Nortel Celebrates Six-Month Countdown to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games

TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - Aug. 12, 2009) - On time and on target - that's the status of the network infrastructure from Nortel(1) NRTLQ to power the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games(2). The network is up and running and already carrying live traffic for game qualifications, World Cup Games and general business information for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC).

"The eyes of the world are upon us. Imagine broadcasting and hosting three Superbowls a day for 17 days in 15 different locations. That's a tall order and the equivalent of the traffic that the network will carry during the Games - but with no margin for error. We are pleased with progress on the network deployment, as it is on or ahead of schedule and exceeding expectations on performance," said Dean Frohwerk, Vancouver 2010 Architect, Nortel.

The 2010 Winter Games are the first Olympics to converge all voice, video and data traffic over a single IP-based network, one which is operated by Bell Canada. Bell, the exclusive Telecommunications Partner to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, selected Nortel to be the Official Converged Network Equipment Supplier. This will also be the first Olympic and Paralympic Games to use voice over IP (VoIP) for all event locations.

"As we mark the six-month countdown to the Games, we feel a great sense of accomplishment and pride for delivering on our commitment to the Olympics," said Joel Hackney, president, Enterprise Solutions, Nortel. "We are honored to be able to work with VANOC and Bell to carry the hopes, dreams and accomplishments of the athletes to their fans around the world. More importantly, this gives us a chance to reflect on the spirit of the Games - the international goodwill and cooperation, the redeeming attributes of good sportsmanship and the opportunity for champions to make history."

The Olympic Games will begin on February 10, 2010. During the 17 days of Olympic Games events and the following 10 days of Paralympic Games events, the network must deliver the highest levels of security and reliability in voice, video, data and broadcast services across 15 geographically dispersed venues in Vancouver and Whistler, as well as numerous support venues. More than one million visitors are expected to attend and 10,000 media representatives will provide coverage to three billion television viewers in 160 countries.

Energy-efficiency is a key attribute of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games architecture, including elements of the network that are built on Nortel's recently-enhanced data portfolio. Third parties have shown that Nortel data networking products provide up to 20 times the performance and seven times the resiliency than its competitors' solutions, while consuming up to 40 percent less energy and costing up to 50 percent less to own and operate.(3)

More information regarding the VANOC network is available at www.nortel.com/2010

About Nortel
Nortel delivers 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. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.

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(1)Nortel, the Nortel logo and the Globemark are trademarks of Nortel Networks.

(2)This is a 3rd party link as described in our Web linking practices.

(3)The Tolly Group Report Number 208298, July 2008, reported the results of a power consumption evaluation of six Nortel converged data network products consisting of large and medium core and wiring closet Ethernet Routing Switches (ERS), enterprise branch office routers, and IP phones compared to similar Cisco products on the basis of power consumption and heat dissipation, and five-year operational cost. See also The Tolly Group Report Number 208275, January 2008, and Info-Tech Research Group Report (January 30, 2008).