It's amazing what you can pick up at tradeshows -- everything from freebies (see Supercomm Snippets: The Sequel) to inside dope on your competitors' products (see Huawei in Spying Flap)... and this item below, the results of a survey into what "major players" think of selected standards bodies and industry forums:

Unfortunately, Light Reading has been unable to pin down anything more than what's on this slide, so precisely who was surveyed and how they were surveyed is something of a mystery.

All the same, the results give food for thought, and have led to us creating our very own survey of reader attitudes towards a dozen industry forums at the end of this article.

Note that we aren't mixing up standards bodies and industry forums in our own survey. We're doing forums first, and, if it turns out to be a meaningful exercise, we'll give standards bodies a grilling at a later date.

As for the poll results obtained by Light Reading at Supercomm, it looks as though respondents were asked to rate organizations on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of how much influence they have on technology developments, with 5 being a lot and 1 possibly being none at all.

The results for standards bodies may be a reflection of who took the survey. The fact that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) did better than the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) suggests a predominance of North Americans and more "Net Heads" than "Bell Heads." This would also explain the surprisingly low score for the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).

As commenting on the results for the industry forums might influence how you respond to Light Reading's own survey, we'll let you get on and air your own views:



{survey 46}

— Nicole Willing, Reporter, Light Reading