"The other side to the coin is that you've got a lot of R&D that's being moved up into Canada," he said. "Companies like Microsoft are looking at Canada as an area where they can draw upon a good base of talented people for their R&D efforts. So I don't know that even if Nortel decides to pare some of their research and development in Canada that it necessarily cripples the Canadian industry for that because you've certainly got other networking companies that are doing R&D up here. I would point to Cisco and Enterasys, for example, as two companies that are certainly very much committed to R&D in Canada." Nortel's workforce in Ottawa has already been sliced in half since the beginning of 2001 to approximately 7,500 employees. The number of Nortel employees worldwide, after the latest reductions are completed, will total approximately 35,000. A Nortel spokesperson said details surrounding the latest workforce reduction would be revealed in October.