Nortel Networks, Inc. (NNI) was the principal U.S. operating and research subsidiary of Nortel Networks Corporation (NNC), the Canadian telecom equipment maker commonly called "Nortel." NNC was headquartered in Mississauga, Ontario; NNI's U.S. operations included offices in Nashville, Tennessee. The corporate lineage traces to Northern Electric (1895), with Northern Electric Company, Limited incorporated in 1914, renamed Northern Telecom in 1976 and Nortel Networks in 1998–99. Nortel was publicly traded (NYSE/TSX: NT). At its peak it reported roughly 70,000 employees and about US$22 billion in 1999 sales (ReferenceForBusiness company profile). NNC, NNI and affiliates filed for Chapter 11 protection on January 14, 2009 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (Case No. 09-10138); equity interests were cancelled and the group wound down.
Products/operations: Nortel supplied end-to-end networking hardware, software and services to service providers and enterprises — DMS digital central-office switches, CDMA and GSM wireless infrastructure, optical networking and carrier Ethernet equipment, enterprise voice/data systems (sold to Avaya), LTE access assets and associated support services. R&D was performed across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., France and Ireland. The company is no longer an operating business.
Litigation posture: One tracked case, as a defendant, and none as plaintiff — the profile of an operating company being sued, not a patent assertion entity. The single matter sits in the plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas (Tyler Division).
Notable case/context: Fenner Investments, Ltd. v. Juniper Networks, Inc. et al., filed January 6, 2005 (E.D. Tex., No. 2:05-cv-00005), named Nortel alongside Juniper, UTStarcom, Nokia, Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson and Alcatel in a patent-holding plaintiff's infringement suit; claims against Nortel were stipulated dismissed August 23, 2006. After bankruptcy, Nortel's roughly 6,000-patent portfolio sold in July 2011 for US$4.5 billion to the Rockstar Bidco consortium (Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson, Sony, EMC); those patents were later asserted by Rockstar and purchased by RPX in December 2014 for US$900 million.