ITU SHOW STILL DRAWING VENDORS DESPITE INDUSTRY DOWNTURN

Since the last ITU Telecom World event convened in Geneva in 1999, the telecom industry has suffered the worst economic decline in its history, which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. The good news is that the industry is now showing strong signs of rebound; the bad news is that many vendors dropped out of Telecom 2003 at least two years ago.

Still, several large firms did show up at Geneva's Palexpo to display their wares on a world stage.

Nortel Networks President and CEO Frank Dunn will deliver a keynote speech this Wednesday with the title, “New Sources of Revenue.” Dunn likely will address the role of 3G, Wi-Fi and wireline broadband in helping the industry's recovery. Nortel also will launch its Business Without Boundaries strategy. Nortel offered little detail of the plan beyond a statement that alluded to how services such as mobility, voice and broadband are attributes of all networks, regardless of access technology or carrier model, and that users should have access to them seamlessly across all types of networks.

Meanwhile, Motorola will unveil its Global Applications Management Architecture service delivery platform and demonstrate how GAMA supports the company's softswitch platform, acquired this year from Winphoria, as well as new mobile services, such as multimedia message service and location applications.

Sun Microsystems also is scheduled to make a handful a major announcements relating to Java and mobile content.