For many smaller, rural, independent telcos, smaller cable companies and competitive local exchange carriers attending the MetaSwitch Forum, there is a genuine sense that options available to global giants like AT&T (News - Alert) and BT simply are not viable for them They don’t have lots of programmers on staff. They don’t have global networks, wireless assets or development teams to create new applications that fuse wireline and wireless networks or integrate Web applications.

A future marketplace where some providers can create applications that run on any device, anywhere, such as David Axam, BT (News - Alert) director says his company is doing, seems tantalizingly out of reach. It might be true, as Karen Campagna, Cisco senior manager points out, that “the rate of change has accelerated and that the future is a highly visual and seamless environment where people rely more and more on social networking.”

Networks are becoming more open, as MetaSwitch (News - Alert) Vice President Andy Randall notes. Delegates generally agreed with Randall and Axam that third parties now will be creating more of the applications. But there also was a sense that smaller providers simply don’t have the resources to do those things.

It might be possible for a company like BT to seriously entertain creating new applications “in 90 days, including the business case,” as Axam says BT now does.

But asked how all the mashed-up applications and Web 2.0 applications drive revenue, Axam agreed that “it is not easy to see” how that happens, in all cases.

Delegates seemed to agree with Randall that the entire business now entails “more risk,” and that there now is a need to “get comfortable with greater risk” in the business. “The uncertainty about the future is just there,” Randall says. “Google (News - Alert) didn’t start out knowing how they’d make money.”

“If something doesn’t work, try something else,” Randall says.

Some delegates also expressed concern about the reliability of new “mashup” applications that might not work as reliably as the voice and data services providers now sell to smaller business customers. “I don’t know that we are going to be putting together third-party developer groups,” one delegate said. And another expressed some doubt about whether his company could risk offering services that weren’t stable. “Small business customers expect us to provide services with no mistakes,” one said.

“Ninety-five percent of my small business customers just have phones on their desks,” one delegate said, alluding to the fact that he wasn’t seeing demand for all sorts of fancy new services.

The angst is understandable. A market changing apparently so fast is not especially forgiving. And there has to be legitimate concern that smaller competitors without access to the resources of firms such as AT&T or BT may be quite disadvantaged in the future.

All of which points out the growing importance of professional services industry technology suppliers can provide.

A rather more immediate issue is the size of the consumer wallet, especially if an economic slowdown is here, or coming.

One delegate pointed out that $150 a month is about as much as most of these smaller mass market retailers can compete for, and most smaller contestants do not own wireless assets at all—a concern if the trend to wireless substitution continues. Another delegate, Sam Kumar, CEO of Microtech-tel in Denver, Colorado, wanted to know what CLECs focusing on small and medium business customers could do, since neither mass market nor enterprise customers were his customers and prospects.

On that score, Apple (News - Alert) reports that in its most-recent quarter, it shipped 2,289,000 Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing 51 percent unit growth and 54 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter.

The Company sold 10,644,000 iPods during the quarter, representing one percent unit growth and eight percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter.

Apple also sold about 1,703,000 iPhones. All in all, revenue was up 43 percent.

The point, perhaps, is that even when discretionary income is limited, consumers will spend money for services, devices and features they deem important.

There didn’t seem to be much fundamental disagreement about where things are headed. There seemed much more delegate concern about what smaller competitors practically could do.

Gary Kim (News - Alert) (News - Alert) is a TMCnet contributing Editor.