How do you possibly answer that one? The honest response is: Well, there are 20,000 people here and I havent had the chance to ask every one of them what they think yet.

But still I get asked. At CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment in San Francisco this week, the truth is there were very few announcements of import. AT&Ts tie-up with Napster was probably the biggest on the operator side and its hardly earth-shattering. In fact, pegging the songs at $1.99 a pop got AT&T more negative publicity than anything else.

So I think its fair to say that the overriding theme of CTIA, from a content industry perspective, is how much the US carriers are still loathed. Not in public, of course. But go off the record and you find that content provider loathing is like James Blunts love brilliant and pure.

What do they hate? The pretence that the US has an off-portal market when it really has a small number of companies given permission to trade. They hate the bewildering variety of restrictions on their activities. They dont much like the limits on adult-oriented content that bans not just flesh but logos.

But most of all they resent the enduring absence of operators from events like CTIA (not entirely surprising given the levels of spite).

At the lamentable Billboard conference prior to the show, only one network exec appeared all day. He was Mark Collins from AT&T and the questioning ran along the lines of: Mark, tell us why it is that AT&T is just so great?.

This was the same conference at which the legendary musician Quincy Jones was asked repeatedly about mobile in the days keynote and answered repeatedly about the amplification of bass guitars.

So, not a lot of love around for operators, although in their defence they can be forgiven for maintaining a vice-like grip if the alternative is the kind of off-portal carnage Europe experienced in the mid-noughties.

I think CTIA 2010 might be an interesting show though. By that time there might be a US operator present, which is running a network entirely as a dumb pipe through which to move data around and sell advertising. It will be called Google Wireless.