WASHINGTON-After last year’s PCS show was largely disrupted by Hurricane Georges, Jay Kitchen, president of the Personal Communications Industry Association, said he’s been assured this year’s show will not be a repeat performance.
The list of speakers at Personal Communications Showcase ’99, set to begin Tuesday in New Orleans, will focus on the word “convergence,” Kitchen said. He said the list of speakers “is a line-up like you have never seen at a PCS show or at a wireless show-at any wireless show.”
These are among comments Kitchen made in a one-on-one interview with RCR Washington Reporter Heather Forsgren Weaver that focused on this year’s show and how Kitchen plans to improve it from last year, which some said was underwhelming.
RCR: What is going to be the focus of this year’s show?
Kitchen: I think if you look at the show, you will see that the word “convergence” is appearing everywhere.
What’s ahead in 1999? We are looking at the changes in the industry. You only need to look at the list of speakers at the supersessions to see that we are off in a different direction.
RCR: How will it be it different than previous shows?
Kitchen: As I just mentioned, the direction will be quite different. The keynote speaker on the first day is Ted Leonsis, president, AOL Interactive Properties Group. Followed by a panel of John Majors, president and CEO of Wireless Knowledge; Alan Kessler, president of Palm Computing Inc.; Mohan Vishwanath, Ph.D., vice president from Yahoo! Everywhere; Harel Kodesh, vice president of the productivity appliance division of Microsoft; Nicholas “Colly” Myers, CEO of Symbian Ltd.
You have got to admit that is a line-up like you have never seen at a PCS show or at a wireless show-at any wireless show.
RCR: How are sign-ups comparing with last year?
Kitchen: We are right on target. We recognize that as with many other industries, trade shows are plateauing. People are being very cost conscious. Of course, in our industry, as fast as it is moving, we have had a lot of mergers and acquisitions as we all know. This could reduce the number of people that come to the show, but we are expecting 20,000 attendees and we have 600 exhibitors. (In comparison, PCS ’98 had 21,800 registrants and 767 exhibitors.)
We have to include in that hard data that just about the time the show was going to start we had Hurricane Georges. We had people leaving in droves. The whole contingent from Motorola from South Florida left on a bus. Ian Morris told me that as he and one of his colleagues were headed south to go back home on Wednesday or Thursday that they were the only car headed south. Everything else was people leaving, evacuating south Florida.
It was interesting. We have been assured there will be no hurricanes this year.
RCR: Do you think the weather problem was the reason there were a lot of complaints the show was not as successful as it could have been?
Kitchen: Absolutely. There is no question about that. It is certainly something that we were disappointed with, but you can certainly understand when people are thousands of miles away from home and they don’t want to get stuck, so people were trying to get the earliest available flight out. As I already mentioned, folks in the Florida area were going home to board up their houses. It is kind of hard to not understand or empathize with that.
RCR: You are going to be in New Orleans. That is where the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s show was held earlier this year. What are you planning to do to blunt any type of comparisons?
Kitchen: Quite frankly, I don’t care if people compare because I think when they compare, what they will see is the PCIA show being a tremendous show.
PCS ’99, as far as we are concerned, is going to be our best ever. We have got the best speaker list we have ever had. The exhibit hall is going to be great. So we are very, very excited about PCS ’99.
RCR: I understand Chairman William Kennard of the Federal Communications Commission is not coming.
Kitchen: That is correct.
RCR: Is another one of the commissioners or another FCC official going to talk to the general show?
Kitchen: Chairman Kennard is doing a video. We will be taping that very close to the show so it will be very current. FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth, FCC Commissioner Susan Ness and FCC Commissioner Michael Powell will all be there in attendance.
RCR: With the consolidation that you talked about in the personal communications services industry, can PCIA survive as the representative of the mobile phone industry or do you need to either return more to paging or evolve more to fixed wireless?
Kitchen: Actually what we are doing is we are doing all of the above. We continue to recognize that our roots are in paging and messaging and that whole industry is evolving into something very different than what it was even back as recently as the merger of the two organizations-NABER (National Association of Business and Educational Radio) and Telocator-but we have also looked at opportunities to move into other areas.
The organization is into PCS and we are still into PCS. We have our PCS section; its members are going strong. We just had a PCIA council meeting not too long ago so that section of the membership is doing just fine.
Our most recent section is fixed broadband, the LMDS (local multipoint distribution service) folks. We are very very excited about that section-the Wireless Broadband Alliance. They are doing very well. It is a great exciting spot in the industry.
RCR: The Chairman of the Board of PCIA is George Schmitt, president of Omnipoint. Have you had a commitment from Omnipoint that they will stay once they complete their merger with VoiceStream Wireless?
Kitchen: Omnipoint has always been a member and we have no reason to believe that the merged organization won’t continue with PCIA.
RCR: At the show will there be an emphasis on fixed wireless? I saw bone session on LMDS, but will there be a more general focus on fixed wireless?
Kitchen: There is a focus on all of our different membership sections. Exactly what is in that track I couldn’t tell you without looking at the show program.
RCR: What does PCIA think of the FCC; there has been some criticism that they are missing the forest for the trees. In other words, they are spending all of their time on little details; they are missing the big picture. Do you think this is a fair criticism? Do you think PCIA would share it?
Kitchen: No I don’t think that is a fair criticism.
I think what we have seen since Chairman Kennard took over is a commission that is very dedicated to seeing the industry move in the direction of competition.
They are trying to move their processes along. Tom Sugrue (chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau,) has made it one of his goals to get rid of the backlog both in docket items and in licensing at the commission. So I think the commission is working very hard to tackle not only the big issues but the small ones as well.
RCR: What successes have you had with your Agenda for a Wireless America? It is about 18 months old?
Kitchen: We have had a number of successes. The first one we point to is interconnection. A number of our members have been able to sign interconnection agreements with the local exchange carriers, but I would quickly add that battle is not over. There are some LECs that continue to hold out. We will continue to fight those battles on a daily basis. We are still confident we will ultimately win those battles.
Taxation. We certainly made the government aware of the taxation issues.
Infrastructure. Our SOMA (Site Owners and Managers Alliance) section, I think, is an indication of where the whole antenna-siting industry has gon
e. We have seen most of the major carriers sell off their antenna-site businesses typically to our SOMA members. That has moved well. We have had a su
ccess in the last Congress in keeping the Leahy/Jeffords bill from moving forward. We are confident we will be OK there.
(On Aug. 5, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.) re-introduced an antenna-siting bill that gives state and local governments the ability to regulate tower siting. It has been referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, where no action has taken place.)
Spectrum management. We think our stand on spectrum caps is excellent given the progress we have made there, which is directly correlated to our spectrum management issues and the Agenda for a Wireless America.
The Agenda for a Wireless America was a focus. It had its six tenets. We think over the last year-and-a-half we have been able to address those all and make significant progress.
RCR: Is there anything that you have been disappointed in?
Kitchen: Certainly there have been some things we have been disappointed in. Last year we were disappointed in the commission’s decision to not go far enough on forbearance on resale, as an example.
RCR: What has happened with tower-siting issues in the last year? Do you think tower siting has improved on the local level?
Kitchen: Yes, it has definitely improved. We can point to the fact that many of the challenges that have gone to court, the wireless industry has won. The more of those challenges we have won, the fewer challenges we have seen. We have made great progress … While there are certainly still issues with tower siting, it is not the issue it was a year-and-a-half, two years ago.
RCR: How do you see your relationship with the local governments? About a year ago, you signed an agreement with the FCC Local and State Government Advisory Council?
Kitchen: Yes, that is right.
RCR: Has it improved in the last year?
Kitchen: Yes, and I think that agreement had something to do with it, for sure.
RCR: One of the issues I have not seen you enter is the issue of encryption. And yet encryption is how PCS keeps mobile phone conversations private. Is PCIA going to enter the encryption debate?
Kitchen: No. We have no plans to.
RCR: Any additional comments on the FCC’s recent action on the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994?
Kitchen: I think you know that CALEA has been a long, hard-fought battle. We have certainly disagreed on the punch-list items on what needed to be implemented and what fell within the scope of CALEA and what didn’t. We didn’t fare very well. The fact that the FCC upheld six of the nine items we think will cost the industry a great deal of money. Costs are going to be passed to the consumer and we question to what value to the consumer.
We are very concerned over the level playing field-that by not changing the grandfather date, that the PCS industry is being singled out from the others because none of our equipment was installed prior to Jan. 1, 1995.
RCR: Are you going to continue to fight the grandfather date on Capitol Hill?
Kitchen: That is really a good question and I think it is something that the jury is somewhat still out on. We will have to decide whether we can continue to fight those battles or cut them off.
