Supercomm to reflect telecom industry revival

Last year, things started looking better . . . this year, they are better.

Supercomm, the telecom industry's biggest party, kicks off this week at its new Chicago digs with upbeat news: Paid attendance, exhibitor count and square footage of exhibition space are all up from last year, show officials report. This is an indication that a market recovery is in full swing. The show also is expected to include significant announcements from key vendors - Lucent, Movaz Networks, Mahi Networks and Mangrove Systems among them.

Organizers expect 30,000 attendees - 20% more than last year, Supercomm's swan song in Atlanta after six years. There will be 100 more exhibitors at this year's show, 600 total; and 300,000 square feet of exhibition space, 22,000 more than 2003.

That's because carriers are picking up and spending again on equipment to offer new services to companies while decreasing their own operating expenses.

North American telecom service providers' overall capital spending experienced a year-over-year increase in the first quarter of 2004, the first in nearly three years, according to research firm RHK. Worldwide, service provider capital expenditures will remain roughly stable through the next five years, the firm found.

"This is a positive development for the industry, which has seen significant declines in spending in recent years," RHK said. Global capital spending declined 11% in 2003, to $214 billion, after a nearly 30% decline the year before.

North American capital expenditures also are stabilizing, according to Infonetics Research. Carriers will spend $47.4 billion this year, which is down 2% from 2003. RHK says North American capital spending rose 12% in the first quarter of 2004 compared with the first quarter of 2003.

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The hottest area of investment is in equipment for wireless infrastructure and services, both firms found. In North America, capital spending for wireless rose 33% in the first quarter as wireless subscriber numbers increased rapidly. Wireline spending declined slightly in the first quarter.

That's not to say wireline is in a slump. Many wireline RFPs are on the street - such as AT&T's multiservice edge, SBC's optical add/drop multiplexer and switch, and Verizon's ATM/multiservice core projects.

With that, many vendors plan to unveil and demonstrate new gear designed to appeal to these specific and more general requirements of carriers that want to roll out next-generation telecom services to corporations.

Lucent is expected to announce a metropolitan optical system, the Metropolis Wavelength Services Manager (WSM), designed to help service providers deliver optical bandwidth to their customers' premises for metropolitan-access, interoffice and regional applications. T-Com, the fixed-network division of Deutsche Telekom, will start testing the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system this summer, sources say.

Lucent confirmed it will be making a DWDM announcement at Supercomm but provided no details. Lucent and Movaz jointly developed WSM.