Nortel Networks

From ArticleWorld

Nortel Networks Corporation is a telecommunications equipment manufacturing company based in Canada. The company has its headquarters in Ontario and has a total workforce of over 34,000 persons headed by the chief executive officer Mike Zafirovski. It earns revenue of almost 10 billion USD.

History of Nortel

It was in the year 1895 that a company called Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company Limited was incorporated when Bell Telephone Company of Canada decided to spin off its manufacturing arm to produce telephone devices to be sold to other companies. The company came up with the first wind-up gramophones meant for playing flat discs. The company merged with Imperial Cable to give rise to the Northern Electric which was jointly owned by Bell Canada and Western Electric of the United States. The 1920s saw the emergence of Northern Electric as a major distributor of appliances manufactured by Western Electric.

During the 1920s and till the 50s, a number of innovations like the talking movie sound system and the tube-based television sets were brought out. By 1969, work on digitizing telephone communications was initiated. With the development of digital technology in the 1970s, the company was renamed Northern Telecom Limited. With the arrival of the internet age in the 1990s, the company acquired Bay Networks and re-christened itself as Nortel Networks. Towards the end of 2004, the company began to be simply called as Nortel.

Nortel - Present and Future

Nortel today has over 34,000 people employed across the globe. This company is a leading force in the industry when it comes to delivering a wide range of telecommunications solutions. Some of the areas in which the company has good expertise include optical transmission, wireless, voice, multimedia and other related services.

A significant presence of the company can be seen in the European continent, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Several Asian countries too see network solutions being delivered from Nortel. In spite of recent losses, the company seems set to stage major leaps in the future following the signing of joint venture agreements that would benefit customers worldwide.