Toronto, July 25 - The liquidation of Canada's fabled Nortel began Friday.

After a troubled decade, the 127-year-old telecom equipment giant went under the hammer in New York to sell its wireless business to the highest bidder. Its other divisions - the enterprise unit and the metro Ethernet networks unit - are also lined up for sale.

Nokia Siemens Networks with an initial offer of $650 million, American private equity firm MatlinPatterson with $725 million and Sweden's Ericsson with $730 million were in the fray Friday to grab Nortel's next-generation wireless technology.

The highest bidder will be known only next week after all the bids are reviewed by Nortel and its creditors.

Despite its offer of $1.1 billion, Canada's Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry, was shut out of the bidding process by Nortel after refusing to sign non-disclosure agreements.

An angry BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie had even appealed to the Canadian government to stop Nortel from selling its crucial next-generation wireless technology - known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) - to foreign players.