Telecom Trends

Nortel is starting to see carriers looking at expanding their long haul optical capacity. After years of dealing with the glut of capacity creating during the boom years of the tech bubble, carriers are talking about needing to invest in optical equipment again, according to Nortel CTO John Roese. Will Nortel be the supplier of choice? I suspect Lucent / Alcatel will try to get in their way.

Roese and Nortel President Mike Zafirovsky were speaking at a gathering of Ottawa technology executives at a joint OCRI / ITAC breakfast meeting on Thursday.

According to the Ottawa Business Journal story about the breakfast, the two Nortel execs detailed three trends that offer Nortel an opportunity to take the industry lead:

• hyperconnectivity: where individual consumers are always plugged into the Internet with enabled devices;
• network-aware applications: where network applications are easily tailored to needs;
• true broadband: defined as a seamless handoff to provides uninterrupted mobility between home, office and points between over high-speed networks.

Keep in mind, this list mixes applications and underlying technologies. Consumers are not likely to care about hyperconnectivity or true broadband. These are considerations of what goes on behind the curtain to enable sizzling applications - as yet undefined.

Will Nortel be able to seize on these opportunities? Will Nortel's customers be able to convince consumers to buy their solutions?

Mark Evans' All Nortel, All the Time has more on news out of the breakfast.

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