ISPCON: Notes from the Show Floor

The ISPCON show floor is the place to find out what's happening.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [July 11, 2005]

Spring ISPCON was held in Baltimore at the end of May. The West Coast ISPCON will be October 18 through 20 in Santa Clara. The show features great conference sessions, a bubbling show floor, and the evening sessions which are off the record and which, therefore, we will not write about. You'll have to ask someone else who was there.

Still solving Wi-Fi interference after all these years
We were surprised to find Jack Unger, the wireless interference prevention guru who once gave a full day session on the topic at ISPCON, working with Anaheim, Calif.-based NextPhase Wireless. He told us he's still doing what he knows best, "helping new WISPs learn before they deploy." Right now, he said, the company is focusing on Orange County, already the second most unwired area in the U.S. Unger said that we may see things never seen before, such as Wi-Fi on buses.

Pennsylvania's backbone
We talked to Nitin Krishna, product line manager for IP and Ethernet at Allentown, Pa.-based PPL Telcom, a fiber optic backbone provider connecting various cities in Pennsylvania to New Jersey, New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The company even has fiber in Williamsport, population c. 30,000. PPL Telcom is an unregulated subsidiary of energy company PPL Corporation, which has a need for fiber and the resources to build its own.

WISP websites
We chatted all to briefly with Kory Mohr, based in Emmaus, Pa., who runs several websites for WISPs, the most famous of which is WISP Centric.

YourNetPlus
We met up again with Gary Stanley of Monroe, N.Y.-based Your Net Plus, who told us the company is rolling out all sorts of nifty new things for ISPs, most of which he cannot talk about yet, but said to look for a mobile VoIP product and an eBay interface.

Mobile e-mail
We talked once again to Josh Mailman of San Jose, Calif.-based everyone.net whose company is also working a many things he cannot talk about. However, completed projects, which he was able to talk about, include pushing e-mail to mobile devices like the Blackberry and Treo, synching mail to all devices and across multiple accounts, and compatibility with many new e-mail clients including Thunderbird.

Mailman was particularly enthusiastic about the company's software for mobile devices. He says the company charges a one time fee to end users of about $35 and that this price is much lower than the per user pricing of an enterprise server that larger companies would use to achieve the same end.

Missing children
We'll have more on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, with branch offices across the U.S.. We will be talking to this organization about how ISPs can participate in Amber Alerts, and similar matters.

The organization also wanted ISPs to know that although ISPs are not supposed to monitor the behavior of their users, they are required to report anything related to child pornography and abduction that they find in the course of normal operations.

Conclusion
These are just the items that stood out, that made us put pen to paper. We wish we could have recorded everything, but really—you had to be there.

— End