Meridian Norstar
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The Meridian Norstar, later called Nortel Norstar was a small-office digital PBX introduced by Northern Telecom (now Nortel). It is based on the same internal design and instruction set as Nortel's earlier SL-1 and DMS systems, allowing it to support features such as Meridian Mail, automatic call distribution and other features, but can support a total of up to 192 phones and has limited processing power. In the United Kingdom it is sold by British Telecom, rebadged as the BT Norstar.
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[edit] History
With the advent of LSI ICs, also called integrated circuits in the 1980's, key telephone system design went from electro-mechanical parts to electronic or fully digital parts. The first key system developed by Northern Telecom in the early 1980's was the Vantage TDD system. Unlike the success of the SL-1 system, the Vantage system did not catch with the business environment and the Meridian Norstar was developed as its replacement.
In 1988, Nortel developed the Meridian Norstar system. This system directly competed with the AT&T Merlin, ROLM Redwood, Executone/Isotec Hybrid systems, Toshiba DK Strata, and NEC hybrid systems. [1] Unlike the earlier Vantage system, the Norstar went on to be one of the leading telephone systems in the world. It is visible worldwide with installations at major retail chains, educational environments, medical institutions, government facilities, and many places where key telephone systems are required. [2]
The Norstar system went further than the other systems in similarity to a PBX system such as the Meridian SL-1/Meridian 1 system developed in the late 1980's as well. This allowed blurring the distinction of key telephone system versus PBX telephone system. Many features such as Direct Inward Dial, Caller ID, Automatic Call Distribution, and Call Accounting were designed off the larger Meridian 1 PBX, DMS-100 and Meridian SL-100 as opposed to being developed as an independent system.
Although there were many hardware/design similarities between the Norstar systems and larger Meridian 1/Meridian SL-100 systems, the telephones themselves could not be used interchangeably between the key system and PBX. They were, however, backwards compatible on their respective switch. That is, you can use the oldest Meridian M7000 telephones on the newest Business Communication Manager system. You can also use the latest T7000 series telephones on an older Norstar system such as the DR5.1. This allows companies to invest in hardware as needed. [3]
[edit] Telephone Design
When introduced in 1988, Norstar telephones were developed with highly advanced features. The telephones came with LCD displays, heavy duty aerodynamic handsets/telephone body, color coded keys with easy to read fonts, grey, ash and black colors, a high quality speaker phone, quick reference card located underneath the handset, high clarity handset voice quality, and a very rugged solid telephone.
As with other Nortel telephones, the phones contained a clearly defined color coded red Hold key, orange Release (RLS) key and a grey Feature key. RLS allows you to cleanly hang up a call without having to depress the handset cradle. This also is very useful during loudspeaker paging announcements with the telephone, as the RLS keys cuts off the noise associated with hanging up the telephone system from going to the loudspeakers. This is very useful in large retail stores where paging announcements are broadcast quite frequently.
The Feature key allows you to access many system features with one single Feature Code. For an example, you would simply dial Feature 70 if you want to transfer as opposed to complex feature codes on older systems.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Nortel: Technology: History of Innovation
- ^ Nortel Networks Norstar Integrated Communications Systems Portfolio
- ^ Nortel: Products: Business Communications Manager (BCM): Overview
[edit] External links
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