Say, where have we heard that before?

For me, the CommunicAsia show thus far can be summed up in three words--hectic, hectic, hectic. I spend most of my days between trawling through the exhibition halls at the 'far' eastern end of Singapore, attending conferences held at a separate venue in the city, and rushing back to the office to file stories.

As CommunicAsia takes place only once every year, and one really does get an eyeful--and earful--of the latest and greatest in communications tech, I'm not really complaining.

Although the conference portion is the less glamorous cousin of the show, it is where serious issues by so-called experts of the industry are discussed and debated. So when I sat attentively at one of the conference tracks, the last thing I expected was for a prominent executive of a mobile company to recycle his presentation topic.

He spoke with such passion about how his company listens to customers and hasn't jumped onto the 3G bandwagon, that I thought 'wow, this guy has guts'. And since his somewhat anachronistic ways haven't landed his company into bankruptcy yet, he must be doing something right.

Most importantly, I thought, what a story it would make.

So imagine my chagrin when I pitched the story to my editor later that evening, and she said we had written the very same story last year. That executive had the same talking points at CommunicAsia 2005.

Flabbergasted, I cursed and swore as I scrambled to find something else to write about.

One doesn't really have to poke very deep, or very far, to realize that invariably some of these telecoms topics have been regurgitated to death, especially if you've been in the industry long enough and have attended the same trade shows for years.

Is this a sign that the comms industry is running out of ideas?

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Eileen Yu

Eileen Yu began covering the IT industry when Asynchronous Transfer Mode was still hip and e-commerce was the new buzzword. These days, she gets stirred up over issues concerning Internet regulation, intellectual property rights and software patents, online privacy and data protection. Eileen is senior editor at ZDNet Asia, where she oversees the business tech news site.