business has proven attractive to information technology companies eager to get into consumers’ living rooms.

There’s also continued M&A activity in the telecommunications gear business, which is still too big to support the smaller number of carriers in the world today. A deal with Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Tellabs or Ericsson might one day make sense. If WiMax takes off, the network division might find itself in a good position relative to other equipment vendors who have turned their back on the standard.

Given all this, I wonder who Brown will find to take on the handset business.

Feb. 28, 2008: Nortel, About.com & QTrax Again

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:47:35 -0800

Dell Thinks Small Biz is Big Biz for VoIP

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:42:38 -0800

Dell begins bundling Fonality’s open-source software with its enterprise servers today, its latest gambit to compete in the already-crowded VoIP market — this time targeting companies with 125 employees or fewer.

This is fertile ground: Analyst Alan Weckel of research firm Dell ‘Oro Group estimates annual PBX revenues, including those from VoIP phone systems, will exceed $7.5 billion by 2011. Much of this growth could come from small- to medium-sized businesses. Weckel told The Wall Street Journal in August that he thinks 35 million small businesses will adopt IP phone service before 2010 (about 11 million currently use it), a number that’s likely to ramp up if the economic situation worsens.

Granted, this is a market that has never fulfilled its promise. Few of the many hosted-PBX service providers are even making money. Yet Dell (DELL) still sees opportunity in hawking VoIP to businesses. Why? They buy more gear than cost-conscious housewives. If there is one thing Dell knows, it is that empires can be built on the incremental profits inside lots of gray boxes and the software that runs on them.

Dell is a relatively late entrant here. Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent, to name a few, are established players in the VoIP space, though their products also target larger customers. In the small business space, Digium and Microsoft, which released its Microsoft Office Communication Server in 2007, will be the chief competitors. (Microsoft has claimed a working relationship with Dell in the past.)

Late or not, Dell lives to put the squeeze on the margins of its peers. The Fonality VoIP Phone System will be priced at about $750 per employee for a five-employee system, or $9,999 for a system that will serve 25. This is far less than Cisco-class proprietary system, which can cost as much as $2,000 per employee. Being open source, Dell-Fonality boxes are simpler than most too, and capable of self-installation — an additional savings worth thousands of dollars.

“The big five phone systems-vendors are going to wake up today and see Dell as a competitor and it’s going to be a watershed event — the end of the phone system-oligolopy,” Fonality founder Chris Lyman said.

It certainly is a watershed event for four-year-old Fonality (as Lyman tells Found|READ), which has been selling its own branded VoIP boxes since 2003. Fonality now has 5,000 business customers (and 130 employees). It could sure use Dell’s sales channel to scale. Dell has between 6 million and 7 million small business customers, according to IDC.

Fonality will get a standard revenue share: hardware proceeds go to Dell, software revenues flow to Fonality (Dell won’t disclose the exact breakdown). Users will get their bill from Dell. Tech support will be handled by Fonality for at least the first year, Lyman says. Dell’s service is available for purchase today, via phone. Customers can order systems at Dell.com by February.

LDAP/MS-CHAP & freeradius-0.4 and current CVS

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:05:44 -0800

Verizon Picks LTE for 4G Wireless Broadband

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:37:59 -0800

Verizon Wireless, a division of Verizon, is picking LTE — Long-Term Evolution — as the 4G technology for wireless broadband, and will start trials sometime in 2008.

LTE allows download rates of 100 Mbps and upload speeds of 50 Mbps for every 20 MHz of spectrum. It can handle 200 connections per 5 MHz. However, it is said to be spectrally more efficient and can better handle IP connections. LTE networks are based on the Internet Protocols. The traditional wireless vendors — Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Nortel (NT), Motorola (MOT), Nokia-Siemens and Ericsson (ERICY) — are going to be hardware suppliers, while the usual handset makers will make devices for this trial. Vodafone (VOD), joint owner of Verizon Wireless, is also planning an LTE Trial for 2008.

That said, it will be a while before we see the actual 4G network rolled out. This technology evolution when complete will make Verizon’s (VZ) Open Access Development initiative more meaningful. The LTE evolution negates the GSM vs. CDMA debate, and it also promises global connectivity. In a recent chat, AT&T Mobility President & CEO Ralph de la Vega said that his company was going to migrate to LTE as the 4G solution. In such a scenario, you and I can then switch between the two services without worrying too much about handsets.

Microsoft dials up phone ambitions - CNET News.com

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 08:33:33 -0700

Company formally makes its push into "unified communications"--software to bring together e-mail, IM, voice mail and telephony.Video: Microsoft moves to business telephonyPhotos: Gates talks up 'unified communications'

Tying Asterisk with Nortel MCS5100

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:04:00 -0700

OLPC Has A Network Problem

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:15:40 -0700

I have been fairly skeptical of the One Laptop Per Child project, not because it’s not a worthy cause, but because it doesn’t factor in the harsh realities of the daily lives of those who Nicholas Negroponte & Co. plan to uplift.

Where food, water and shelter are largely unmet needs, it is my belief that a laptop is not a road to salvation. Looks like I might be wrong. Apparently kids love it, as per Brazilian Culture Minister Gilberto Gil’s speech at the Emerging Technologies (EmTech) Conference at MIT, where he talked about the magnificence of the laptop project and its deep impact on children.

Nevertheless, his country isn’t ready to order the devices just yet. Why? Because they don’t have the network infrastructure.

We can’t just distribute computers. We have to build a backbone. Just making the technology accessible is not enough. Technology leads to language, to spiritual dimensions. It’s the whole process that matters. It’s not just one item, computers are not enough.

Like putting the cart before the horse. In fact, the lack of networks is a problem that extends beyond Brazil; India and other emerging economies are trying to build network infrastructures as well.

The good news is that OLPC is going to prompt network makers to think creatively about it, and come up with ways to build networks very, very cheaply. John Roese, chief technology office of Nortel (NT), wrote on his blog about OLPC and the concept of hyperconnectivity.

While OLPC is not a Nortel product, it is a tool to stimulate the R&D teams to consider new communication models of hyper connectivity, new programming models and new collaboration methods. It also represents a new type of client, as well as new economic and networking models that are possibly a reflection of the future nature of broadband networking.

Well, let’s hope Roese is right. Leaving my skepticism aside for a moment, I wonder what the impact of a successful OLPC program might have on the network. Thoughts?

Microsoft’s (Beta!) VoIP Device Blitz

Mon, 14 May 2007 00:08:04 -0700

You can’t buy them yet, but if you are an enterprise IT exec who is kicking the tires on IP telephony offerings you might at least want to take a gander at the wide range of Microsoft-centric IP voice devices — phones, headsets, videocam monitors — being informally unveiled Monday at the Windows Hardware Engineering conference in Los Angeles.

All meant to work with the still-in-beta Office Communications Server software from Redmond, the VoIP device blitz from nine different vendors is Microsoft’s latest attempt to break into the corporate Voice over IP market, against established players like Avaya and Cisco.

While the devices — shown last week in pre-WinHEC press briefings in San Francisco — performed impressively in an all-Microsoft environment, many big questions remain, such as:

1) OCS still isn’t available, nor is pricing information;

2) Much of the functionality shown is already available from competitors; and

3) do you really want to trust your phone system to Microsoft software?

Despite our traditional skepticism of Microsoft’s commitment to communications, we should start out here by saying that the demo of phone systems cobbled together in a SF hotel basement last week all performed as planned, without any of the also traditional Microsoft demo glitches. VoIP phones rang crisp and clear, triggering on-screen synergy with Office Communicator, updating presence-based information for other Microsoft-based clients, etc., etc.

Impressive as it was for a Microsoft VoIP display, there wasn’t anything shown — customizable presence info, IM-to-voice-to-video call escalation — that isn’t already available from other IP players or even free offerings like Skype or Gizmo. So what’s the fuss?

For starters, the participation of tested device players — like Polycom, Plantronics, Samsung and LG/Nortel — shows that Microsoft has the pull to draw in trusted suppliers whose gear IT execs have likely already signed PO’s for. And by committing to a standards (SIP) based platform, Microsoft hopes to drive economies of scale to eventually sell itself as the low-priced alternative to Cisco’s Cadillac-priced offerings in the IP voice arena. (Again, no pricing yet from Microsoft. Trust them at your own peril.)

Certainly, toys like the USB Bluetooth headset (which Microsoft says will dual-home to VoIP and cellphones, a pledge that couldn’t be proven in the demo) from LG-Nortel will serve as momentary VoIP-candy, but there’s still a long road ahead of Microsoft in its attempts to A) convince enterprise IT that it’s serious about telephony and B) overcome products already in the market from playahs like Cisco and Avaya, not to mention the burgeoning open-source offerings in the Asterisk arena.

But while it’s easy to poke holes in Microsoft’s offerings — like, say, its five pre-configured “presence” states, which seem laughable next to the on-the-fly customizable “don’t bug me” field in Google’s Gtalk — it’s important to remember that people who buy Microsoft corporate software buy in the thousands, not by single downloads.

And with a host of interested device suppliers on its side, Microsoft might not be able to ignore its commitment to telephony any longer. Now all we need is pricing and availability to let the battle really begin.

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Nortel: Podcasts

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 19:14:08 -0800

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Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:12:24 -0700

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激動の世界ICT市場の覇者は誰か

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 22:42:24 -0700

In Brief: AirDefense announces wireless LAN analyzer

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 13:52:30 -0700

Also in Brief: Yahoo launches cell phone shopping in Japan; Samsung to invest $618 million in memory chip lines; Micromuse to acquire GuardedNet; Apache announces XMLBeans 2.0; Nortel appoints new chairman; W3C issues XKMS 2.0 as Recommendation

In Brief: Micromuse to acquire GuardedNet

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 13:52:30 -0700

Also in Brief: Apache announces XMLBeans 2.0; Nortel appoints new chairman; W3C issues XKMS 2.0 as Recommendation; StorageTek service expands data protection options; Nsite launches free process-automation service; Meditech, BridgeHead enhance backup an