Lest Nortel be left out of the growing WiMAX fanfare, the networking vendor announced Thursday it will offer PC cards and USB dongles to allow WiMAX connectivity to laptops, among other products.

Nortel did not win a coveted role as a network equipment provider to the Sprint Nextel Xohm offering for WiMAX, which will provide broadband wireless nationwide starting next year. That principle role went to Motorola Inc. and others.

But Nortel nonetheless made it known this week at WiMAX World that it considers mobile WiMax hugely important for its future and that of many different end customers globally. Those customers range from individual consumers and workers to governments and service providers.

Nortel set up one of the biggest booths at WiMAX World on the show floor, and announced Wednesday that it is working with the Choctaw Electric Cooperative and Pine Cellular to bring WiMAX to southeastern Oklahoma and other rural areas where it is not economically feasible to build a wired network.

On Tuesday, Nortel said it is working with ITT to jointly pursue mobile WiMAX for use in a satellite-based air traffic control system for the Federal Aviation Administration. ITT won a $207 million contract from the FAA in August for the control system, which is set for deployment in 2009.

In yet another token of its commitment to the technology, Nortel demonstrated unified communications over WiMAX at the conference. The demonstration used Nortel's WiMAX infrastructure and Communication Server along with Microsoft Office Communications Server to initiate a phone call with one click from a soft phone.

Nortel also showed bright green laptops used in the One Laptop Per Child campaign championed by Nicholas Negroponte to show their Wi-Fi wireless capability. Scott Wickware, vice president of carrier networks for Nortel, said those laptops will eventually be WiMAX capable, and predicted that just about any Wi-Fi device will become WiMAX capable as chip sets evolve.

"The principle we have is that anything Wi-Fi will be WiMAX eventually," Wickware said in an interview. Nortel has also launched a marketing campaign based on the idea of "hyperconnectivity," which he described as anything that can be connected wirelessly, will be connected that way.

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