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Nortel Networks Solutions Enable Innovation in Higher Education; Leading-Edge Solutions Deliver New Academic Collaboration Capabilities

Business Wire - October 19, 2004

DALLAS -- Nortel Networks (NYSE:NT) (TSX:NT) today announced new customer deployments that are improving the way higher education and research organizations use networking resources to communicate, conduct research, teach students and provide mobile collaborative multimedia technologies both on and off campus.

Leading education and research institutions are building state-of-the-art communications infrastructures through Nortel Networks solutions to attract top-notch students and faculty, as well as to develop the next generation Internet. These deployments make it possible for institutions to deliver new communication services at lower cost while improving network security, reliability and mobility.

New customer deployments include: CANARIE, Canada; Central Piedmont Community College, N.C., Coppin State University, Md.; Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Ind.; The University of Michigan; The University of Missouri-Columbia; and The University of Pennsylvania. These demonstrate continued global momentum for Nortel Networks with higher education institutions.

Nortel Networks also announced today deployment of a Wireless Mesh Network solution for the University of Arkansas and the award of a US$1 million grant to Nortel Networks Kidz Online and the NASA Center for Distance Learning.

"Nortel Networks is working closely with universities and research organizations around the world to improve education, ensuring teachers can share information and connect with students and researchers in a more meaningful way," said Dan Young, vice president, Global Industry Solutions, Nortel Networks. "Our solutions for education customers are designed to deliver information and services on-demand, anywhere, any time to support innovation in higher education while delivering a learning experience without boundaries."

Nortel Networks Higher Education solutions are designed to engage dispersed academics and students with real-time multimedia collaboration to improve the learning experience by eliminating boundaries caused by location and schedules. Now a student with a laptop in the chemistry lab can work on an experiment with a student who is in the library - instantly. The solutions are designed to yield a single, converged campus-wide network that delivers wired and wireless communications - voice, data, video and multimedia - seamlessly on-site or off-site.

To enable students, staff and faculty to have ubiquitous access to network resources even while roaming on campus, the University of Missouri-Columbia is upgrading its wireless local area network (LAN) infrastructure to a Nortel Networks solution.

"The wireless capabilities are a huge boon to our students and faculty. We evaluated competing approaches, but none provided the solution we need to ensure access to resources and applications," said Beth Chancellor, director, Telecommunications, University of Missouri-Columbia. "Now we have the confidence to put the resources our students and faculty need on the wireless network while simultaneously allowing us to move forward with enhanced security measures."

The University of Michigan has adopted an education-focused solution that carries voice and data communication on a single optical network that provides superior performance, capacity and ease of operations. The Nortel Networks solution supports some of the University's mission critical voice and data traffic, providing the highest availability network on campus for these applications. The University of Michigan selected Nortel Networks solutions because the network supports the resiliency the university demanded while providing unparalleled network economics.

To provide professors and staff with integrated communications capabilities, the Central Piedmont Community College of Charlotte, N.C. selected Nortel Networks multimedia communications solution to provide real-time collaboration capabilities for faculty and researchers. The school will extend these features to students in the near future with plans to incorporate the solution to provide seamless distance-learning capabilities soon thereafter. The ability to easily evolve communications services was a key consideration for Central Piedmont's selection of Nortel Networks IP (Internet Protocol) multimedia solution to meet the needs of its technically-focused student body.

Coppin State University, located in Baltimore, created an educational environment that freed faculty and students via mobility solutions from Nortel Networks. "It enables the faculty to better reorganize their technology-enhanced classrooms to better suit their teaching styles. It enables the creation of teaching and learning communities anywhere on campus," said Dr. Ahmed El-Haggan, chief information officer and vice president of technology, Coppin State University.

Coppin State University is also leveraging security solutions from Nortel Networks to prevent, eliminate, and mitigate the damaging effects of worms, viruses, and network intrusions. "Nortel Networks vision of total network security encompasses a full spectrum of networking solutions, and delivers security solutions with the performance and ease of deployment we require," El-Haggan said.

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, one of the nation's leading engineering, mathematics and science colleges, credits Nortel Networks for providing multimedia communications to meet the increasing demands of its student body and faculty. More importantly, delivering the voice, video, streaming content and wireless mobility was accomplished with an extremely resilient infrastructure that offers advanced security features to keep unauthorized users off the network while protecting critical information.

In addition, Nortel Networks is helping research organizations that are developing the next generation Internet.

The University of Pennsylvania relies on Nortel Networks for the foundation of the school's work researching and developing Internet 2. The University of Pennsylvania is one of the first universities to use its communications network in a distributed fashion to ensure business continuity in the event its primary networking facilities are rendered inoperable.

Also instrumental in research for next generation networking, including the development of Internet 2, CANARIE has deployed solutions from Nortel Networks. CANARIE, a non-profit Canadian organization that operates the CA*net education and research network infrastructure, is deploying a 10 Gigabit optical component to its CA* net4 infrastructure built on Nortel Networks optical solution. The platform links universities, research centers, government research laboratories, schools and other organizations engaged in similar research internationally.

More than 10,000 education customers worldwide have installed communications solutions from Nortel Networks, including the University of Connecticut School of Business; the University of Texas at Austin; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Seoul National University; Ohio State University; the University of Ulster; Saga University; George Mason University; Yunnan Art University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Bosphorus University of Turkey; University of Granada, Spain; Open University of Israel; Binzhou Medical College; and the Philadelphia Unified School System. Nortel Networks is uniquely able to provide IP multimedia solutions to customers of all sizes in all industry verticals and is the only company to have deployed more than 50 million enterprise telephony lines in addition to 50 million Ethernet ports.

As a global innovation leader, Nortel Networks enriches consumer and business communications worldwide by offering converged multimedia networks that eliminate the boundaries among voice, data and video. These networks use innovative packet, wireless, voice and optical technologies and are underpinned by high standards of security and reliability. For both carriers and enterprises, these networks help to drive increased profitability and productivity by reducing costs and enabling new business and consumer services opportunities. Nortel Networks does business in more than 150 countries. For more information, visit Nortel Networks on the Web at www.nortelnetworks.com.

Certain information included in this press release is forward-looking and is subject to important risks and uncertainties. The results or events predicted in these statements may differ materially from actual results or events.

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