Nortel cant die

Nortel will still be here in 10 years - or at least some incarnation of Nortel. It's extremely unlikely that they'll die.

Nortel are so ingrained in the large telcos that they cant die. They manufacture switches, not the kind you sit on your desk that have a few Ethernet cables plugged in, but telephony switches - the kind that have thousands of customers plugged into. There are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of these telephony switches in lots of networks and they're not the kind of thing you can replace easily.

As a telecoms provider with Nortel switches that you've paid millions of dollars for, you need them to be there. You also want to ensure they'll be supported for the next 10 years or so. When a CPU board fails, you want to know it's going to be replaced and someone needs to ensure any software bugs are fixed.

So though Nortel might be going through a bit of a bad patch, even if the company per se goes under, Nortel will still be there and their spirit at least will live on, just maybe consumed by another company - Nortel's systems are alive and well and will be for the for a while - if they aren't then don't try making a telephone call for a while.