Supercomm touts convergence

CHICAGO - Supercomm convened for the final time last week and telecom's premiere U.S. trade show went out with a bang, drawing an impressive roster of executive speakers and throngs of service providers eager to upgrade their networks to support advanced IP services.

This despite the fact that the two groups that sponsored the show for the past five years - the Telecommunications Industry Association and the U.S. Telecom Association - are going their separate ways next year to start their own shows, GlobalComm and TelecomNEXT, respectively.

Over its 18 years, Supercomm managed to ride out the most devastating downturn in telecommunications history and then rebound over the past three years. Last week's event boasted a Who's Who of speakers from Cisco's John Chambers to new FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. The CEOs of Nortel, Lucent and Siemens even shared an hour on the same stage at the McCormick Place convention center.

One consensus that emerged from the din of the show was that broadband is king, the single most important factor in making converged IP service offerings a reality.

On the policy side, the FCC's Martin said he supports the Bush administration's goal of universal broadband access by 2007. "It can mean a productivity growth for a country of people who are all connected," he said (More on Martin's speech).

But the political talk about broadband lacks substance, said Nortel president and CEO Bill Owens. "I don't see policies or direction that will take us forward," he said.

The U.S. lacks a plan for getting consumers to embrace broadband access to the Internet and other services, he said, and pointed to South Korea, the nation most receptive to broadband technology, as a better example. He credited that country's wide acceptance of broadband with contributing to an informed, competitive workforce that fuels businesses like Hyundai and Kia.

Whatever the political shortcomings, technology at the show took leaps and bounds. As more than 30,000 people elbowed from booth to booth, vendors and carriers announced new hardware, software and services that promise to alter the way businesses view communication.

Alcatel announced it would be pushing passive optical networking technology to gigabit speeds through an alliance with chip maker Freescale, while a dozen other PON vendors teamed up to demonstrate that their technology is interoperable.

The most promising broadband wireless technology, WiMax, is still nearing standardization, yet pre-standard WiMax gear riddled the show floor. Israeli WiMax vendor Alvarion announced BreezeMAX WiMax products that are designed to deliver connectivity up to 70M bit/sec. The products operate in radio spectrum set aside for U.S. carriers.

Even traditional copper phone lines are being mined by vendors that can turn the old infrastructure into high-bandwidth Ethernet circuits. Aktino, for instance, chose the show as a platform to announce its AK4000 device that logically bonds copper wires to support 25M bit/sec Ethernet services. The Metro Ethernet Forum put up a booth where members demonstrated interoperable gear supporting VoIP, circuit emulation, video conferencing and 3D video transmission.