News flash – you don’t need to live in large, highly populated cities for top-quality multimedia service.

 

Although it probably does improve your restaurant selection and dating options.

 

Carrier VoIP products from Nortel (News - Alert) are designed “specifically for regional service providers, customers in some of the most remote places in North America,” according to officials with the Toronto-based telecom equipment maker.

 

It’s probably no surprise, since Nortel’s home is Canada, home to some of the remotest human outposts on the continent.

 

Nortel officials have announced that Release 4 of the CS 1500 is an upgrade to “more powerful applications” for customers in regional North America, including an integrated Web portal which allows users to click-to-call straight from their address book, and voicemail access from the Web.

 

Release 4 of the CS 1500 also allows VoIP service over cable modems, Nortel officials say. Here’s how company officials diagram the CS 1500’s architecture:

 

 

Today, more than 120 regional service providers throughout North America are using Nortel’s Communication Server 1500. Goldfield Telephone in Iowa and Hood Canal Communications in Washington State are “just a few of the regional service providers,” according to Nortel officials, using Nortel’s technology to “help shrink the digital divide.”

 

The CS 1500 is an IP multimedia softswitch used to bring such VoIP applications to regional providers as the Automated Attendant, which “ensures customer calls are always answered,” or Intelligent Call Transfer, which transfers calls from home to mobile to office.

 

Also this past week The Romanian Educational Network said it had chosen a Nortel next-generation 10G optical product to provide scientists and researchers with enough bandwidth and network capacity needed for science and research projects, as well as education and training.

 

Felix Telecom, Nortel’s integration partner in Romania, will deliver the project to RoEduNet including design, installing, deploying and providing ongoing servicing for the network.

 

In September TMCnet’s Susan Campbell reported that Nortel was “capitalizing” on companies’ searching for ways to reduce energy consumption, by Nortel’s “aiming to deliver products that are not only energy efficient, but also bring new levels of performance as they migrate toward unified communications in an effort to improve business operations and lower expenses.”