Nortel Meridian is a private branch exchange telephone switching system. It provides advanced voice features, data connectivity, LAN communications, computer telephony integration (CTI), and information services for communication applications ranging from 60 to 80,000 lines. [1]
Exploratory development on digital technology, common for the SL-1 (PBX) and the DMS (public switch) product lines, began in 1969 at Northern Telecom, while R&D activities related to the SL-1 started in 1971. SL stands for Stored Logic. [2]
The original products were developed in a Bell-Northern Research developed proprietary toolset and language, similar to Pascal called Protel, and ran without a specific operating system. In the 1990s it was evolved onto VxWorks, a commercial real time embedded operating system, at which time the model numbers were evolved to add the letter C to the end of the option numbers.
It was introduced by Northern Telecom in December 1974 at the USITA convention in San Francisco, with an original capacity from 100 to 7,600 lines, and became the first fully digital PBX announced on the global market aimed at the smaller PBX market. In the early 1970s, most PBXs were either electromechanical (e.g. cross-bar) or based on a hybrid technology (e.g. switching matrix made from a two-dimensional array of contacts but control performed by an electronic logic). For this reason, the SL-1 enjoyed a great success on the enterprise market both in North-America and globally. [2] [3] [4]
Its success went on to power the company into a leadership position in the telephony world, and led to expanded designs "up and down" to provide products at all sizes, including the DMS series high-end machines, and the Meridian Norstar for smaller installations up to 200 users. The SL-1 was gradually enhanced (peripheral hardware, packaging, etc.) and renamed Meridian-1 in the late 1980s. The Meridian-1 has evolved to support IP telephony and other next generation IP services. [2]
The Meridian has 43 million installed users worldwide, making it the most widely used PBX. [5]
The Meridian was one of the few PBXs still available from a major communications supplier that can be configured as non-VOIP PBX and could be upgraded to a hybrid system with VoIP added. [6]
The Meridian 1 range currently consists of several models:
Additionally, other products have been sold using the Meridian brand:
Resellers, and accessory manufacturers frequently but erroneously use the phrase "Meridian Option" to refer to the Meridian 1 range, to distinguish it from the smaller and larger Norstar and SL-100
A digital line card is an intelligent peripheral equipment (IPE) device which can be installed in the IPE module. It provides 16 voice and 16 data communication links between a Meridian 1 switch and modular digital telephones.
The digital line card supports voice only or simultaneous voice and data service over a single twisted pair of standard telephone wiring. When a Meridian digital telephone is equipped with the data option, an asynchronous ASCII terminal, or a PC acting as an asynchronous ASCII terminal, can be connected to the system through the digital telephone.
Digital line cards are housed in the Intelligent Peripheral Equipment (IPE) Modules. Up to 16 cards are supported.
The digital line card circuitry is mounted on a 31.75 cm by 25.40 cm (12.5 in by 10 in) double-sided printed circuit board. The card connects to the backplane through a 160-pin edge connector. The faceplate of the digital line card is equipped with a red LED that lights when the card is disabled.
When the card is installed, the LED remains lit for two to five seconds as a self-test runs. If the self-test completes successfully, the LED flashes three times and remains lit until the card is configured and enabled in software, then the LED goes out. If the LED continually flashes or remains weakly lit, there is a fault detected in the card.
The digital line card is equipped with 16 identical digital line interfaces. Each interface provides a multiplexed voice, data, and signaling path to and from a digital terminal (telephone) over a 2-wire full duplex 512kHz time-division multiplexing digital link. Each digital telephone and associated data terminal is assigned a separate Terminal Number (TN) in the system database, giving a total of 32 addressable units per card.
The Digital Private Network Signalling System (DPNSS) is a network protocol used on digital trunk lines for connecting to PABX. It supports a defined set of inter-networking facilities.
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services over the digitalised circuits of the public switched telephone network. Work on the standard began in 1980 at Bell Labs and was formally standardized in 1988 in the CCITT "Red Book". By the time the standard was released, newer networking systems with much greater speeds were available, and ISDN saw relatively little uptake in the wider market. One estimate suggests ISDN use peaked at a worldwide total of 25 million subscribers at a time when 1.3 billion analog lines were in use. ISDN has largely been replaced with digital subscriber line (DSL) systems of much higher performance.
Telephony is the field of technology involving the development, application, and deployment of telecommunication services for the purpose of electronic transmission of voice, fax, or data, between distant parties. The history of telephony is intimately linked to the invention and development of the telephone.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for voice calls for the delivery of voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet.
Bell-Northern Research (BNR) was a telecommunications research and development company established In 1971 when Bell Canada and Northern Electric combined their R&D organizations. It was jointly owned by Bell Canada and Northern Telecom. BNR was absorbed into Nortel Networks when that company changed its name from Northern Telecom in the mid-1990s.
Asterisk is a software implementation of a private branch exchange (PBX). In conjunction with suitable telephony hardware interfaces and network applications, Asterisk is used to establish and control telephone calls between telecommunication endpoints such as customary telephone sets, destinations on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and devices or services on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks. Its name comes from the asterisk (*) symbol for a signal used in dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) dialing.
A business telephone system is a telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing the range of technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX).
The DMS-100 is a member of the Digital Multiplex System (DMS) product line of telephone exchange switches manufactured by Northern Telecom. Designed during the 1970s and released in 1979, it can control 100,000 telephone lines.
Meridian Mail is one of the early all-digital voicemail systems, running on Meridian1 / SL-1 digital PBX systems from Northern Telecom.
Nortel's Switch56 was a networking protocol built on top of the telephone cabling hardware of their Digital Multiplex System and other telephone switches.
The Nortel Norstar, previously the Meridian Norstar, was a small and medium-sized business digital key telephone system introduced by Nortel and later sold to Avaya. It featured automatic call distribution, and supported up to 192 extensions. In the United Kingdom it was sold by British Telecom, rebadged as the BT Norstar.
Unified communications (UC) is a business and marketing concept describing the integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice, mobility features, audio, web & video conferencing, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), desktop sharing, data sharing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging. UC is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.
TalkSwitch was a company that designed and built telephone systems for small and multi-location businesses. The company's Private branch exchange (PBX) and hybrid IP-PBX products enable communication over telephone and Voice over IP (VoIP) networks.
UNIStim is a deprecated Telecommunications protocol developed by Nortel for IP Phone and IP PBX communications.
TouchWave, Inc., was a privately held Palo Alto, California IP-telephony network switch provider founded in 1997. TouchWave developed a product line called WebSwitch that was designed to replace traditional private telephone exchange systems in small-to-medium-sized companies. WebSwitch was part of a phone system that incorporates communication features provided by the Internet. The rapid success of TouchWave was memorialized with awards and an acquisition by Ericsson Communications for $46M two years after TouchWave was founded. Ericsson continued the TouchWave product line under the name WebCom, but its efforts have been viewed as less than successful.
CT Connect is a software product that allows computer applications to monitor and control telephone calls. This monitoring and control is called computer-telephone integration, or CTI. CT Connect implements CTI by providing server software that supports the CTI link protocols used by a range of telephone systems, and client software that provides an application programming interface (API) for telephony functions.
Aculab is a privately held, UK-based limited company that was founded in 1978. It is a designer, developer and manufacturer that specialises in providing API-driven, enabling technology sub-systems for telecommunications related OEM products such as are used in fixed line PSTN, wireless and VoIP networks. Aculab's products are sold worldwide, primarily through direct sales and also via the reseller channel. Aculab's headquarters and R&D facilities are located in Milton Keynes, UK. It has a branch office in Norwood, Massachusetts, USA.
SunComm Technology is a Taiwan multinational computer technology and GSM Voice over IP gateway manufacturer. The main products in 2010 focused on GSM VoIP gateways & IP surveillance camera devices. Core members have been engaging in the communication & networks industry since 1977.
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Extracts from Nortel IP Telephony
Time Compression Multiplexing (TCM) is the standard communication protocol used by Nortel digital telephones on a 2-wire tip and ring circuit. Each digital phone line terminates at a station port on a Digital Voice Card (DVC) in the PBX. The circuit interface operates by a transformer coupling which provides foreign voltage protection between the TCM loop and the digital line. The maximum length of a normal TCM loop is 300 m (1000 ft.) Minimum voltage at telephone 10 V DC [11] and a TCM port should have between 15 and 20 V DC across the Tip and Ring with the phone disconnected. [12] [13] The port connection may be through a Punch-down block or a Modular connector called a TELADAPT plug (or socket) which is Nortel parlance for phone connector.
The Nortel Meridian 1 can be upgraded to support VoIP in two forms:
The introduction of Release 3.0 for the Meridian 1, otherwise known as the CS1000 Release 3.0 also provides an upgrade path for the existing customer base to upgrade a Meridian 1 to an IP-PBX [16]
