Rogers Cable Selects Nortel Cable Telephony Solution for Digital Phone Service

Business Wire, Feb 23, 2005

TORONTO -- Nortel (NYSE:NT)(TSX:NT) today announced that Rogers Cable, Canada's largest cable television company, has selected Nortel as its primary softswitch vendor to support delivery of digital phone service and other new voice and data services across its service areas. Rogers plans to begin launching Digital Phone service in mid-2005.

Rogers passes 3.3 million homes in Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and has 69 percent basic cable penetration of its homes passed.

"Rogers shares Nortel's vision of enhancing the human experience through communications," said Dan Mondor, general manager, Global Cable Solutions, Nortel. "We have committed the resources and focused investments in this space to enable cable operators like Rogers to bring to market innovative new services that can enhance the human experience through communications."

"The majority of cable operators around the globe who have chosen to deploy cable telephony have selected Nortel cable voice over IP solutions," Mondor said. "We are honored that many of the world's leading cable companies recognize the strength of Nortel's solutions."

Rogers Digital Phone service will leverage the company's advanced DOCSIS broadband cable network combined with Nortel's Communication Server (CS) 2000 - Compact, the industry's only softswitch that is PacketCable qualified in both North America (CableLabs) and Europe (Euro-Cable Certification Board). Nortel will also provide Rogers with Nuera's ORCA BTX-4K, a high-density media gateway providing PacketCable compliant trunking access to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

As part of this deployment, Rogers will use its reliable, carrier-grade optical transport network based on Nortel Optical Metro 5200s and Optical Metro 3500s for transport of voice traffic.

Nortel ranked #1 in the global markets for both service provider softswitches and gateway ports for the third quarter of 2004, according to Synergy Research Group, In-Stat/MDR and the Dell'Oro Group. Nortel, which has a proven voice and multimedia portfolio, is providing voice over IP solutions to several leading cable operators, including Cox Communications, Charter Communications, VTR (Chile), TeleCable (Spain), Telenet (Belgium), and ish and Kabel BW (Germany).

Nortel's solutions are designed to help cable operators drive new revenue opportunities and reduce operating costs. These comprehensive, integrated cable solutions span video and video on-demand transport, voice and multimedia communications, high-speed data services, managed network services for business customers, and next generation access.

About Nortel

Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that enhance the human experience, ignite and power global commerce, and secure and protect the world's most critical information. Serving both service provider and enterprise customers, Nortel delivers innovative technology solutions encompassing end-to-end broadband, Voice over IP, multimedia services and applications, and wireless broadband designed to help people solve the world's greatest challenges. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.> Certain information included in this press release is forward-looking and is subject to important risks and uncertainties. The results or events predicted in these statements may differ materially from actual results or events.

Factors which could cause results or events to differ from current expectations include, among other things: the outcome of regulatory and criminal investigations and civil litigation actions related to Nortel's restatements and the impact any resulting legal judgments, settlements, penalties and expenses could have on Nortel's results of operations, financial condition and liquidity; the findings of Nortel's independent review and implementation of recommended remedial measures; the outcome of the independent review with respect to revenues for specific identified transactions, which review will have a particular emphasis on the underlying conduct that led to the initial recognition of these revenues; the restatement or revisions of Nortel's previously announced or filed financial results and resulting negative publicity; the existence of material weaknesses in Nortel's internal controls over financial reporting; the impact of Nortel's and NNL's failure to timely file their financial statements and related periodic reports, including breach of its support facility and public debt obligations and Nortel's inability to access its shelf registration statement filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"); ongoing SEC reviews, which may result in changes to our public filings; the potential delisting or suspension of Nortel's and NNL's publicly traded securities; the impact of management changes, including the termination for cause of Nortel's former CEO, CFO and Controller in April 2004; the sufficiency of Nortel's restructuring activities, including the work plan announced on August 19, 2004 as updated on September 30, 2004, including the potential for higher actual costs to be incurred in connection with restructuring actions compared to the estimated costs of such actions;