It’s worth spending several hours on a plane to attend a conference that offers a lot of forward-looking ideas – and by that measurement, last week’s GENBAND (News - Alert) Perspectives13 conference in Orlando was worth the time attendees invested in it.

I went through my conference notes and pulled out what I found to be the most compelling ideas presented there.

1.       Carriers Without Wireless Needn’t Despair. Liberty Global (News - Alert) is an interesting company that invests in cable companies worldwide and is very hands-on with those carriers. Those companies typically don’t have a cellular business, which some stakeholders view as critically important as services become more converged. But launching wireless service isn’t really an option for most Liberty Global companies, noted Liberty Global CTO Balan Nair. “It’s hard to build a network and be the fourth or fifth operator,” observed Nair. “The math never works.” Instead, the company is using an MVNO approach, but Liberty Global is not what Nair considers a “standard MVNO.” To be successful, he said, “You want to control the SIM cards.” In addition, he said, “You have to own the [home location register].”

2.       AT&T Plans to Use Bonding and Vectoring. AT&T has promised to do some substantial upgrades to its DSL service in certain areas as part of its Project Velocity IP plans. Included in that strategy are plans to use vectoring and bonding to boost DSL bandwidth, said AT&T Vice President of Research Chuck Kalmanek.

3.       Real-world Small Cell Data. Kalmanek also shared the results of small cell trials that AT&T has conducted, noting that the company saw a 15 percent increase in traffic, stronger signals and a better customer experience. The company will begin its small cell rollout this year, Kalmanek said.

4.       A New Approach to Home Control and Security. Noting that low-power devices such as thermostats and security devices typically use proprietary interfaces today, Verizon (News - Alert) CTO Tony Melone sees an opportunity for carriers to offer home gateways with open interfaces and “the sophistication to recognize devices and communicate to cloud-based services.”

5.       The Content Encoding Opportunity. Melone also sees an opportunity for Verizon to “create scale to encode content to different formats for different devices.” He noted that for every piece of content, the creators of that content might need as many as 40 different versions. Extending on its experience with FiOS (News - Alert) and its RedBox partnership, Verizon believes it is well positioned to do that conversion for content providers.

6.       New Types of Carriers. The advent of Wi-Fi hotspot networks presents the opportunity for cities, owners of public spaces, universities, hospitals and the like to become carriers, observed GENBAND Chairman David Walsh. Repurposing phone booths as hotspots is a particularly interesting opportunity here.

7.       Wake-Up Call on Rural Broadband. Matt Beal has never been afraid of controversy – and now that he is CTO at CenturyLink, the incumbent carrier in many rural parts of the U.S., he has become an advocate for bringing broadband networks to rural areas that cannot get broadband today. Such an initiative won’t be funded unless certain things change, however, Beal said. On the topic of inter-carrier compensation, for example, he said, “Neither the Internet for the PSTN model is sustainable.”

8.       Hijacking Existing ROI. As TMCnet contributing editor Doug Mohney previously reported, Samsung is having considerable success in cracking the enterprise market for wireless devices. Tim Wagner, vice president and general manager of enterprise sales for Samsung Mobile, said one of the company’s successful tactics there is to “hijack existing ROI” by, for example, offering more cost-effective alternatives to devices that a company is already buying such as laptop and desktop computers or TDM and IP desk phones.

9.       Extending Buckets of Minutes. “One bucket of minutes should follow you,” said Malik Tatipamula, vice president of service provider solutions for F5 Networks (News - Alert). Tatipamula sees an opportunity for a carrier that can offer a plan that costs 20 percent more when a customer is roaming.

10.   Latency is the New Frontier. It’s not all about bandwidth, latency is also key -- as an observation made by Lee Blaylock, founder and CEO of Who@, illustrates. “For every 1 millisecond of latency, Amazon loses $1 million,” said Blaylock.