Rapid growth marks telecom trade show

Kevin Rademacher

Friday, Oct. 8, 2004 | 11 a.m.

The emergence of new telecommunications technology -- and the related business opportunities -- are lifting the stature of the U.S. Telecom Association's annual convention.

Telecom '04 is expected to draw in excess of 5,000 industry executives. While the event has a long way to go before it will stack up against the largest Las Vegas conventions, it will be twice as large at the 2003 show.

In 2002 the telecom convention drew fewer than 1,000 attendees. With the rapid growth, Tradeshow Week this year named it one of the 50 fastest growing conventions in North America.

The five-day convention begins with educational sessions Saturday and Sunday before the opening keynote presentations Monday morning.

John Abel, the USTA's senior vice president for membership, marketing and business development, gave much of the credit to rapidly emerging technologies, such as Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which allows telephone calls to be sent over broadband Internet connections. Then there's the rise of consumers using cellular telephones in place of traditional landline phones and the emergence of cable systems as a means to transmit voice and data.

"The whole message is that times have changed," Abel said. "We're in a different world now. The consumer has a lot of choices."

While the new marketplace could be seen as a threat to existing telephone service providers, Abel said the show will focus more on business opportunities created by technological advances.

Even those deep into the wave of new technologies, the rapid pace of growth is difficult to comprehend.

"I'm still amazed at how fast it's moved," said David Clark, president of CommPartners, a Las Vegas-based VoIP company.

Abel said the current surge in product development came later than the industry predicted. Many thought that Congress' passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a sweeping regulatory change, would spur development of new products. Change, however, never materialized.

"We thought (the telecom act) was going to result in a lot of new technology and new competition," Abel said. "What happened was that it only created government-managed economies and competition."

Clark agreed, adding that the "nuclear winter" that saw many telecommunications companies struggle financially -- and in some cases face bankruptcy -- has cleared. Now, as the economy is perking up, those once strapped companies, or at least former executives, are willing to pour new capital into technology.

"It's created an environment that is truly ripe for new technology to take hold," he said.

Bolstering the wave of change has been the maturation of the Internet as broadband connections allowed for increased applications -- such as telephone service -- in a regulatory-free environment.

"VoIP became a legitimate business threat," Abel said. "Virtually everyone of our (member) companies is involved in VoIP in one way or another."

Additionally, many younger consumers have grown up in a wireless environment and think nothing of foregoing landline telephone service completely.

"We are on the cusp of an explosion in telecom resources and competition," Abel said. "Companies are coming to this event to find out what everyone else is doing ... The opportunities are everywhere."