Honestly, if you are serious about getting into the Networking field, you should focus more on Linux and go from there. Every major vendor base their network stack on linux/qnx/bsd.

Even better you were a developer, you'd understand many things a Network guy wouldnt grasp. You'd know how to interpret a stack trace, you'd know how to read syslogs and variables, you can write many tools/srcipts that will help you understand the visibility/behavior of a network.

One more area that might interest you is SDN, software-defined-networking. Look at Openflow initiatives, running the full internet table on commodity boxes with Quagga, Bird, or OpenBgpd on it. The possibilities are enormous.

Good luck.