There may be nearly as many vendors attending this year, however, they are putting less into it with smaller booths, moving to meeting rooms and cutting back on attendance. ALU, just to pick any example, has a room not a booth this year. After 20+ straight years of attending (remember Houston?), I plan on skipping this one.

It's amusing -- despite the broadband focus, I've gotten a lot of pitches having to do with 40/100-Gig optical transport. 

To be fair, these are probably folks who booked Supercomm June and just shifted their plans to Supercomm October.  The question is whether this mix of old-school Supercomm exhibitors will continue into 2010.  Wouldn't surprise me if it did.

I have to say, it seems like there will be quite a few people in the show.  But I agree with the third quote in this story: The people footing the bill might not tolerate another "off" year.  And if Odo and Honestly arent' going, then jeez, what's the point.  :)

i got a personal call from someone at supercomm asking me if i had registered and was coming! i feel special.

and no, i am not going!

odo <- wondering how desperate they must be to place a call to odo!

What a mistake, this show was done last year.!  It is wasteful to throw good money at bad.  It would be great to have 1 Telecom show a year that is a great show, it isn't Spercom

To amplify what seven said:  The conference organizers have STILL not gotten it thru their heads that they need to cut prices drastically.

As travel and hotel costs keep dropping, I'd rather have a team travel directly to a client (or potential client), where they will get some concentrated attention, rather than pay insane amounts of $$ per sq ft, $$ per union shipping, and nickles+dimes for even putting out bottled water.

I can't figure out if conf organizers don't know their competition or are just bad at competing.

Craig,

What Bollocks is referring to (and I normally do not agree with him but this time i do) is that 10 years ago there were a lot of customers on the floor and Supercomm was a good way to introduce new things to customers and get your message out.

Now there are some large carrier meetings (generally disconnected from the booth - except maybe as a meeting room), analyst meetings, and press interviews.  From a pure marketing standpoint, Supercomm has gone from a valuable tool to a convenient place to meet existing customers and business partners.

So, as long as people recognize it for what its for then they can get some value.  It is not the same value as the old days, and probably requires less expense to obtain.

seven

A correction -- Dates & venue *are* set for 2010:  Oct. 26-29, in Chicago again.

This will allow me to recycle my jokes about how there won't be any Cubs games to attend, since the dates would probably be during the World Series.

Also, I should clarify -- when I talk about some smoothing-over that occurred due to the crowded October schedule, I didn't mean to imply Supercomm negotiated with other tradeshows.  Rather, Maciejewski and I were talking about vendor reaction, referred to some "challenges" (as he put it) that occurred after telling people Supercomm was moving to the fall.

I'd asked Grant Seifert about BBWF back in March, when the date change and new focus were announced.  The response was, Yes, the missions sound similar, but Seifert thought Supercomm would have a level of carrier support that BBWF lacks.

He might have a point. Off the top of my head, Supercomm's keynotes include representatives of AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Sprint, Cox, BT, and DT.