Random musings from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, home of TelecomNext:

Win some, lose some

This new event is premiering to mixed reviews. There is no question that the conference content is extraordinary, the speaker roster packed, and the sessions crowded. Given all the issues swirling around telecom in Washington, this has turned out to be a good time for this industry to come together.

But TelecomNext has yet to succeed where it may count most – by staging a successful exhibit. For the first two days, show floor traffic has been very light and, according to vendors, not terribly productive. USTelecom claimed TelecomNext would deliver hundreds of the industry’s top procurement officers, but that’s not who vendors are seeing.

“We started keeping track Tuesday afternoon and at one point, we went for more than an hour without a single customer entering our booth,” said a booth worker for a major manufacturing company.

“The traffic is definitely disappointing,” said Jerri Barrett, director of marketing at IP Unity. While her company has gotten some good sales leads and has had a good opportunity to meet with partners, she said, it’s hard to justify the expense, especially when the show was scheduled during an already-busy time of year. “Spring VON last week was much better for us.”

The larger booth spaces, which can cost close to half a million dollars, were among the most conspicuously empty.

Emmanuel Vella, chief marketing officer and president of operations at Wave7 Optics said he was “shocked” at how light show traffic was. His company has been pleased with the quality of contacts it made at the show, he said, but disappointed in the quantity.

At some exhibits, the grumbling had grown to an angry growl by late Wednesday.

“They keep talking about how great this show is, and how it’s the only one, and that’s nonsense,” said one marketing executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There are plenty of other trade shows. We’re definitely going to rethink our decision to come here.”

Most vendors said they had not yet made a decision on future trips, and want to wait to see how Globalcomm, produced by USTA’s former Supercomm partner, TIA, does in June in Chicago. Those willing to give TelecomNext another shot said its organizers need to change its timing to reduce conflicts, change its venue to a place with fewer distractions or change its schedule so exhibits aren’t always competing with conference sessions.

One word, guys: Teleprompter

TelecomNext scored the trifecta in Bell company CEOs as Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg, AT&T’s Ed Whitacre and BellSouth’s Duane Ackerman all showed up to open a keynote session.

They turned out to have something else in common, other than their stature – each of the three read his speech from paper, standing at the podium. So did Cingular CEO Stanley Sigman, a former Bell exec.

By contrast, most of the other CEOs on the schedule used the dual teleprompters to engage the audience more directly – and smoothly – at center stage. That group included Glenn Britt of Time Warner Cable, Robert Iger of Disney and Harald Braun of Siemens. John Chambers of Cisco went further, delivering much of his speech from the floor in front of the stage.

The contrast made the Bell execs appear stodgy by comparison, something I’d think they’d want to avoid. The only other CEOs to resort to the paper routine were those for whom English was a second language, including Norio Wada of NTT and Hubert de Presquidoux, president and CEO of Alcatel North America.

And at the risk of sounding catty, the giant, high-resolution video screen used for the keynote speakers was flattering to no one. Just because the technology exists, doesn’t mean it should be used.

A balancing act

The Net Neutrality debate has the potential to create a dilemma for people such as Robbie Bach, the president of the Entertainment and Devices Division of Microsoft, which is selling its IPTV product to major telcos, even as it lines up with much of Silicon Valley in a letter to Congress urging support for network neutrality.

Bach said, however, that he no trouble on the issue, and even feels Microsoft is in a position to bring the two sides together.

“Our goal is to take a balanced view,” he said in an interview following his keynote address. “We understand both sides of the issue and we would like to be a little bit the voice of reason. We would like to see less explosiveness and a little bit more discussion, which generally leads to better outcomes for everybody.”

Yahoo!’s Jeff Bonforte, product manager of voice, has a different kind of issue to resolve. His company is a major partner of AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon in their broadband service offerings but is now rolling out its own VoIP service, based on Yahoo! Messenger.

Bonforte admits to some “uncomfortable phone calls” but says he has been able to reassure the telcos that he is not at all interested in getting into their business.

“The calls people make on Yahoo! Messenger aren’t calls they would have made on the phone network, they are calls they probably wouldn’t have made at all,” said Bonforte. “It’s more like, you’re on Messenger and you can see that your [buddy] is available on his phone and so you call him instead of sending him an IM.”