Liabilities

If the purchaser has to take on liabilities then it'll sell for $1

Nortel GSM tech for railway operators???

This does concern me slightly that no-one is interested. I work for Network Rail and most of our current and planned implementation of GSM-R uses Nortel kit for the over-the-air transmission part.

I wonder what would happen if no-one takes Nortels business. I know that the IP will probably go dirt cheap to a rival, but they would likely continue with their own line of products, incompatible with ours, and causing us many headaches.

I recall working for a major UK GSM operator that had some bits of Ericsson equipment nailed on to the end of a Nokia installed network, and the specific alarm codes generated by the Ericsson stuff, became generic alarms on the Nokia equipment and the Nokia NetAct software used for network control, rendering them useless. This made any kind of remote faulting on them nigh on impossible and always resulted in an expensive tech support call out.

Maybe as our backbone network is provided by Alcatel-Lucent they can come up with a solution, but probably at our much maligned "special railway price" of RRP plus a few hundred per cent.

Either way, I can foresee a delay in the nationwide implementation of GSM-R which must be on line by 2012, or else there will be no trains running, or no olympics with radio mics as Ofcom have commandeered our National Radio Network and Cab Secure Radio frequencies.

Paris, cos I will hoepfully be implementing this tech at SNCF by 2012.