NOON -- NEW YORK -- Ethernet Expo -- Fun fact out of Laura Howard's keynote this morning (she's chief marketing officer for ECI Telecom Ltd. ):

Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. now says handset sales will drop 5 percent in 2009. The original projection had sales going up 4 percent.

So, one of the markets that was so vital that it couldn't go down -- is about to go down.

Merrill Lynch still thinks sales will pick up in 2010, but who knows what kind of life span that prediction's going to have?

Meanwhile, Howard used her keynote to emphasize that the transition to the glory of the all-optical, all-IP/Ethernet network won't be happening just yet. "In our economic climate, that transition where we drop off the bottom and decommission that TDM equipment... is going to be somewhat delayed." (The part about dropping off the bottom refers to the end of Sonet/SDH, not the end of everything.) The key for equipment providers, then, will be to help reduce the costs of running these overlay networks, she said.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading