Northern Telecom Ltd has approved a telephone wire implementation of Ethernet to run over its Integrated Building Distribution Network cabling system – bestowing its favours on SynOptics Communications Inc of Mountain View, California with respect to its unshielded twisted pair LattisNet product, which will now operate on Northern Telecom’s cabling system. This means, says SynOptics, that users in the UK and US will have access to LattisNet technology in a telephone wire implementation for the first time. Northern Telecom’s 10Mbit-per-second certification is a very important milestone for our Building Distribution Network according to Gary Tutt, divisional general manager at Northern Telecom. Bell Canada, overwhelmingly the largest telephone company in Canada, is to distribute LattisNet as a key element of its Lanscape general purpose local area network products. SynOptics Communications develops and markets LattisNet Ethernetworks on a variety of cabling types in a star topology. The company was founded in November, 1985 as a spin off of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where LattisNet was originally developed. Xerox remains an investor, along with Menlo Ventures and Paragon partners, both of Menlo Park, and Rust Ventures down in Austin, Texas.