AT&T Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre is retiring effective June 3. (That’s a Sunday… do you think he’ll work through the weekend?) That means that his successor, Randall Stephenson, will give one of his first public addresses as AT&T’s new chairman and CEO at NXTcomm on Tuesday, June 19.

What can we expect AT&T’s new boss to talk about? Will he describe a vision for an even newer AT&T, newer than the “new” AT&T we have seen advertised of late. My guess is Stephenson, a long-time SBC executive, isn’t going to announce that this particular ocean liner will be making any sharp strategic turns in the near future.

It’s a pretty good time to be an incumbent service provider in the telecom industry, and Stephenson is sitting at the head of that table, along with fellow NXTcomm keynoter Ivan Seidenberg from Verizon. (Yes, it’s a very big table, with room for two at the head of it.) Though competition is encroaching from the cable TV industry and elsewhere, major telcos are innovating like crazy, already delivering or poised to deliver all kinds of new services in the voice, data and video realms, and across all types of wired and wireless devices.

However, AT&T has a lot on its plate, starting with Project Lightspeed, and I’m sure we can expect an update on how it’s progressing. Beyond that, I’m not sure where Stephenson will take us in his keynote, but here’s a few things I would love to see him talk about:

• A vision for home networks: Not the kind in which the kitchen blender is wired to record this week’s episode of “Lost,” though that would be totally cool; more like the kind in which video applications can be seamless controlled and viewed on multiple screens within the home (but not on the blender), and voice calls can be answered from any room in the home on practically any device (though again, let’s leave the blender out of it—too many sharp blades).
• A vision for fixed/mobile convergence: The only way to sum up FMC services right now is to say that everyone is testing absolutely everything. It would be great to hear from Stephenson where AT&T thinks all of this is going.
• A vision for WiMAX: Does WiMAX have a place in AT&T’s future, or in the future of its Cingular Wireless subsidiary? A whole market segment wants to know.
• A new vision of the competition: I’m starting to have a hard time figuring out who AT&T’s most significant competitors are. Is Comcast its most significant competitor? Verizon? Level 3? The CLECs it’s competing with in the enterprise market? Where does Google fit in, if anywhere? It would be interesting to hear Stephenson’s take on this.

Maybe imagining that all these issues will be addressed in a NXTcomm keynote is too good to be true. I don’t know if Stephenson’s speech writers are reading this, but I guess we’ll find out on June 19 in Chicago.

E-mail me at doshea@telephonyonline.com.