ICA user-group conference in jeopardy

The nation's longest-standing telecom user group is struggling to find a home for its national convention, following a trend that has seen regional telecom user groups retrench or collapse.

Leaders of the International Communications Association are meeting this week in Washington, D.C., to decide how to replace ICA's traditional annual meeting held as part of SuperComm, a trade show for carriers.

ICA, which traditionally represents corporate users nationwide spending $1 million or more per year on carrier network services, has not been invited back to this year's SuperComm in June in Atlanta. Accounts differ as to why.

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ICA First Vice President Ruth Michalecki notes that as SuperComm has expanded with the growth of the service provider equipment market, ICA's contribution to the show has appeared to shrink.

"I don't think we had as good attendance as we should have had last year," says Michalecki, who recently retired as telecommunications director at the University of Nebraska. "They decided they didn't have space for us this time."

An official with the International Engineering Consortium, which also participates in SuperComm, goes further, saying ICA's presence at SuperComm "kind of evaporated."

But Brian Moir, ICA's general counsel and long-time issues advocate before the Federal Communications Commission, insists that ICA members were dissatisfied with meeting at what is essentially a trade show for their own suppliers. Even so, SuperComm officials say attracting enterprise network managers is one of their goals. For the 2001 show, they have established their own enterprise track, called EntNet, in place of the ICA meeting.

The hunt for an ICA convention locale parallels a persistent membership drain. About 200 corporations belong to ICA, down from a peak of 600 to 700, according to Michalecki. The arrangement to share space with SuperComm, which began in 1995, was a retrenchment from what had previously been an independent ICA trade show.

ICA's latest difficulties come soon after a disaster that hit a Northeast regional telecom user group called the Communications Managers Association (CMA). Last fall CMA was forced to cancel its annual convention after vendor booth sales plunged.

CMA recently reestablished a monthly seminar series in New York, and in a letter last month to members, CMA President Charlie Murray pleaded for patience as the group works out of a "financial crisis." A parallel West Coast user group called the Tele-Communications Association folded in the past two years, although some vertical-industry user groups - for universities, Wall Street shops and others - continue to thrive.

Critics maintain that the national and regional cross-industry user groups have been mired in a voice legacy and failed to replenish their predominantly telecom-manager ranks with executives responsible for a broader range of data and IP network services.

ICA's Michalecki says the group is still likely to come up with a meeting spot for the annual convention required under its bylaws, but educational sessions and attendance may be hurt by the lack of time to plan and advertise.

Promoting its conference

ICA's Web site at www. icanet.com promotes "ICA Conference 2001" but says the "program schedule is under development." A hypertext link to "be among the first to receive" a conference brochure is broken.

Founded in 1948, ICA made its mark by pressing the FCC for lower telecom rates and surcharges, principally by ordering reductions in local-carrier access charges built into long-distance tolls.

Moir says the group has not participated much in demanding a fix to recent rampant carrier provisioning delays, preferring to advocate better opportunities for competitive local exchange carriers. He says he's also recently been monitoring International Telecommunication Union meetings dealing with threats by member countries to impose restrictions on international packet telephony.

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