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Goings on from NXTComm 2008
Just back from the Broadband Wireless World portion of the NXTComm 2008 show this past week with some personal impressions.
I just got back late last night from this year's NXTComm, which by the way, I am glad to see back in its melded form. I recall the old SuperComm show very fondly. This year's iteration was put on simultaneously with InfoComm and both were held at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
I have to admit that my perspective is less broad than specific as I was in to speak on a panel with Jeff Belk about the relative state of the union in WiMAX, LTE and UMB technologies that the major carriers are using. This was all part of the Broadband Wireless World portion of NXTComm which is now co-located with that show.
Jeff and I had a good crowd. The sessions were co-hosted by my fellow blogger here on WiMax.com, Jeff Orr and Patrick Donegan of Heavy Reading, with whom I recently hosted the Tower Technology Summit sessions at CTIA. They did a really good job as we had a full and interested audience. Although I should say that it was a different audience from Broadband Wireless World sessions of the past. No one in the audience at the beginning of the session identified themselves as carriers. Or at least they would not admit it.
This does bring up rumination about the state of the small broadband wireless carrier in the US. Namely, where are they and what have become of them? Well, they are still there, but the survivors are pretty technically versed by now and many of them have either been through a merger or acquisition and have a very veteran understanding of the business case by now. Clearly I have seen a lot of M&A activity in the space, but I do believe there is still a strong niche for the small player.
The major exhibitors of the show were the usual suspects of Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and other venerable vendors. Traffic seemed fairly solid to me, although Las Vegas was very hot (over 100 degrees) which may have muted things a bit. There were the usual polite executive slug fests in the keynotes. A lot of attendees I talked to though told me they were buyers for their organizations and were there to decide on products---always a good sign if organizations are looking for solutions. Companies seem determined to succeed and there were sessions at BWW where several shared some really great success stories, especially Kelley Dunne from Digital Bridge Communications, who I thought had a great story of success by focusing on smaller market niches.
Tim Sanders
The Final Mile
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