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Newbridge Networks Corporation was founded by Welsh-
Canadian Canadians () 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 their being ''C ...
entrepreneur Sir Terry Matthews in
Ottawa Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It is located in the southern Ontario, southern portion of the province of Ontario, at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the cor ...
. It was founded in 1986 to create data and voice networking products after Matthews was forced out of his original company 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-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 ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...
. 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 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 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, Ontario. Newbridge was purchased and absorbed by 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 Defunct computer companies of Canada Defunct computer hardware companies