Stories about: Nortel Networks

Fedora Core, a popular flavor of Linux being developed by the open-source community, is hardly hefty by Tuesday's operating system standards. But to fit the tight specs for the US$100 laptop being designed by MIT's One-Lap-Per-Child (OLPC) group, Fedora will need to go on a crash diet, concedes its overseer, Red Hat.

The standard for the broadband wireless technology known as mobile WiMax has been approved. Mobile WiMax networks will allow customers to wirelessly access the Internet anywhere they may be in a city.

IBM unveiled its System z9 mainframe, the first in a new generation of machines focused on easing security and systems management, company executives said Tuesday.

Nortel Networks Chief Technology Officer Brian McFadden, who has worked at the Brampton, Ontario-based networking equipment provider for 25 years, spoke this week about the coming technologies in networking for 2005 -- and about Nortel's role in them. In his conversation with Computerworld senior writer Matt Hamblen, McFadden predicted that wireless technology will be a newsmaker and said innovative consumer products could quickly find their way into the corporate world.

An open source group has posted free Session Initiation Protocol-based PBX software that lets businesses create their own phone switches from standard Linux servers -- but drawing business customers to the technology could be an uphill effort.

The 3G Partnership Project - a consortium of 200 wireless vendors and operators - has begun a study to determine the feasibility of defining a standard that supports wireless downlink speeds as high as 100Mbps.

Hewlett-Packard on Thursday signaled its commitment to the Intel processor architecture and carrier-grade Linux for telecommunications infrastructure, announcing it will introduce a blade server based on those specifications as part of a new hardware, software and services strategy.

In February, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered "a focused examination and assessment of California state government." The US$10 million review, conducted by about 275 state employees and released in early August, calls for about a bizillion changes to the way that state's government is run.

3Com is readying a Linux-based appliance version of its VCX 7700 enterprise IP PBX in hopes that an open source version of the product will be easier to sell through its channel partners.

In theory, an open source IP telephony system will increase the demand for IP telephony, create better interoperability between IP phone systems and drive down the cost of IP telephony by putting price pressure on the traditional phone system vendors. An open source model for IP telephony might yield these results at some time in the distant future, but it will have no such effect in the short term, for a number of reasons.

Internet Protocol-based voice networks may be the wave of the future, but they will require a whole new approach to security, warned telecoms experts at the VON Europe voice-over IP (VoIP) conference in London on Tuesday.