A cooling process

It may not be NXTcomm--or at least what NXTcomm’s planners propose it will be--but WiMAX World is an impressive little conference and expo coming into its own just as the WiMAX market is coming into its own. There are a few thousand people gathered in Boston for WiMAX World this week, and while that might not sound like much, it’s enough to get a market on the move up to the next level.

Telephony’s Kevin Fitchard just concluded an online series that looks at how six different top WiMAX vendors are positioned to take advantage of the increasing fortunes of the WiMAX market. This is a market that has been crippled by hype and over-expectation almost since the word “WiMAX” arrived in the lexicon. Now, the thing this market most needs to avoid is the vendor overcrowding that could delay deployment decisions. Not everyone will win with WiMAX, and if you aren’t in it yet, you have very little chance of being a winner.

Comptel is another less-than-colossal event being held this week. Comptel’s constituents are competitive carriers, and while that group has seen much better days, it’s also experiencing something of a rebound. A somewhat resurgent wholesale market is at least partly responsible.

Comptel’s market certainly is at a far more advanced phase of maturity than the WiMAX market. Wholesale carriers and their vendor partners already have lived through a glut that ultimately decimated the number of firms chasing this opportunity. The WiMAX market would do well to view that experience as an object lesson.

WiMAX World and Comptel follow last week’s segment show of choice, the FTTH Conference. Fiber-to-the-home is further along than WiMAX, past its earliest technology and cost struggles, and just reached the 1 million customer plateau. The next challenge is to match growth with consistent quality of service and increasingly innovative applications.

None of the smaller events may be the mother all telecom trade shows, but they nonetheless bring together companies chasing market segment opportunities that ultimately will contribute to how the rest of the world views the telecom industry’s health. Their decisions and the aggressiveness with which they pursue opportunity will determine in some small part what we’ll all be talking about at NXTcomm 2007.

E-mail me at doshea@telephonyonline.com.