PHILADELPHIA -- Nortel (NYSE:NT) (TSX:NT) has completed new customer deployments that are providing advanced teaching tools like secure distance learning, wireless access, Web-based curricula and real-time online collaboration to students, faculty and staff at four North American educational institutions, the company announced at the 26th Annual National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Philadelphia.

Nortel solutions are now a part of improving the way school systems conduct research, teach students and collaborate at the State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam, Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) Catholic Schools, Saskatoon Public Schools, and the Calgary (Alberta) Board of Education.

"It is vital for education to have communications that are reliable, fast and secure without exception," said Dan Young, vice president, Global Industry Solutions, Nortel. "We are committed to helping customers overcome the challenges they might face when implementing innovative new ways to enhance research and education."

Nortel solutions for education are designed to enable IP (Internet Protocol) Multimedia capabilities like IP audio and video conferencing, Web-based document sharing, and secure instant messaging to engage students and improve the learning experience.

The SUNY Potsdam campus is one of 13 Colleges of Arts and Sciences that make up the world's largest multi-campus university. With more than 4,000 students on campus, student file sharing programs were creating problems for academic and administrative users, so SUNY Potsdam needed to segregate the dorm traffic from the main campus.

The University was also looking to upgrade the academic and administrative buildings with 10/100/Gigabits to the desktop and a multi-Gigabit backbone, including a major cable plant upgrade to the majority of the campus. SUNY Potsdam chose a Nortel solution including wireless local area networking (LAN), Ethernet Routing Switch 8600, and Ethernet Routing Switch 5510.

"Nortel's solution provided the ease of management, security and resiliency we were lacking in previous solutions," said Matthew Keller, enterprise systems analyst, SUNY Potsdam. "We were looking for improved mobility in academic environments, such as classrooms and labs, as well as more reliable, stable and fault-tolerant network service, including multi-path redundancy for disaster recovery -- all without drastically increasing the management complexity of the network. These capabilities allow us to position ourselves for differentiation as we build out future phases of our network."

Nortel Networks Ltd.