What's the most exciting technology of late for enterprise customers? We're pulling a few technologies together where we have sensor technology in Ultra Wideband to track individuals, and we've bound that to MCS and the Wi-Fi infrastructure. So we have put together a medical application that we are currently demonstrating which uses mostly generally available technology that is dynamically adapted.

For example, in a hospital, a doctor walks around with a Tablet PC that is Wi-Fi-equipped, and he also has a name badge that has a sensor. We can detect over UWB which patient he is seeing and transmit to the doctor that patient's current medical record. And the system automatically updates medication and other information so that all the personnel would all have common access to that info. Also, if someone tries to contact the doctor in the hospital, he gets an indication on the Tablet and uses a BlueTooth headset working through the PC. All the voice communication can also be transferred to the doctor's desktop phone set once he's in the office. So you could have a video medical image sent to the laptop, which could be transmitted to a big screen in the office. All of that is really happening, with data collected from the sensor network and processed and coordinated with GPS. We have that health care application in trial and almost all the products involved are from Nortel.

What are the important networking technologies coming in the next two years? The technologies of the next two years in the future revolve around the changing cost structure of network facilities customers gain access to and, secondly, with personalization of services with broadband and virtualization.

In the cost area, quite a bit is going on with wireless, especially with OFDM [Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing] and MIMO [multiple-input, multiple-output]. OFDM is a foundation for CDMA, UMTS and WiMax, and we're going to see various deployments of this technology on fixed and nomadic and full cell systems that will make mobile communications as capable as fixed communications for personal use. OFDM dramatically increases the amount of applications that will be built for this infrastructure, such as doing training or any desktop video streaming or videoconferencing application, which is hard to do across GPRS. We're working with Intel to get consumer devices to use OFDM and MIMO. MIMO is antenna technology that will increase capacity by 10 to 40 times of what we have now.

Pretty big changes are coming in the packet core. As we've added more layers of technology into the core of the network, it's starting to get more expensive rather than less. But optical technology is continuing to drive much better price and performance. For example, dispersion compensating optics gets rid of all repeaters used in a large network by a service provider or enterprise. It's starting to roll out. With an optical modem, it looks across a stretch of fiber and will do the predistortion correction and the signal goes through. As many enterprises start to deploy SANs and connect bigger sites, optical networks should be a cheaper alternative to lines available today, perhaps 40 percent to 70 percent [cheaper].