Chicago is putting on a pretty good show this week. The weather is cooperating and the wind off the lake is keeping the Grant park cicadas quiet -- as if they could be heard over the honking horns, bustling traffic and cacophonous hype emanating from the show floor at McCormick Place.

Far removed from the show floor, among the denizens of panel sessions and seminars, there is another sound to be heard. It is the disquiet of non-marketing folks -- engineers, CTOs, regulatory and legal affairs experts -- as they begin to squirm in the face of the quickly approaching day when all the promise of the next- generation network must be delivered.

They have been here before. But this time it's different. This time, their livelihoods are at stake. In the face of forced competition from the Telecom Act of 1996, also known as the CLEC days, big service providers had to know they were swatting at flies, that they weren't likely to lose everything to a bunch of over-funded upstarts. But the cable providers, wireless competitors and the Googles of the world today are not over-funded upstarts. They are for real. And this game is for real.

The industry knows what it needs to do. Its disquiet may stem from the fact that it has known for a long time what it needs to do -- yet it has not always done so. This disquiet is healthy. It isn't born of fear, but of realizing better than anyone the enormity of the task ahead and weighing that against the expectations of the marketplace and Wall Street.

Convergence has to happen. Interactive multimedia needs to happen. Ubiquitous broadband needs to happen. A wholesale transformation of network and business processes needs to happen. And it all has to happen without a clear vision of the return on investment for doing so.

No wonder people are beginning to squirm.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@telephonyonline.com.