Planet ISPCON

Let ISP-Planet be your other ISPCON guide.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 17, 2005]

When you arrive at the show, you'll get a bag and a book detailing the sessions. You've also got the ISPCON website with its valuable session grid. For the inside scoop, there's the Inside ISPCON blog. But leave room for us too. Let ISP-Planet be your other ISPCON guide.

We know a few people here. Allow us to introduce them.

Returning to chair the ISP-CEO session, which in itself is worth the price of admission for the entire show, is Doug McDonald, longtime contributor to ISP-Planet. A hosting industry veteran, McDonald now runs his own business, Harrisburg, Pa.-based Branch Run Enterprises. He has also worked for major hosting players Hostopia and Tucows.

Chairing the other session, on Open Source Communications, is Greg Boehnlein, with whom we spoke at length during ISPCON Spring (we got his attention by paying for breakfast—see Asterisk is Developing). Boehnlein is vice president of Cleveland, Ohio-based N2Net, an ISP that's offering all the new services. The Asterisk article mentions the whiz kid Boehnlein admires, Kristian Kielhofner. Kielhofner will be delivering two advanced Asterisk sessions on Thursday.

Delivering a key session, First Four Years as a WISP, is Eden Recor, whose WISP we profiled two years ago.

Guru and marketing advisor Mike Cassidy, whose ISPCON preview article is here, will be delivering two sessions. The first, Top 10 Managed/Value-Added Services of Today and Tomorrow (and 5 to Avoid), is with Doug McDonald. His second session, Connection as VAS Conduit, Optimizing a Profitable VAS Model also features John McKown.

We had a long e-mail conversation with McKown (see How To Grow, How To Change) and felt privileged to speak with him because his Dover, Del.-based Delaware.net is thriving and he provided valuable insights.

Dan Hoffman, president of New York City-based outsourced IP phone company M5 Networks, is looking for ISP partners and dishing advice in Turning to IP Voice to Generate New Revenue Streams. We had a long conversation with him at his office earlier this year, learning about his business and its history in A Local VoIP Provider.

Rich Bader, former ISPCON keynote speaker (he told ISPs how to survive in 2002), runs business-focused Portland, Ore.-based ISP EasyStreet. We profiled the history and current plans of his company in A Cat in a Basement in Oregon. He's one of the few here for whom running an ISP is probably easier than his previous job: head of a division of Intel.

Back again is the tireless ISP advocate Cynthia deLorenzi. She has connections in both Virginia and Texas. She runs Fairfax, Va.-based Patriot.net for her mother, who inherited the business when her brother, Bob deLorenzi (see in memoriam) passed away at the age of 42 in 2002. She continues her brother's work and his advocacy for telework. From November, 2000 until January, 2001, Bob deLorenzi served as the Chief Technical Consultant for the Bush-Cheney Presidential Transition Team. Today, Cynthia deLorenzi is co-chair of the WBIA (see Your Free Washington Bureau For ISP Advocacy) with Frank Muto and appears at numerous conferences (see, for example, ISPCON: Making Allies from Enemies and At F2C, ISPs and VoIPs Have Similar Concerns). She has earned her three paragraph bio on the ISPCON faculty list. She will be speaking on The Business Case and Practice of Advocacy.

Elliot Noss, who runs Tucows (job title: president and CEO) will be speaking on Love Technology? Use it to Win Customers. We won't write an essay on the subject here, but believe us, if anyone knows this stuff, it's him.

Best wishes to Tom Millitzer who will have undergone a complex operation on his spine when this is printed but who will nevertheless attempt to speak on The Big Shift: Successful Exits, Funding New Models over a video link. Some of his valuable advice to ISPs contemplating a purchase or sale can be found in our January article, Be Accountable, Part II.

Don't ignore the lawyers. Keynote panelist David Snead will be in three sessions, one of which is a keynote. We look forward to learning more about him.

Dave Baker, EarthLink's professorial and scholarly lawyer, will be talking about Your Best Business Options in the Kevin Martin Era. EarthLink, America's largest non-facilities-based ISP, shares your pain and Baker's been thinking about this problem for years.

Kristopher Twomey, whose law office recently provided an update on U.S. regulation (see Regulation Briefs, September 2005), will talk on The 10 Biggest Policy Issues Facing Your Business and What to Do About Them and if you can think of number 11, he'll answer that too.

Companies
We've written about many of the companies exhibiting and speaking at the conference, especially in our Value Added Services directories.

Of note are the following articles:

• TowerStream in TowerStream: Getting It Right The Second Time and A Wi-Fi VoIP Handoff in the Parking Lot
  
  
• Our Hostopia profile
  
  
• The California ISP Association in our article I Wish They Could All Be CISPA
  
  
• Perimeter Internetworking in our article Outsource Security to the Cloud
  
  
• Our profile of Sendmail, the company: Sendmail, the Flexible Mail Solution
  

Last, and most important, is our article on the solo keynote, Covad. We did not speak with the CEO, who will be keynoting at ISPCON, but we learned a lot about Covad's recent eyecatching moves in the marketplace and concluded that Covad's Acquisition of NextWeb Makes Sense.

— End

Note: The parent company of this website, Jupitermedia, has a minority interest in ISPCON.