Nortel Buzzboard

This week has been a bit slow for Nortel news — as you have likely noticed with my posts on the exaflood and twitter. Luckily for me and you, next week will be much different.

Next week, hundreds of Nortel customers from around the world will descend on the wonderful city of Grapevine, Texas, for Global Connect 2008. The event is happening at the Gaylord Texan Hotel, which is about 5 minutes from the Nortel facility I work at (otherwise called my house).

Global Connect is the annual conference for Nortel enterprise customers hosted by INNUA (the International Nortel Networks Users Association). The event provides the obvious educational …

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Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski was in Mexico earlier this week as part of the inauguration of Nortel’s Center of Excellence (CoE) in Mexico City. The event celebrated the expansion of the facility (literally building on a new wing), which includes a new engineering laboratory, a new customer demonstration center, and the space required to provide expanded technical support and new product introduction for the region.

“The Mexico CoE is proving that we live in a globally integrated world. From Mexico, the CoE delivers to Nortel a desirable geographic location, a talented and motivated workforce, a government that we can partner and work together with, as well as a strong infrastructure,” said Mike …

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Image from Broadcast EngineeringExaflood.

It is derived from the word “exabyte” - which is eqaul to one quintillion bytes. Numerically, that would be: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

I came across “exaflood” today while reading this article on Network World. The term is new to me, and probably new to a lot of readers since a quick Google search only found 28,500 instances of it (which is next to nothing for Google search). The word was coined by Bret Swanson in this WSJ opinion piece in January 2007.

Exaflood describes the pending deluge of traffic that many predict will overwhelm today’s Internet infrastructure. Peer-to-peer networking and the …

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Building to scale — admittedly it’s not really that exciting of a topic.

It doesn’t bring out the debate and controversy that, say, energy efficiency comparisons do. But “building to scale” turns out to be really important, and not always that easy to do.

Twitter’s recent downtime shows the difficult goal of network scalability and reliability.Twitter - the current hip and trendy messaging application - is figuring this out firsthand. This week Twitter has had recurring issues with downtime and application reliability, which in part looks to be caused by an overloaded system that can’t scale to meet user demand.

It is becoming an all-to-common problem in today’s …

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The $100 laptop targeted at the underprivileged children in developing nations is getting quite a makeover. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) - the organization founded by Nicholas Negroponte - unveiled plans for the second generation of it’s XO laptop last week.

While the current generation XO is a great device on its own, the XO-2 brings to it some incredible advancements.

The new model, which is estimated to be available in 2010, ditches the green keyboard in favor of a touchscreen - two actually, one touchscreen for each side of the laptop. This dual touchscreen design should give the XO-2 more flexibility (including the ability to be held vertically …

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With 1,600 locations, a variety of old PBX systems and the typical underfunded government budget, the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) is not your average VoIP network deployment.

After signing a 10-year contract valued at up to US$300 million last year with Nortel Government Solutions, the SSA is now beginning a massive evolution of their voice network to VoIP. The new VoIP network will eventually support 55,000 field office agents, with 205 of the SSA’s nearly 1,600 field offices expected to be deployed in the first year and another 500 per year after that.

Larry Stevens of FedTech Magazine has this great article that details the progress, benefits and challenges that the SSA …

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The elusive, mysterious Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator. Where is this thing?

It’s almost like the “Economic Stimulus” checks in the U.S. that the IRS is supposed to be sending — we’ve all heard a lot about them and it sounds great, but has anyone actually seen one? And so it is with this Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator (or the NEEC as us Nortelians like to call it). Sounds great, but let’s see it already.

The NEEC first peeked its head into public view in March at VoiceCon, where it was briefly mentioned in this release. It was also on the Nortel booth, and No Jitter had this post after seeing it first-hand. The NEEC then had a starring …

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For several years the cable companies in the U.S. have been effectively taking customers from the traditional telcos in the residential voice market. An area they have not addressed as aggressively, though, has been the business market. That may be changing.

This week Nortel announced that Cox Communications, the nation’s 3rd largest cable operator, had signed a multi-year agreement with Nortel to become the first cable operator to use Nortel’s new Small Business Sales Center. The Center is dedicated to helping cable operators with the sales, products, installation and support of solutions targeted to the more than seven million small businesses in the U.S. that have fewer than 20 employees. …

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Click here to call me at home.

No, that doesn’t work yet, but this week Nortel unveiled a new solution called the IP Powered Home that makes it possible.  Targeted at service providers, IP Powered Home is essentially a bundle of consumer-based applications that merge phone, Internet, and TV services in the home.

The solution uses residential VoIP as a base, then adds on optional services that customers can subscribe to from their service provider (much like today’s residential voice service model).

The core solution provides VoIP lines for each member of the family, a single number for both home and mobile phones, and video calling features.  Customers can set up call routing preferences based on …

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Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas

Last week while Nortel CTO John Roese and IDC senior vice president Vito Mabrucco were having a media event in Toronto to discuss the details of the IDC Hyperconnectivity study, Nortel was also hosting a group of reporters to it’s campus in Richardson, TX. This group of reporters was from CALA (Caribbean and Latin America), and the Nortel team had a full two-day agenda scheduled for them.

In addition to a telepresence session with John and Vito, the reporters were also treated to a visit to Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas to see the UC deployment …

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