WASHINGTON-The Personal Communications Industry Association announced last week it will hold an Asia-Pacific wireless trade show in Singapore every two years beginning next January.
Wireless Showcase Asia will premier at the Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre in January 1998. PCIA expects 3,000 to 4,000 attendees at the pilot show.
“PCIA is very excited about this new venture,” said Jay Kitchen, president of the trade group. “We see this as one of the many steps our association and its member base is taking toward penetrating the global market.”
The announcement was made at a briefing last Wednesday with reporters.
The association said it expects the first convention to attract mostly U.S. wireless manufacturers and service providers. But ultimately, according to PCIA officials, the percentage of international attendees will grow. They said international attendance at PCIA’s annual convention and exhibition in the United States has grown steadily in recent years.
The Asia Pacific region represents the largest and potentially most lucrative untapped wireless market in the world. It has been estimated, for example, that China’s telecommunications market could be worth $50 billion over the next decade. Half of that could go to wireless contracts.
In other matters, Kitchen said PCIA is taking the Clinton administration’s proposed sale of toll-free 888 telephone numbers seriously, and will try to keep the initiative from getting into any legislation this year. Those numbers are used heavily in the paging industry.
In addition, the association is awaiting the outcome of interconnection litigation and focusing attention on access charge, universal service and pay phone compensation rules. PCIA said it believes the Federal Communications Commission should implement access charge and universal service fund reform at the same time to prevent local telephone companies from getting double recovery of costs.
“If both these reforms cannot be addressed simultaneously, then the FCC must adopt safeguards to prevent the LECs (local exchange companies) from double dipping,” said Mark Golden, senior vice president at PCIA.
“The FCC should reduce the access charges that subsidize universal service if these subsidies are recoverable elsewhere,” Golden added.
PCIA opposes a universal service definition that excludes commercial wireless carriers, which will be required to pay into the fund, from tapping into it.
The trade association said it has hired Scott Harris, former chief of the FCC’s International Bureau, and Theodore Olson, former assistant U.S. attorney general, to fight its appeals court case here against the FCC’s pay phone compensation regulations.
