Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/13/olympics_infrastructure_nortel/
Olympics loses tech provider
No medal for Nortel
Posted in Networks, 13th July 2009 08:48 GMT
The London Olympics and its network infrastructure provider Nortel have agreed to split.
The London 2012 organising committee said the contract with Nortel had ended on good terms. The move could cost the Olympics as much as £10m, because as well as providing infrastructure, Nortel was also a "Tier One" sponsor of the event.
The firm has been replaced by Cisco, at the organisers' invitation, but only as a "Tier Two" sponsor. The organising committee blamed the move on the recent sale by Nortel of its wireless business - which Nokia Siemens Networks bought last month.
Organisers said they wanted to work with one company for all of the games' network infrastructure, and therefore the committee and Nortel "amicably decided to bring the current agreement to an end.".
The deeply-troubled, 100-year old, Canadian firm is struggling to survive - it was only just recovering from accounting scandals when the credit crunch hit telco infrastructure spending.
The company only just survived the dot-com crash - lost $19.6bn in one quarter in 2001. Last month it delisted its shares from the Toronto exchange.
The UK business went into administration in January. ®