Rumor mill: Nortel's carrier VoIP auction coming soon

With Nortel's Ethernet, CDMA, GSM and now the Enterprise Services flying off the shelves, it's only a matter of time that Nortel will open up the auction block for its Carrier VoIP and Application Solutions (CVAS) unit.

Avian Securities analyst Catharine Trebnick is predicting that a "stalking horse" bid for the CVAS unit could be made by a number of potential candidates as early as this week. What's making the unit attractive to potential bidders is the fact that it includes AT&T and Verizon as key customers.

Talk of auctioning off the CVAS unit has been running rampant since August, when a report in Canada's Financial Post emerged [1] that Nortel was close to getting an offer for its VoIP business.

In a research note, Trebnick named Genband, NEC, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sonus Networks as potential bidders for Nortel's CVAS unit. However, she said that Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Huawei would be less likely to place a bid.

Trebnick suggests that NSN has an advantage over Genband or Sonus because it could bring more revenue and cost synergies and apparently AT&T would prefer to have NSN by Nortel's CVAS unit.

For more:
- Light Reading has this analysis [2]

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