Newbridge Networks was an Ottawa

Ottawa

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...

, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 company founded by Welsh

Welsh people

The Welsh people are an ethnic group and nation associated with Wales and the Welsh language.John Davies argues that the origin of the "Welsh nation" can be traced to the late 4th and early 5th centuries, following the Roman departure from Britain, although Brythonic Celtic languages seem to have...

-Canadian entrepreneur Sir Terry Matthews

Terry Matthews

Sir Terence Hedley Matthews OBE, FIEE, FREng is a Welsh business magnate, serial high tech entrepreneur, and Wales's first billionaire....

. It was founded in 1986 to create data and voice networking products after Matthews was forced out of his original company Mitel

Mitel

Mitel Networks, is a high-tech company providing unified communications solutions for business. The company previously produced TDM PBX systems and applications but after a change in ownership in 2001 now focuses almost entirely on Voice-over-IP products.Mitel is headquartered in Ottawa,...

. According to Matthews, he saw that data networking would grow far faster than voice networking, and he had wanted to take Mitel in much the same direction, but the 'risk-averse' British Telecom dominated Mitel board refused and effectively ousted him. The name Newbridge Networks comes from Sir Terry Matthews' home town of Newbridge in south Wales

Wales

Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

.

Newbridge quickly became a major market player in this area using the voice switching and software engineering expertise that was prevalent in the Ottawa area.

The company initially had innovative channelbank products, which allowed telcos

Telephone company

A telephone company is a service provider of telecommunications services such as telephony and data communications access. Many were at one time nationalized or state-regulated monopolies...

 with existing wiring to offer a wide variety of new services. Newbridge also offered (for the time) innovative network management and ISDN, RS-232C PC

Personal computer

A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

 and Mac

Macintosh

The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 networking products, including distributed star-topology

Star network

Star networks are one of the most common computer network topologies. In its simplest form, a star network consists of one central switch, hub or computer, which acts as a conduit to transmit messages...

 routing through both proprietary hardware and telco switches.

In 1992-93 the company became increasingly focused upon and well-known for its family of ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a standard switching technique designed to unify telecommunication and computer networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing, and it encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells. This differs from approaches such as the Internet Protocol or Ethernet that...

 products.

Newbridge later absorbed some routing technology that had been abandoned by Gandalf Technologies and entered the pure data networking market with a distributed routing product (Ridge or routing bridge - bridges with a centralized routing server).

It was purchased and absorbed by Alcatel

Alcatel

Alcatel Mobile Phones is a brand of mobile handsets. It was established in 2004 as a joint venture between Alcatel-Lucent of France and TCL Communication of China....

in late February 2000 for over seven billion dollars in stock. With this transaction, Matthews became the single largest shareholder in Alcatel.