They say that in a recession people get back to the basics: family, conventional sitcoms, comfort food, and country music. Especially the latter, if you happen to be in Grapevine, Texas, the site of the spring COMPTEL PLUS show.
The venue here in the Dallas suburbs is the behemoth Gaylord Texan, a ranch-themed resort hotel with cowboy boots and lone stars on the carpets, longhorn motifs everywhere, and ubiquitous piped-in country music. So omnipresent is the chicken-fried pop that I could have sworn Faith Hill was showering, at the top of her lungs, in my bathroom when I woke this morning. (No such luck.)
Also getting back to basics, to stretch a metaphor, is the telecom industry as represented at this show. While things in telecom are not nearly as bad as in, oh, the rest of the civilized world, it’s definitely a time for retrenching, refocusing, and reorganizing.
One attendee this morning pointed out that that this was the first COMPTEL show in memory that did not include a lavish party thrown by one of the major carriers. This year it’s not about socializing, he added, but about dollars and cents: “Lowering costs and increasing revenue. There’s no second reason to be here.”
Booths are relatively pared-down, outlooks are cautiously optimistic, and the talk is less of whiz-bang next-generation technology than of making the most of what you got. One exhibitor told me he’s seeing a “SONET revival” for wireless backhaul as carriers look for ways to handle all the data traffic flooding out to today’s iPhones and other broadband-connected smartphones.
Underscoring that point, Infonetics Research said in its Optical Network Hardware report this week said the market was up 5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, a period when many, many sectors of the economy were plunging. “The pressure to upgrade equipment is still there, because mobile and data traffic continue to mount, and the number of mobile broadband subscribers continues to grow rapidly,” said Infonetics.
On the panel I moderated this afternoon, “Cloud Computing: Impacts on the Telecom Industry,” the speakers were at pains to cast the move of telecommunications services to the Internet cloud as not a “paradigm shift” but as simply a more efficient way of delivering what customers need: “These are not new services,” said K.B. Chandrasekhar, founder and CEO of JamCracker.
If there’s a one-word motto for the industry right now, it’s “Simplify!”
On service providers’ emerging converged networks “there are so many touchpoints where things can go wrong,” remarked Nathan Franzmeier, president of Stratus Telecommunications. “We take this whole mess and make it easy to own, operate and deploy.”
Now if the Treasury Dept. could just accomplish that feat with the whole mess of the U.S. financial system, maybe we could all get back to work.
