This post was written by a fellow telecom enthusiast who prefers to remain anonymous.
What impact does Nortel Enterprise have on the lives, safety and security of Canadian citizens ? How about the world’s citizens ?
Answer: Limited, with the exception of 911 Call Centres and telephony systems for various Police agencies such as the RCMP and a substantial market share in Canadian / worldwide Hospitals.
With this, it will become important that the various Government bodies that manage these services would want clear direction on support commitments on these systems from the eventual purchaser of Nortel Enterprise. Research & Development of these systems is primarily located in Ottawa and Belleville, so there really should be some motivation to secure parts of this business for the best interests of Canadians and citizens around the world given its influence on our day to day lives and expectations of service availability.
This topic could get far more complex when the Carrier Voice and Applications Services (CVAS) business of Nortel is sold. This business holds huge market share for home phone services delivered by the various Carriers across Canada. If your home phone service is provided by Bell, Telus, MTS, SaskTel or Aliant, then chances are your home phone line is provisioned by Nortel equipment known as DMS or CS2000. Bell and Telus have approximately 11 Million Network Access Subscribers (Wireline) across Canada according to their recent financial reports. Sustaining 911 Services will become very critical here so a long term product support plan should be of top priority and interest to all levels of Government and Carriers across Canada.
On Monday September 7th, the City of Calgary experienced a 911 system outage that resulted in 37 lost calls. It isn’t known yet the cause of the problem but this incident shows that long term support of mission critical systems needs to be a top priority.
Worldwide the numbers are more staggering. There are 115 Million wireline and wireless ports delivered to 350 carrier customers, making Nortel the number 1 vendor in this space.
As Nortel prepares to complete the auction for their Enterprise Business on September 11th in New York City, we need to be aware of the potential purchasers’ Product Support plans for Nortel products, services and solutions. With over 75 Million ports of Voice infrastructure and 75 Million ports of Data Infrastructure deployed using Nortel products, long term support and product plans will have substantial influence and perhaps impact how we use communications services around the globe.
More: Jeff’s thoughts: I have read and followed many articles and posts over the last few months and am surprised at how little attention has been paid to the 911 and CVAS issue. The Canadian Government has been concerned about Ericsson’s acquisition of Nortel’s CDMA business and keeping jobs in Canada. Meanwhile, we have this ticking time bomb hanging over the “911” emergency support service infrastructure and little has been mentioned.
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