Newbridge Networks was an

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

, Canada company founded by

Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

entrepreneur Sir Terry Matthews. It was founded in 1986 to create data and voice networking products after Matthews was forced out of his original company

Mitel Mitel Networks Corporation is a Canadian telecommunications company. The company previously produced TDM PBX systems and applications, but after a change in ownership in 2001, now focuses almost entirely on Voice-over-IP (VoIP) products. Mitel ...

. According to Matthews, he saw that data networking would grow far faster than voice networking, and he had wanted to take Mitel in much the same direction, but the 'risk-averse'

British Telecom BT Group plc (trade name, trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is th ...

-dominated Mitel board refused and effectively ousted him. The name Newbridge Networks comes from Sir Terry Matthews' home town of Newbridge in south

Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the Wales–England border, east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the ...

. Newbridge quickly became a major market player in this area using the voice switching and software engineering expertise that was prevalent in the Ottawa area. The company initially had innovative channelbank products, which allowed telcos with existing wiring to offer a wide variety of new services. Newbridge also offered (for the time) the industry's most innovative network management (46020 NMS) and ISDN TAP 3500, RS-232C 3600 Mainstreet PC 4601A and ACC "river" routers (Congo/Amazon/Tigris etc.), including distributed star-topology routing through both proprietary software over the unused facilities' data links in optical hardware and telco switches. Starting in 1992 the company became increasingly focused upon and well known for its family of ATM products such as the MainStreet 36150 and MainStreet Xpress 36170 (later renamed Alcatel 7470). Newbridge later absorbed some routing technology that had been abandoned by Tandem Computers, with the purchase of

Ungermann-Bass Ungermann-Bass, also known as UB and UB Networks, was a computer networking company in the 1980s to 1990s. Located in Santa Clara, California, UB was the first large networking company independent of any computer manufacturer. Along with competito ...

and entered the pure data networking market with a traditional routing and switching product. This was in addition to its internally developed ViViD product line, which was a network-wide distributed routing product (ridge or routing bridge—bridges with a centralized routing server). Newbridge had 30% ownership of affiliate West End Systems Corp., which was headquartered in Kanata, Ontario, with R&D facilities in Arnprior, Ontartio. Newbridge was purchased and absorbed by

Alcatel Alcatel may refer to: * Alcatel, a former French telecommunications equipment company, which became Alcatel-Lucent and is now part of Nokia * Alcatel Mobile, a brand of mobile phones, tablets and wearables, formerly a joint venture between Alcatel ...

in late February 2000 Alcatel buys Newbridge - Feb. 23, 2000
/ref> for over $7 billion in stock. With this transaction, Matthews became the single largest shareholder in Alcatel.

References

{{Authority control Canadian companies established in 1986 Defunct networking companies Telecommunications companies of Canada Telecommunications equipment vendors Companies based in Ottawa Wesley Clover Canadian companies disestablished in 2000 2000 disestablishments in Ontario