Canadian Telecom Summit attracts industry heavyweights to 8th annual event

What started out as essentially as a 10-year reunion for the people who helped bring competition to Canada’s long distance telecommunications market in 1992, the Canadian Telecom Summit has evolved over the past eight years into an annual conference many consider a must-attend event. Taking place from June 15 to 17, the show will feature keynotes from the leaders of Canada’s communications landscape, including the CRTC, service providers, equipment suppliers and content companies. Rewind eight years and the event almost didn’t get off the ground. In 2002, the telecommunications industry was still suffering from the bursting of the 2000/2001 tech bubble and professional conference companies wanted nothing to do with telecom, explains Mark Goldberg, who along with Michael Sone, have run the event from its inception. They persisted though with the idea that it was important to have the leadership of the industry get together once a year to have those “off the record conversations.” “You can always arrange a formal meeting with folks at the commission, at Industry Canada, at various other government agencies or arrange a meeting with other companies, but every so often it’s helpful to get to know the people in an unofficial capacity, share a cup of coffee, share ideas,” Goldberg tells Tech Media Reports, a media sponsor of the event. “And by bringing together the right mix of people, I think we’ve created a three-day long cocktail party that has the format that people tend to look forward to.” The Telecom Summit mixes a healthy dose of keynotes from the movers, shakers and key decision makers in Canadian telecommunications with international perspectives. This year’s speakers include: Mike Lazaridis (president/CEO, Research in Motion), Konrad von Finckenstein (chair, CRTC), Nadir Mohamed (president/CEO, Rogers Communications), Phil Sorgen (president, Microsoft Canada) and Stéphane Boisvert (president, enterprise, Bell Canada). The event also features smaller sessions on issues more closely linked to specific segments, such as mobile applications and content, unified communications and new media. Goldberg attributes the ongoing success of the event to remaining relevant and its size. “From the beginning we targeted it as an event that covers the current issues,” he says. And the issues have evolved over the years. Broadcasting playing a much larger role this year than it has in the past is a prime example, with both CBC/Radio-Canada and the Olympic Media Consortium having keynotes. Organizing an event of this size isn’t without its difficulties, particularly in putting together an agenda that covers current issues, and according to Goldberg, one that addresses how the industry has evolved. “One of the challenges for us has been to capture all of those issues and increasingly look at the convergence of other communications services such as broadcasting and entertainment on-demand whether that’s gaming or TV on-demand,” he says. “All of those are captured under the broad heading of telecommunications, yet there’s obviously a really big difference between a vanilla dialtone voice service and quintuple play service offering like the kind we see from MTS and SaskTel.” The Telecom Summit attracts upwards of about 500 delegates, a size Goldberg characterizes as a big wedding or family reunion “where you get to see all of the long lost cousins and relatives that you haven’t seen in a while. So it’s not so big that you can’t connect with everybody that you want to connect with yet it’s big enough that it has gathered all of the key stakeholders.” Last year, Goldberg and Sone called on the federal government to use a portion of the proceeds of the Advanced Wireless Services spectrum auction for broadband expansion. They said the money could be in the form of a tax credit for low-income families that just can’t afford to get broadband. Asked whether there was going to be any similar type of call to action, Goldberg said wait and see.

Canadian Telecom Summit attracts industry heavyweights to 8th annual event

News | 05/27/2009 8:45 pm EDT

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