Geoff Hall

Geoff is Nortel's chief technology officer for the Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. He has been in the role since 2003 and is responsible for formulating technology strategies and representing Nortel's future technology strategies with EMEA customers across all business segments, in particular pioneering fixed mobile convergence strategies and network transformation architectures.

Geoff joined Bell Northern Research in 1985 - the then research arm of Nortel - moving to software development and management of digital switching systems development in Maidenhead. In 1995 he was appointed to lead the development of all ETSI based switching development, taking the DMS switching platform into 52 countries.

Geoff nurtured the research into Voice over IP, the first demonstration of which took place in Maidenhead in 1997. This development evolved into the CS2000 - the worlds leading VoIP platform. Subsequently, as the executive responsible for R&D in EMEA, he led R&D across sites in the UK, Germany, Turkey, China and India.

Geoff graduated from DeMontfort University Leicester with an honours degree in electronic engineering in 1976 and lives in Berkshire with his wife and 3 children.

Synopsis

Advances in the web are bringing about many changes that are having a major impact on networks such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), allowing phone calls to be made over the Internet. The next wave of the web in terms of Mobile/Pervasive and Semantic Web capabilities will continue to drive change.

There will be a new phase of growth in quantity and increasing significance of additional information such as personal data, social networks and metadata about all forms of artefacts like digital music and images. We have yet to see the broad adoption of the broadcast techniques which have been allowed in recent standards.

All these factors combine to challenge the old cost models of telecoms and other industries. Mobile phone operators and fixed network operators are now planning for the next generation of the web that will offer a vast range of services to the user wherever they are in the world.