In an exciting announcement todayhttp://www2.nortel.com/go/news_detail.jsp?cat_id=-8055&oid=100257409&locale=en-U S, Nortel has extended a LIFETIME WARRANTY to all 2500, 4500 and 5000 series Ethernet Routing Switches. The new lifetime warranty is the best in the industry including:

• Lifetime next business day replacement of failed Hardware. Rapid replacement in the event of malfunction minimizes downtime and service interruption for your mission critical operations.

• Lifetime Level 1 Software support. Up to Level 3 for the first 90 days after purchase, ensuring seamless integration and business continuity.

I wanted to put in a quick post to let everyone who follows this blog know that the Nortel Technical Journalfor for thefirst half 2009 has been released and is on-line. That is right, it is ON-LINE only...with the Nortel focus to being a green supplier and a investing in protecting the environment we made the decision to transform the NTJ into an on-line magazine that we will update every 6 months or so. This issue has articles about the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Network, Innovation both inside the company and with the custoemr, and critical wireless technology.

Please chech out the 1st Half 2009 Nortel Technical Journal HERE

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was the control plane. This post is focused to the Sensory Interfaces that can be used by people when communicating. Sensory interfaces are the mechanisms that we can use for communicating. Essentially, as human beings, we have 5 sensory inputs mechanisms; hearing, seeing, touch, smell, and taste. While smell and taste may have some value in certain social forms of communications I will argue they are of minimal value in business oriented communications and the need to replicate them over distance is not justifiable to the cost. Therefore, we have essentially 3 primary forms for business; audio, visual and physical.

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was the transport. In this post the topic is the control plane level. The control plane is the dimension responsible for managing the establishment of connections between communicating entities. It started as call control in the PBX arena where it maintained the call state of devices and instructed the TDM switching plane to connect two devices (or a device and a trunk) together.

In the previous postI introduced the concept of a layer (or partitioned model)of the functions of communications. in this and the next few posts I intended to discuss the different areas in more detail. The model is shown below, in this post I will focus on the transport level. In each subsequent post I will take a single level and discuss the transformations in that area that are coming in the future.

The transport dimension has obviously been the place where the large transformation has occurred over the last 5 years as the transport migrated from traditional TDM infrastructure to an IP based infrastructure. This transformation, while having significant potential cost impact, has had little if any real impact on the function of communications.

Finally the wireless vendors are enabling WiFi on their device. And it is not driven by voice minutes, it is driven by data. At&T is encouraging their iPhone users to use WiFi as a way to move a significant amount of traffic off the 3G network onto the users WiFi network. With iPhone users consuming up to 50 times as much data as other smart devices, this movement is critical. In fact, over 18 months ago Nortel commented that with only 6% of the users in a 3G cell using video, the cell capacity would be saturated. I already use the WiFi capability of my Blackberry for data whenever there is an available network. In my home I use the WiFi all the time for this purpose.

What makes this interesting is that it is confirmation of something that I argued over the last few years; that voice services would not be the primary driver of dual mode devices. This was based on the belief that voice would be an increasingly small part of the traffic as the top bandwidth of the network increased. As the actual cost for voice transmission decreased, the ability off the wireless carrier to actually capture large revenue differences based on minutes would decrease. If minutes actually became "free" and were therefore not precious, there would be little reason to move to the WiFi network for voice (except where there were coverage issues). Both the advent of moving the data off and the capacity that clears seems to be increasing this path.

I had an opportunity to present a view of the transformation in networking that are coming to the technical conference at National Semiconductor this week.   It was an interesting opportunity and led to a number of discussions.

I saw this article titled "Dangerous Fakes" in Business Week that I thought was interesting as it reminded me of some discussions I have had with IT teams about the value of multi-vendor solutions for dependability.  In the article there are many references to fake components, but the reference to fake Cisco routers is particularly challenging.

I am writing this post in London where we just completed a formal kick-off of the Nortel participation and sponsorship of the 2012 London Olympics.  The event was an exciting opportunity, in the morning focused on 120+ attendees, including key members of the LOCOG (London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games), a number of Nortel Customers, Partners and Industry Analysts.  In the afternoon 150 UK based Nortel employees attended sessions designed to demonstrate the Olympics and the Paralympics in action. An exciting part of both events was meeting actual members of the British Olympic team, including Peter Reed, gold medal winner in the coxless four rowing, who was there with his gold medal from Beijing.  As he led groups of employees through a rowing simulation, he discussed the drive necessary to catch up from a length back in the last 500 meters of the finals to overtake the Australian team for the gold.   His focus and dedication are truly inspiring, as is the fact he and the rest of the team began training yesterday for the 2012 games.

I find the longevity of technology to be an interesting topic.  While there are some technologies and implementations that seem to have longevity, it appears that increasingly, new technologies have significantly reduced longevity.  This seems to dramatically increase the cost of ownership over time.

Today the London 2012 Olympic Games announced Nortel as the Official Infrastructure Supplier for the summer games. This is an exciting event in many ways.

Well, I think Kermit (the Frog) was wrong.......it is easy bein' green.....for Nortel customers anyway. And especially when bein' green comes with great financial dividends as well.

I flew out Sunday for the Global Connect event in Dallas. This is the huge Nortel User event that is the opportunity to interact with our customers, partners and a fairly large group of analysts and press.

I found the recent study IDC IDC did with Nortel sponsorship of the emergence of the Hyperconnected worked to be very interesting, it confirmed what many of us know to be true; we are increasingly living in a Hyperconnected world and are ourselves connected everywhere, all the time.

Last week at InterOp, Nortel created a sensation with it's commitment to Green Technology and demonstrations that Nortel data equipment is dramatically more energy (and carbon footprint) efficient than our major competitor. The Tolly Group has analyzed Nortel data products versus the major competitor and has independently verified the veracity of the Nortel claims (Tolly report).