March the Month of the Telecom & VoIP Trades Shows
Comptel & Channel Partners in Las Vegas, TAG National in San Diego, VoiceCon in Orlando, VON in San Jose and for some like ABP CeBIT in Hannover made for a marathon month.The good news is we didn't have to exhibit in all places and were only visitors or speakers at some of them. Attendance was soft and this year there didn't seem to be as many new products as in past years. The overall quality of the leads and the interest level is was much higher and no one any longer is explaining how to spell VoIP (:The Channel Partners show is getting better every year for VoIP and is a very nice and professional setting in a larger hotel without all the inconveniences of the large city convention centers.
TAG National is a very well organized convention for a group of Interconnects but most of the action and players is still centered around legacy switches and it seems most attendees are in no hurry to get into VoIP.
ABP showed Aastra à P phones and Actiontec's VoSKY Skype Gateways. Aastra is well known among most interconnects for vendor independent analog phones and VoSKY is a unique "Business SKYPE" trunking gateway that allows interconnects to add VoIP capabilities to any PBX for a fraction of the cost of VoIP cards. Even bettter "Business Skype" offers low cost trunks for about $40 a year and free Skype Tie Lines. Perfect for multi office VoIP using "forever free" Skype tie-lines. Free Skype softphones can be downloaded by anyone to call back into the PBX via the VoSKY gateway and with practically no NAT traversal or firewall problems. Overall both very nice entry level solutions for interconnects and telecom resellers.
VON like always was the relationship center "par excellance". Nowhere can you meet as many industry colleagues, partners, competitors, vendors and other players in the VoIP business than at VON.
CeBIT for ABP has always been a special show since we started getting active in the VoIP field after meeting several key vendors at this show. This year CeBIT attendance and vendor count has been down but it was still a great event. The jet lag and the long commutes every morning and evening are no fun, but the beer parties in the evenings good food in Germany and the awesome booths in Hannover make up for a lot of the hardships. This year it became very apparent that Europe is catching up and passing the US by VoIP. Of course it helps to have relatively low cost switched rates for legacy telephony. In Europe the political climate also seems to be much friendlier towards VoIP and most of the carriers themselves are embracing VoIP instead of seeing VoIP as the public enemy as painted by many US Ilecs.
