- Traditional telco is aging out and that's reflected in its industry shows
- Analyst Blair Levin agreed that the industry is "not nearly as interesting as it was 30 years ago"
- But there's lots of hope if telco would get on the network modernization bandwagon
Each industry has its own personality and vibe — kind of like concerts. A Grateful Dead concert was populated with people wearing tie-dyed T-shirts, with their hair in dreadlocks, swirling around in circles to 20-minute songs. While a Taylor Swift concert is attended by mostly young women dressed in glitter, tulle and rhinestones — all at the same time.
Back in the early days of cable television and wireless, tradeshows were exciting. People still reminisce about CBS Cable hosting a party in the desert outside Las Vegas where they created a fake oasis and brought in live camels. Wireless veterans get misty-eyed when they talk about Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Nice, France, where they got to attend parties on big yachts. YACHTS!
But if I had to describe the personality and vibe of the traditional telecom industry today, I would say it’s mainly older white men who are generally very nice, very smart and quite nerdy. They wear baggy, out-of-style suits and like to talk about “how they solve problems.” No glitter. No parties on yachts. No-nonsense.
This jives with what a few telecom folks have mentioned to me recently. The industry is not growing. It’s in its “mature phase,” and the workforce is “aging out.” None of this bodes well for all of us still relying on the industry for our careers and incomes. (Yipes!)
Blair Levin, the policy analyst with New Street Research, confirmed what I've been hearing. He told me the telecom industry is ending a 30-year transition from single-purpose analog networks to converged wired-wireless networks.
“There are some things to clean up. But fundamentally, it’s done. The business is not nearly as interesting as it was 30 years ago,” he said.
The telecom doldrums
My fellow journalist colleague still talks about watching Elton John perform for a small private event hosted by Nortel at Supercomm back in 2001. But those days are long gone. Now, MWC in Barcelona shunts journalists to a press room in a back hallway where they sit out a tray of 50 cookies for hundreds of hungry reporters to fight over like a pack of wild dogs. Perhaps the show organizer GSMA needs to save money on cookies because the event has not recovered to its pre-Covid highs of more than 100,000 attendees?
I checked with analyst Roy Chua, principal of Avid Think — and a true road warrior — to get his perspective on the trade show doldrums and if there are any events that he still considers must-attend. He said he is on track to attend 17 public shows by the end of 2024. He still thinks MWC Barcelona is a must-attend event for people in the wireless industry even though the show isn’t growing.
“MWC will still see 90,000 people, but the smaller shows are struggling because telco investment is down. Nokia and Ericsson are hurting. Huawei can only play in limited markets," he said.
He called out other recent telco shows, which he says have also lost steam, such as MWC Las Vegas, the Network X show in Paris and TIP’s event in Dublin.
In fact, GSMA reported that MWC Las Vegas got about 8,000 people in 2023, while only 6,000 attended this year. TIP reported that 1,200 people came to its Fyuz show both this year and last year, although people said this year seemed less crowded, less energetic and the keynote session was sparse. Similarly, the Network X show, hosted by Informa, reported that 5,000 people attended the show in both 2023 and 2024.
Industry analyst Leonard Lee, principal with NeXt Curve, said, “GSMA and others are just missing the mark.” He said they’ve tried to hype things such as 5G, which has only resulted in disappointment. Then they’ve tried to pivot to things such as private networks, open RAN or enterprise verticals, but nothing has gained major traction.
“It’s just this culmination of disappointments and misalignments,” said Lee. “How do these industry associations guide the discourse of the industry in a constructive direction?”
Lee said the industry should be focused on network modernization because it's real and necessary.
Were there any good shows?
I was covering the broadband beat this year, and in my opinion there were some good fiber shows, including Fiber Connect in Nashville, Mountain Connect in Denver and Broadband Nation Expo in Washington, D.C. (I’m prejudiced on this last one because Fierce Network hosts it).
Chua spoke highly of the two FutureNet World conferences he attended this year: one in London and one in Singapore. He said the shows purposely set a candid (rather than canned) tone in the opening keynotes, and that tone then carried over to all the conversations at the shows, where people felt comfortable talking honestly about the real problems in the industry.
Chua said that other shows with energy this year included KubeCon, the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit and of course, Nvidia’s GTC. These shows are growing because of the excitement around artificial intelligence (AI).
Where is telco's place?
There’s a place for telco in all of this new energy. A case in point would be Lumen Technologies. Under CEO Kate Johnson’s leadership, one of the oldest and stodgiest telcos is leaning into modern times, recognizing the demand for fiber to support all the connectivity needs of AI. And perhaps engineers from Lumen are now attending Nvidia's GTC.
The bottom line is that traditional telco has become rather boring. It keeps playing the same old songs and wearing the same old clothes. It’s like going to a Bruce Springsteen concert in 2024. You look around and everyone’s old. And while the music is fine, you know Bruce’s voice isn’t going to hold out much longer.
Meanwhile, all the young people are at a Bad Bunny concert. And if you’re asking, “Who’s Bad Bunny?” perhaps you need to get yourself up to speed – both on music and telco modernization.