The telecom industry is poised to “drive growth and prosperity on a global scale,” AT&T Chairman, President and CEO Randall Stephenson said in Tuesday’s NXTcomm08 keynote speech, and service providers and their vendors all have “an important role to play in making that happen.”

In a speech clearly aimed at inspiring an audience of thousands, Stephenson focused on the themes of velocity and connectivity, as well as driving home the point that services take off when they go mobile. The telecom industry is position “to accelerate the velocity of commerce,” using smart mobile devices and connectivity that extends to every device sold at Best Buy.

“We are about to connect another billion-plus people to the network” via mobile phones, “and many of those people are in developing countries, and are being connected to the global economy for the first time,” Stephenson said. He described the impact of global phones on fishermen in India, who were then able to check and compare wholesale price offerings for a boat full of fish before they chose the harbor in which to dock. Instead of being at the mercy of the wholesalers, fishermen who could price-shop saw their profits increase eight percent and reduced waste based on lost stock, which increased the supply of fish and drove down prices to consumers by four percent.

“Those fishermen could buy more, even buy bigger boats, and you can imagine the impact on the local economy,” Stephenson said. In many developing countries, new users will leapfrog existing technologies such as PCs and go right to mobile Internet devices.

“We are going to see growth and velocity on a major scale in this industry,” Stephenson reiterated. “Our business is making it fairly simple to connect people to their worlds on their terms. There are more than one billion devices connected to AT&T’s network today including mobile phones, ATMs and gas pumps, and we want more. We need to drive the development and delivery of new applications.”

The challenge for the industry is to manage the complexity of the ecosystems required to bring new products to market, Stephenson said, citing the many vendors involved in helping AT&T deliver its U-verse IPTV service and the IPhone. And, Stephenson added, there is considerable time pressure.

“The opportunity is fleeting,” he said. “This is no time for missteps or missed deadlines.”

NXTcomm represents a good opportunity for the telecom community to come together and “for all of us to push each other” forward to do things such as more intuitive ways to mobilize applications.

“These are exciting times,” Stephenson said.

Stephenson traced the history of commerce and communications, starting with the birth of commerce near seaports and rivers, through railroads, highways, the telephone, broadcast television