A Look Inside TIA 2011

 After attending this year, Light Counting expects the show, which will return to Dallas again in 2012, to focus on regulatory and service issues in carrier networks rather than network hardware. Light Counting attended TIA 2011: Inside the Network on May 17–20 in Dallas, Texas. This was the debut of the TIA’s new annual addition to the calendar of communications industry shows and conferences. It is intended to be the Telecommunications Industry Association’s (TIA) flagship event, and this year, it combined an exhibition, educational sessions, standards meetings, and the TIA’s annual Spring Policy Summit. 

TIA’s inaugural gathering of suppliers, network operators and service providers boasted 2,200 preregistered attendees, and its intimate feel seemed to support easy networking among them. The event was held in AT&T’s backyard, but the recent announcement of AT&T’s intention to acquire T-Mobile may have impacted attendance—rumor has it that AT&T discouraged employees from attending (just as it did at the March CTIA show) to avoid an inadvertent release of information on the progress of the acquisition. 

Many attendees compared the show to the much larger SuperComm events, which the TIA and United States Telecom Association (USTA) jointly sponsored for many years. In 2001, SuperComm attracted record attendance of 52,000. But attendance fell to 26,000 in 2004 as the industry struggled to recover from the telecom downturn. By 2009, when the last SuperComm show took place, attendance had dropped to about 7,000.  

SuperComm and OFC used to be the two big North American events for the communications industry. Today, industry consolidation has left fewer suppliers to support a large event, and the dominant carriers don’t need a trade show to get information from vendors. Over the last few years smaller, more targeted trade shows have pulled vendors and their customers away from the large events. For example, the high-growth mobile technology component of the market has its own trade shows; the CTIA presents two shows in the United States every year that have caught the interest of vendors and customers in the mobile market. While Interop, the largest US trade show for the IT market continues to draw service providers and vendors.