Nortel Adds Enhancements to Industry-Leading Carrier VoIP Portfolio

New Software Gives Carriers More Capacity, Speeds Upgrade Times, Delivers Advanced SIP Applications to Subscribers

Nortel announced significant product enhancements to its carrier voice and multimedia product offerings that will allow service providers to increase network capacity, upgrade their networks more quickly and also improve the communication experience for residential and business subscribers. These new enhancements, which are expected to be available in the third quarter of 2009, include the latest software releases of the Nortel's Communication Server (CS) 2000 softswitch (Rel CVM13) and Nortel's Adaptive Application Server SIP software engine (Rel A2E 7.0 SP1).

New core features introduced in Nortel's CS 2000 IP Multimedia softswitch provide a 66 percent increase in core VoIP capacity while drastically improving software upgrade times by 70 percent over prior releases. Core enhancements to Nortel's Adaptive Application Engine SIP server provide up to a 280 percent increase in SIP lines capacity.

Nortel's new product enhancements include more than 100 new end user features. Highlights include:

- A new Personal Agent web-based portal that lets subscribers view and access their call logs, address book and use click-to-call features from any web browser in a more intuitive manner as well as enabling carriers to create custom widgets into their existing end-user web portals.

- An enhanced Personal Communicator PC client that offers a modern highly intuitive user interface, supports federated instant messaging to Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google and allows subscribers to manage multiple calls from a single window.

- Open Programmability Interfaces that allow subscribers to communication-enable web applications. For example, a subscriber could communication-enable their home or business security service by programming it to call their mobile phone and play a pre-recorded announcement (i.e., "your back door is open") if an intruder trips the security alarm.

- SIP Business Trunking enhancements to include support of all existing widely deployed PRI trunking capabilities via SIP as well as support of the existing draft version of Standards SIP Connect 1.1. All of these capabilities make it easier and more cost-effective for businesses to migrate their legacy PBX trunking services to SIP.

- New features on Nortel's Mobile Extension application include a "call grabber" feature that lets users switch their calls between their mobile and fixed phone while maintaining the user's presence status and without call interruption. A new "secretary" feature allows a secretary/administrative assistant to handle a manager's calls and see the manager's presence/availability via a PC client.