The rise and fall of Canada's tech sweetheart

The stumble and collapse of Canada’s once powerful telecommunication giant is a saga that many will have a hard time forgetting.  

The company that started out in 1882 manufacturing telephone handsets morphed into Northern Electric Co. Ltd. and later became the famous — or, depending on whom you talk to, infamous — internet-boom darling, Nortel Networks. Like many corporations during the dot-com boom, it saw immense growth, but it all ended in the 2000s when financial mismanagement, a changing market and a failed restructuring plan brought the company crashing down.

Listed below are the high and low points of Nortel's recent history, dating back to its independence in 2000.