Nortel Networks filed Chapter 11 in January 2009 and was carved up over the following years — enterprise voice assets went to Avaya, others to Ericsson and GENBAND. End-of-support phases for Norstar, BCM, and Meridian 1 finished between 2014 and 2018. If you're still running a Nortel system in 2026, you're operating on borrowed time and a shrinking gray market for parts.
Nortel Networks declared bankruptcy in January 2009 and the company was systematically dismantled over the next several years. Avaya acquired Nortel's enterprise voice business in late 2009 — including the Norstar, BCM, and Meridian product families — but treated the line as a wind-down acquisition rather than a roadmap. The last manufacturer support phases for Norstar, BCM 50/200/400/450, and Meridian 1 wrapped up between 2014 and 2018.
The Nortel reseller channel has largely dissolved. The shops that still service these systems are mostly one- or two-person operations that learned the gear in the 1990s and are now nearing retirement. Replacement parts — TDM trunk cards, KSU expansions, MICS/CICS cabinets, station cards — are increasingly scarce and almost exclusively gray-market. Prices on used Norstar modules have roughly doubled in the past few years simply because supply keeps shrinking.
If your Norstar or BCM is still working, that's lucky. The right move isn't to find another Nortel tech — it's to retire the box on your schedule, not the schedule a hardware failure picks for you. Modern cloud VoIP does everything a Norstar or BCM did and a great deal more, with no on-prem hardware and no maintenance contract.
If you're running one of these, we have a playbook for your migration.
Step-by-step. No surprises. Your existing Nortel system stays operational the entire time.
Tell us the model (Norstar CICS/MICS, BCM 50/200/400/450, or Meridian/CS 1000), station count, trunk type (analog/T1/PRI), and what features you actually use. A photo of the KSU and a screenshot of Element Manager or Norstar config is enough.
Auto-attendant menus, hunt groups, ring groups, intercom patterns, time-of-day routing, CallPilot voicemail trees — we rebuild it all in voip.army before the cutover.
Every DID and trunk number currently on your Nortel system ports to voip.army for free. The cutover is sub-5-second — no calls lost.
Nortel M-series and M3900-series digital sets won't work outside a Nortel KSU. We swap to Yealink or Grandstream IP phones at cost, or your team uses our mobile/desktop apps and skips desk phones entirely. If you're running i20xx IP sets we'll evaluate whether the SIP firmware is worth flashing.
Decommission the Norstar, BCM, or Meridian. Stop paying your local independent. Recycle the equipment.
"Our dental practice had a Norstar MICS sitting in the back closet since 2003. When our long-time tech retired last year, no one local would touch it. voip.army migrated us in ten days — they rebuilt our auto-attendant exactly the way we had it, ported all four lines, and shipped Yealink phones to every operatory. Patients didn't notice a thing. We're paying less than half what we were on the old maintenance contract.
The questions we get from Nortel customers considering the move. If yours isn't here, ask.
Talk to migration team30-day free trial. Free migration assistance from a team that's done this hundreds of times. Your Nortel stays running the entire time — no risky big-bang cutover.