While many telecommunication engineers have indeed been permanently displaced in this shrunken market, I'm pleased to report that we're doing better than anticipated. Not only is preregistration healthy, but we have experienced very few cancellations of papers, workshops or speakers. Some speakers whose jobs have been eliminated have even elected to present their papers speaking on their own behalf, for the benefit of the industry at large.

Many participants realize that even if investment capital has long since departed, the need for reliable wireline-broadband and wireless-mobile communication does not just disappear, even if there are backbone overcapacity issues. Designers can focus on the short-range interconnect problems that represent bottlenecks today, or examine in-system upgrades in areas such as Sonet line cards, where carriers cannot postpone purchase decisions even if they want to.

Recent cutbacks at large companies like Tellabs and Nortel show that the layoffs are by no means over, but design groups at some large OEMs are discovering something interesting: They're seeing initial interest from Asian accounts, even if North American WAN markets are dead in the water. Michael Liu, editor of EE Times China, predicted in the summer that we would see precisely this shift to "China first" for metropolitan broadband markets. It might be a blow to Western hubris to see China become the first to deploy metropolitan Ethernet or resilient packet rings, but few U.S. engineers can complain when they see interest in new topologies, from whatever quarter.

CDC therefore will represent a chance for all designers in the communications industry to give themselves a nice long pat on the back-not just for surviving the past year, but to recognize that interest in next-generation architectures is not dead.

It will be a long and difficult struggle to bring the North American market out of its slump, but the burgeoning Asia market provides reason to hope. A forum like CDC will give everyone a chance to see that new design techniques and technologies can still be found, even after two of the most wretched years in memory.