What was Telephony's favorite moment of NXTcomm 2007? It had to be the sight of four telco chief technology officers and the president of a prominent industry association sitting onstage during the opening general session of the show, each with both arms and both legs thrust in the air.

That moment came after the audience at the ATIS TechThink CTO panel were barely settled in their seats. In response to a question from moderator Susan Miller, president of the Association for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, about the state of convergence, one panelist after another — first Verizon's Mark Wegleitner, then AT&T's Chris Rice, then Qwest's Pieter Poll — soberly and seriously described how each of their companies' networks is enabling convergence and what still needs to be done.

Then came Matt Bross, group chief technical officer of BT. The jolly, mustachioed Bross, who seemed barely able to limit his restless energy while the others executives talked, began by exclaiming, “Ooh! Wow! It's really cool to be here!”

Bross then said he wanted his fellow panelists and the audience to participate in a “convergence test.” Raising his left hand, he said, “Raise your left arm if you have voicemail on a mobile device. OK, raise your right arm if you have voicemail at the office. OK, now raise your left leg if you have voicemail at home. And — this is the hard part — now raise your right leg if you have voicemail on more than one mobile, office and home device.” That's how you get five of the biggest names in telecom thrusting their limbs in the air, literally moving by the seat of their pants into the convergence era.

But the point, Bross said, is that “the focus on the [profit and loss] — the PSTN P&L, the business P&L, the mobile P&L — has had us distracted from focusing on the customer experience. I think we need to change the way we think about convergence to really looking at how we enhance the quality of people's lives. Infrastructure won't move along the same life cycle as customer expectations.”

The importance of customer experience also was a subject Poll, Rice and Wegleitner touched on in their opening remarks and that the panel continued to discuss, but Bross' convergence test humorously and effectively articulated where the telecom industry's mindset needs to be as it blends networks and applications.

That was just one highlight from NXTcomm. Our editors found news in nearly every show corner. Read on …

IPTV CUSTOMER NUMBERS

IPTV was a centerpiece of the show at almost all levels. Ironically, the man whose company has the largest number of IPTV customers in the U.S. — Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T — didn't choose to focus his keynote address on that topic, focusing instead on AT&T being a wireless-centric company. Stephenson did say AT&T has more than 40,000 customers to date and is adding 600 new customers a day. By year's end, AT&T will be adding 10,000 new IPTV customers a week, he said.

“Our confidence in this [U-verse] service is stronger than it ever has been,” Stephenson said.

Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon, had a more impressive number to report — the one-millionth FiOS family — and said the service has nearly a half million video service customers. Verizon's video service is a hybrid, delivering broadcast cable video via radio frequency (RF) and using IPTV for video-on-demand and interactive services. Seidenberg also pointed out that the 100 Mb/s services cable companies now say they are planning are already possible with FiOS, and there is more to come.

The National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative and SES Americom used NXTcomm to announce the commercial availability of their jointly marketed end-to-end service for rural telcos, IP-Prime, which packages content with hardware and software or offers a content-only service. Falcon Communications also debuted its end-to-end offering for rural operators.

The increased popularity of IPTV service in the U.S. had also attracted the largest number of IPTV middleware makers to the show, including not only the big three — Microsoft, Minerva and Siemens-Myrio — but also international success stories such as Grass Valley/Thomson and UTStarcom, along with Kasenna and Seachange International. Both Cisco Systems and SES Americom stressed service providers' interest to avoid being locked into one middleware vendor with show demonstrations that featured multiple middleware operators functioning within an end-to-end IPTV system. — Carol Wilson

BIGGER, FASTER AND COPPER

New equipment at NXTcomm focused on faster pipes, bigger scale and a push of carrier Ethernet into copper.

A slew of vendors announced their new or upgraded Gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) products, including Calix, Wave7 Optics, Zhone Technologies and ZTE. At the same time, AT&T finally named its chosen GPON suppliers: Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson.

Core networking vendors Juniper Networks and Sycamore Networks unveiled much higher capacity versions of their gear to meet rising network traffic needs. ECI Telecom doubled the capacity of its XDM optical transport platform to 80 channels, suiting the mainly metro platform for long-haul networks. Ciena quadrupled the size of its 4200 multiservice transport platform, giving the new 16-slot chassis a four-degree reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM). Tellabs went in the opposite direction, unveiling a smaller 2-degree version of its typically 8-degree ROADM, the 7100.

Other vendors added integrated ROADM to their metro optical gear. Nortel Networks added ROADM functionality to its OME 6500 metro optical transport platform; Alcatel-Lucent added it to its 1850 Transport Service Switch; and Fujitsu Network Communications included ROADM functions in the packet optical networking platform it debuted in the weeks before the show.

On the copper front, Calix announced it would resell Aktino's multiple/in, multiple/out (MIMO) and discrete multi-tone (DMT) gear to deliver long-reach DS-3 and 10 Mb/s to 50 Mb/s Ethernet-over-copper services. Nortel partnered with start-up vendor Anda Networks to add a plesiochronous digital hierarchy (PDH) gateway to its Optical Multiservice Edge platform, which enables DS1, DS3, OC3 and DSL bonding. Alcatel-Lucent added its own PDH product, as well, including PDH uplinks in the new, smaller 3 Gb/s version of the 1850, which debuted at the show. Adtran unveiled its Ethernet-over-copper gear the month before the show. And Hatteras Networks previewed plans for T-1 migration gear that allows carriers to pick their own preferred mix of TDM and Ethernet services. — Ed Gubbins

WIMAX: FROM BET TO BUSINESS

Motorola revealed it is pursuing long-term evolution at NXTcomm, but WiMAX is where today's business is. Adolfo Masini, vice president of product management for the wireless broadband group with Motorola, said the company has now shipped 750 WiMAX access points, a good portion of which have gone to Pakistan for its nationwide metro deployment for Wateen Telecom.

“WiMAX is no longer a technology bet; it's a core business for us now,” Masini said.

The Wi4 access point is a modular system that divides the typical base station components between the baseband processing unit and several different RF units, either co-located with the base station or at the top of the tower with the antennas. The flexibility gives its customers more deployment options, Masini said. Sprint, for instance, is reusing its CDMA and iDEN footprint extensively, allowing it to pair its base units and radio together, but operators without an existing cellular footprint can distribute RF modules around a city, backhauling them to a separately housed baseband unit, Masini said.

Motorola also said it completed its commercial release of fixed/nomadic software for the WiMAX portfolio, which is shipping to Wateen and trial customers around the world. The mobility software will be commercially available this summer, well ahead of Sprint's trial launch of the Motorola-built WiMAX network in Chicago. — Kevin Fitchard

STEERING THE GOOD SHIP BROADBAND

Though everyone has gotten aboard the good ship Broadband, one question surfaced at NXTcomm: Who is driving it?

By driving, we don't mean steering; we mean driving. Who or what is the driving force behind the intense pressure to get broadband across the Sea of Ubiquity?

On one hand, we have Maggie Wilderotter, CEO of Citizens Communications, saying that consumers in her company's far-flung territories are not the swift adopters we thought they were. On the other is Robert Quinn, senior vice president of federal regulatory for AT&T, saying broadband is the fastest-growing technology ever introduced to the U.S. “The adoption rate … should not be underrated,” he said, noting that the number of bits traversing the Internet today thanks to YouTube alone is more than that on the whole Internet six years ago.

While both statements can be true at the same time, it leaves us wondering not just about the ship's propulsion system, but what the rush is. Aren't we moving as fast as we can?

Jeff Campbell, director of technology and communications policy for Cisco Systems, said no. “Being No. 1 in broadband adoption should be our industry's goal. It is the technology that keeps our economy going,” he said.

Many comparisons were made between domestic and foreign broadband penetration, but it became obvious at NXTcomm that people were thinking seriously about not getting ahead of themselves. Case in point was putting IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) in perspective and acknowledging how much work still needs to be done with it before we start throwing new services at the wall to see what sticks.

Campbell's colleague on the mobility side, Larry Lang, vice president and general manager of mobility, signaling and control for Cisco, said IMS is not all wonderful behind the curtains, comparing it to the Great and Powerful Oz. After all, he said, “It was designed by a standards body, and with all these different boxes and interfaces, what in your experience in technology suggests that all that will be simple and speedy?”

He's right; it won't be. But one thing IMS does give service providers, he said, is control. It provides control over the introduction of services, control over quality and control over the third parties that will bring some new services to market.

Control is what is needed for broadband and the sooner the better. Demand will drive the ship, but control will steer it. — Tim McElligott