Nortel Networks said Thursday it was holding informal talks with Huawei Technologies about working together after the two companies killed a communications equipment joint venture.

"There's no formal joint venture. That doesn't mean that you can't find ways to work together to resell products or to participate in other ways," Nortel's chief strategy officer, George Riedel, said in advance of his speech at a telecommunications conference in Toronto. "We're in discussions, informally, to figure out what makes sense going forward."

Riedel said he could not comment on specifics. The two companies had planned to develop high-speed broadband access technology. The formal joint venture was abandoned because key customers had already picked other suppliers, Nortel has said.

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