Nortel Enhances Ethernet Switching Portfolio for Unified Communications

Market Wire, March, 2007

Nortel(1) (TSX: NT)(NYSE: NT) today introduced a new family of Ethernet routing switches designed for enterprises migrating to VoIP and advanced unified communications applications, creating a network foundation that enterprises can trust with the convergence of their critical business communications.

Unveiled at VoiceCon Spring 2007, the new Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 2500 and ERS 4500 provide the foundation of a unified communications solution by enabling enterprise local area networks (LANs) to intelligently prioritize real-time business communications like voice, video, and multimedia services.

"With the rapid adoption of VoIP and unified communications, the underlying data network needs to provide always-on performance to these applications. Nortel is unique in being able to provide this capability with innovations such as SMLT," said Aziz Khadbai, general manager, Converged Data Networks, Nortel. "Nortel's new family of Ethernet routing switches further enhance our portfolio by providing key capabilities such as Power over Ethernet (PoE), improved resiliency, security, Quality of Service (QoS) and line- rate switching that enable the enterprise LAN to be truly optimized for unified communications."

"Nortel's latest Ethernet Routing Switch 2500 series offers PoE options and a range of enhancements from QoS to Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and security features," said David Sieborger senior network administrator, Rhodes University, South Africa. "The result of intensive testing on our part reveals a switch that provides the features needed in a modern converged network, with the solid performance and reliability we have come to expect from Nortel, at an affordable price."

The ERS 2500 Series is a cost-optimized, entry-level platform ideal for enterprise branches and small remote offices that need a feature-rich, Fast Ethernet solution. The ERS 4500 Series, with its combined support for both Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet switches, delivers the flexibility and resilient scalability needed by customers looking to deploy one or both products within a single stack. Each series comes with both PoE and non-PoE variants for maximum deployment flexibility of converged solutions. Also, the capability for auto-discovery of devices such as VoIP Handsets makes them an ideal choice for deployments into converged networks.

"With the release of the ERS 2500 and 4500 stackable switch families, Nortel has enhanced its portfolio with convergence focused Ethernet Switching products for the enterprise. With these new additions to the portfolio, Nortel continues to deliver converged LAN solutions to enterprises of all sizes," said Evelien Wiggers, research manager, EMEA Enterprise Networks from IDC.

These products build upon Nortel's PoE expertise, a technology that sends electrical power over a single data network cable where once it was necessary to have multiple power and data jacks. Nortel recently sold its three millionth PoE port to the Bank of Montreal (BMO), one of Canada's largest banks with total assets of $320 billion and more than 34,000 employees. BMO was looking for a resilient and secure solution to enable real-time networking applications like VoIP.

"Nortel ERS provided the secure functionality and performance required in a financial business," said Stevan Lewis, vice preside, Network and Systems, BMO. "With a proven track record, we knew we could depend on Nortel for deployment across our offices. The Nortel ERS 5520 switches provide us the capability to deploy converged networks with minimal downtime and no hit to user productivity. We were also able to streamline the network and help reduce costs by converging multiple networks into one as part of BMO overall network convergence strategy."

About Nortel

Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel's technologies are designed to help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries around the world. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com . For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news .

Certain statements in this press release may contain words such as "could", "expects", "may", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "targets", "envisions", "seeks" and other similar language and are considered forward-looking statements or information under applicable securities legislation. These statements are based on Nortel's current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about the operating environment, economies and markets in which Nortel operates. These statements are subject to important assumptions, risks and uncertainties, which are difficult to predict and the actual outcome may be materially different. Further, actual results or events could differ materially from those contemplated in forward-looking statements as a result of the following