October 2003 ITU World Forum, Geneva.   Four years on from the last ‘Telecoms Olympics’ extravaganza in Geneva there were few signs of any world records being broken and not very many ‘personal best’ performances.

The telecoms industry has seen the worst of times, caused mainly by its own hand, and is now a smaller and more sober sector.  Many of the former growth tigers have gone out of business or been swallowed up by those with long-term stamina – but even these giants have taken time out to reflect on the way they need to manage their recovery.

For some like Ericsson and Nokia that meant not bothering to turn up at all – although in Nokia’s case they have sensibly arranged their very own 2-day invitation-only event in Nice at the end of October.  For the rest it is apparent that the sector is led more than ever before by the Far East.  The European pavilions seem lacking energy and enthusiasm and the US was largely represented not by telecoms giants but the computing dollars of Microsoft, Intel and HP – with the latter projecting a far better understanding of the telecoms world outside of America.

The event, however, remains a good place to spot trends because it is all about the industry selling ideas to itself – ideas that will eventually emerge as new products and services for businesses and consumers.  So it was no surprise that there was very little new on show from the previously over-hyped worlds of ADSL and cable services or 3G.

A fairly dismal 3G week was marked by Orange announcing yet further delays to service introduction and a clear message from the management of both Orange and Vodafone that sometime in 2004 they really might perhaps like to see manufacturers delivering kit that really works.  In reality few now expect 3G to deliver anything like the notion of true broadband services and no-one gives much credence to ‘first mover advantage’.

Much the same expectation-deficit applies to ADSL where the European Commission joined the critical chorus by taking action against eight countries where it judges that incumbent Telco’s have been allowed to act uncompetitively against smaller players and have held back the take-up of broadband services particularly in rural areas.  I felt for the delegate from Corning Glass, looking for new sales opportunities but seeing only a glut of dark fibre – and none of it where it might be useful in the 'first mile’, or ‘last mile’ as the sector likes to shout its lack of customer perspective.

Those facing forward marched under two banners, Wireless and IP.  The IP brigade are somewhat ahead of their Telco marketing colleagues who would still rather scorn VoIP to preserve legacy telephony revenues – but the smart money is on those like the Chinese R&D leader Huawei Technologies who are working the up-coming migration market where new multi-protocol switches are needed to handle the inevitable transition to all-IP telephony services and the demise of analogue PSTNs.

Typical of these powerful and, from a product design perspective, elegant products was the pre-release show-casing of Cirpack’s SuperNode-B switch for Next Generation Networks.  Designed in conjunction with IBM, it speaks volumes for Big Blue’s own transition to Open Standards and collaborative partnerships that the kit could only be seen at the French Pavilion on a stand awash with visitors from alternative carriers.

Combined with a High Velocity SoftSwitch, Cirpack’s ‘Public Telephony Gateway’ is designed for installation in an IBM BladeCenter.  A single blade can be configured to simultaneously handle 2,048 VoIP channels and 63 E1s over SDH (1,890 TDM voice channels) or 1024 VoIP channels and 1,024 AAL2 VoATM channels.  The SuperNode-B can manage well over 250,000 subscribers and several million Busy Hour Call Attempts – not bad for what is a fairly small black box with inbuilt switching redundancy that a few years ago would have needed a very large Exchange or two to house the same functionality.  I didn’t ask the price.

In the world of wireless broadband some things never change.  This year the grand prize for hopeless hype (beyond WiFi where WiMAX might be better described as WiMin or maybe WiBother) was won outright by the proponent of IEEE802.16 who earned a polite rebuke from the Forum top table for being in danger of reviving the standard of hype that bedevilled 3G.

As a fine example of the flexibility of the English language he described this Fixed Wireless Access technology standard operating at frequencies that require line-of-sight and antennas screwed to outside walls as being “in a good position to gravitate to mobility”.  Gravitate?  Did he mean he was trying to be serious?  He was not serious enough to include any mention of the emergent IEEE802.20 standard which, if it rises above messy mobile politics, really will cater at least for portability if not yet speeds beyond 70 mph.

But in some ways the 802.16 cheerleader was eclipsed by a speaker, not from a different planet but a Japanese university, whose vision of telecom trends was entirely described as an ongoing battle between Software Defined Radio and UWB – Ultra Wideband - which in strict ITU terminology should surely be more properly described as Ultra Wide Broadband.  Flashes of radiation (or inspiration) apparently (or transparently) will co-exist with everything else with no cross-interference and deliver everything to everybody at anytime at next to no cost – somehow.  Bottom Up pragmatism versus Top Down ideology – intellectual games that left many in the audience wondering if it was time to retire.

Back in the real world the best example of what IEEE802.20 might deliver was on show and working at the Kyocera stand.  Going way beyond their admirable PHS systems that provide an affordable 384k voice and data mobile service (only in Japan) Kyoceraare gearing up this time to sell rather more than 200,000 base stations of the new iBurst™ variety delivering 1Mb/s per user and on track for development to 8Mb/s per user – on the move, inside and outside buildings, and with IP at both ends.

Apart from a sprinkling of desktop units, user-terminal kit for iBurst is currently of only one variety – a PCMCIA card with an elegant stub extension for use on lap-tops – and the entire production capacity is committed to the roll-out in Sydney where Personal Broadband Australia is having difficulties recalling the original test kit from trial users who do not want to give up the freedom of fast Internet without wires.  More varieties of user kit, including cameras and ‘fixed’ terminals for coupling to LANs and WLANs open up the possibility that even Hotspots might become economically viable by using iBurst for the shared backhaul.  The Burger Van in the Lay-By WiFi Hotspot?  The self-policing Premier football match with hundreds of spectator-operated streaming video sources? You heard it here first on this channel.

And finally, from a long-term perspective, today’s Kazaa Kiddies are tomorrow’s technologists,  and IT is in the ascendancy within the ITU.  As if to underscore ever-reducing product development cycles, the ITU’s World Forum will now reconvene in just three year’s time instead of four.  Maybe they hope to hit the top of the next boom and line up some more marketing gold medals before the crash of falling telephony revenues and the revenge of the routers.