TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwire) -- 11/04/09 -- Higher education institutions in Maryland are relying on innovative and cost-effective solutions from Nortel(1) (OTCBB: NRTLQ) to foster student success. These solutions support the increasingly complex, everyday demands placed on the school's communications systems as they strive to educate and train the 21st century workforce, while ensuring academic sustainability in the event of an emergency.

Prince George's Community College(2) (PGCC), a two-year post-secondary school with approximately 40,000 students, is using mobility and data technology from Nortel. With Nortel's mobility solution, students and faculty gain freedom to communicate outside of the traditional classroom walls. At the same time, Nortel's high-performance, resilient and energy-efficient network supports 5,000 data ports and all of the college's communications needs including building security, video surveillance, electronic door entry and, energy management.

"We worked with our local supplier Presidio(2) to choose a Nortel solution because it was the most-cost effective option for meeting our current needs while providing a foundation to roll out even more advanced learning technologies such as lecture capture, streaming video, video on demand, video-based distance learning and closed caption Web video," said Dr. Joseph Rossmeier, vice president, Technology Services, PGCC.

Construction is also underway on a new Center for Health Studies. This state-of-the art facility will house the PGCC data center and emergency command hub that will provide ongoing access to the college's Web site, employee email system, and active directory even during an emergency scenario.

Situated just an hour North of PGCC is another Nortel customer, University of Baltimore(2) (UB), located in a city that ranks seventh in a study of large U.S. cities that are the best places to attend college. Like PGCC, UB tapped Nortel channel partner Presidio to deploy their advanced communications network. They implemented an IP-based Nortel call server and integrated it with contact center, to improve call agent responsiveness. The result has been more effective routing of calls and greater satisfaction among users, which range from students and prospects to faculty, parents, even suppliers. Future integration of solutions such as Interactive Voice Response and Contact Recording and Quality Monitoring is expected to further enhance these results.

UB is also deploying a Nortel unified communications solution, enabling its staff to leverage presence and other collaboration tools so that they can remain productive if they have to work away from campus for any reason such as in the case of a pandemic. UB similarly plans to leverage Nortel's Notification Suite to automatically alert students, faculty and staff via email, SMS, or voice if a critical event occurs.

"Responsiveness to students is the primary focus at UB and Nortel helps us achieve that," said Judith Wood, chief information officer, UB. "Nortel's solution empowers our faculty and staff to be as productive as possible while driving down total cost of ownership."

"Nortel is helping higher education customers solve their biggest challenge - preparing students for the 21st century workforce during very trying economic times. With Nortel's solutions, colleges and universities can enable students to learn from any place at any time while realizing valuable cost savings," said Net Payne, vice president, Global Services and Solutions Marketing, Nortel.

More than 10,000 education customers worldwide have installed communications solutions from Nortel. Nortel higher education customers include Coppin State University, University of Virginia , Georgia Perimeter College, Indiana University, China University of Petroleum, RMIT University of Australia , Accrington & Rossendale College in the United Kingdom, and many more.

Visit the Nortel Booth #1142 at the Educause Annual Conference(2) or get more information at www.nortel.com/education.

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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