After five days in its new home, the fall VON ’05 conference wrapped up quietly on Thursday. As one exhibitor noted, many attendees had either headed home or were at their hotels, nursing hangovers following the all-conference party that VON founder Jeff Pulver regularly hosts on the Wednesday night of each show.

But while show floor traffic was light on the final day of exhibits, the only complaints were the usual understandable comments that the show floor has to compete too much with popular conference sessions.

“We’ve been very happy with traffic at the show,” said Kevin Nethercott, Founder, President, & COO of LignUp, developer of a Web services-based applications platform that used VON to showcase its new FastLign alliance that ties together application developers, along with Level 3 Communications and integrator tekVizion. “We’ve gotten multiple referrals from each of our partners.”

FastLign is aimed at enabling service providers to quickly deploy new hosted Internet telephony applications by doing much of the integration of the systems in advance, addressing a critical problem that VoIP providers of all sizes must face. In addition to LignUp’s platform and services from Level 3 and tekVizion, the alliance includes application developers NexTone, Rodopi Software, tekVizion, CentricVoice and VoIP Logic.

Similarly, Paul White, CFO of DeltaThree, a service provider with both wholesale and direct sales VoIP service, said his company had a very active week, talking with potential service provider customers.

“We’ve been quite pleased,” he said.

Because it has moved from the smaller Thomas Hynes Convention Center in Back Bay Boston to the new Boston Convention Center, at the harbor’s edge, VON ’05 had a very different feel. The larger space sometimes gave the appearance of fewer bodies, but most conference sessions were well-attended, at least through Wednesday.

SMART MONEY: It’s a question most speakers duck, but Steve Craddock, senior vice president of new media development for Comcast, actually responded to an audience member seeking investment advice.

His advice was to seek out manufacturers of EMTAs, or embedded media terminal adapters, which cable companies are deploying by the thousands to offer VoIP.

“Look for companies offering EMTAs with battery backups,” Craddock advised.

The Comcast executive, who came out of the local telephone industry, also said in his keynote that there is a lot of heavy lifting yet to be done to deliver voice services as primary line replacements for traditional voice.

Expect Comcast to begin major marketing of its VoIP service this fall and winter, as the company is now content with the quality and reliability of that offering.

“We lost about two years’ time following the AT&T merger,” he admitted. “We’re about two years behind where we thought we’d be.”

NOT-SO-SMART MONEY? The VoIP industry is still puzzling over eBay’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of Skype. “There’s no way they can justify $2000 a subscriber on $20 ARPU,” said Vik Grover, Vice President, Equity Research, Thomas Weisel Partners, during a financial analyst panel discussion.

The general consensus among those not just shaking their heads was the eBay’s play has more to do with e-commerce, and using Skype to extend its reach into Asia and into developing countries, than with getting into VoIP as a service.

That said, the financial analysts on Wednesday’s panel agreed that there is “some loopiness” in the VoIP market today, but memories of the dot.bomb and telecom bust should keep it reasonably in check.