Wags suggest that Supercomm may be the only carrier-oriented conference to survive the drought. It makes one wonder what will happen in September, when the National Fiber Optic Engineers' Conference convenes in Dallas.

But what does survival mean? In a year when Allegro Networks held a "wake" party at Supercomm to mourn telecom's dead and dying, survival was stripped to its essence. Equipment makers, as well as the semiconductor companies that supply them, were busy partnering up and forming alliances. But all were anxiously searching for someone, anyone, who even faintly resembled a customer.

The problem for vendors supplying carriers is that the self-induced rot is not over yet. During Supercomm week alone, WorldCom said goodbye to 12,000 more employees while exiting the wireless business. Qwest tried to hold a covert annual meeting in Dublin, Ohio, only to find that thousands of shareholders traveled to the Midwest to hurl epithets at since-ousted CEO Joe Nacchio. And on the vendor side, the rapid fall of Tyco International chairman L. Dennis Kozlowski shows that the Telco Inquisition isn't over yet.

In previous columns, I've talked about the number of equipment providers that have gone into a marketing deep freeze, keeping technologies alive through lean quarters until a reformulated carrier industry can upgrade networks again. But even if you're in suspended animation, it's bad form to avoid a show like Supercomm. It's even worse form to be a product manager with booth duty and to start crying as you're trying to go through your aggregation switch's feature set.

So, the wretched souls at the obligatory Atlanta party dutifully attended Allegro's wake, played with NASCAR replicas at the Centillium soiree and danced with General Bandwidth to the music of Collective Soul. When they got bored with half-empty show floors, they sauntered over to competitors' booths, to commiserate instead of spy.

The interesting question, given Europe's lag time in economic recovery, is not what the National Fiber Optic Engineers' Conference might be like in three months but what the International Telecommunication Union's quadrennial affair in Geneva will look like in 2003. Will it afford the first evidence of a reemerging market or be a mere shadow of the massive shindig that was Telecom '99?