N+I reporter's notebook

Yeah, blame the network

"The curse of the live demo," MCI President and CEO Michael Capellas said after the demo the carrier planned with Web conferencing partner Microsoft failed during his keynote speech at NetWorld+Interop. MCI was trying to show how customers could use Microsoft's Live Meeting conferencing tool in conjunction with their Outlook e-mail system to initiate a conference on the fly over the carrier's network. But after clicking on a user's name in an e-mail all the application did was spin. One MCI executive in charge of strategic relationships, on stage to produce the demo, blamed the delay on the network and talked about the weather. There were several audible groans from the audience with one fellow replying loudly "yeah, right," after the executive blamed the debacle on the network. Capellas made light of the flop and moved on while the other executive exited stage center without any other comments. After the keynote, a handful of reporters asked Capellas what went wrong. He stuck by his staffer's earlier explanation and said, "the local network was congested . . . it worked 10 times before" the keynote.

The spork: Bad model for IP convergence

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Yeah, blame the network

"The curse of the live demo," MCI President and CEO Michael Capellas said after the demo the carrier planned with Web conferencing partner Microsoft failed during his keynote speech at NetWorld+Interop. MCI was trying to show how customers could use Microsoft's Live Meeting conferencing tool in conjunction with their Outlook e-mail system to initiate a conference on the fly over the carrier's network. But after clicking on a user's name in an e-mail all the application did was spin. One MCI executive in charge of strategic relationships, on stage to produce the demo, blamed the delay on the network and talked about the weather. There were several audible groans from the audience with one fellow replying loudly "yeah, right," after the executive blamed the debacle on the network. Capellas made light of the flop and moved on while the other executive exited stage center without any other comments. After the keynote, a handful of reporters asked Capellas what went wrong. He stuck by his staffer's earlier explanation and said, "the local network was congested . . . it worked 10 times before" the keynote.

The spork: Bad model for IP convergence

In a separate keynote, Nortel's enterprise networks president Malcolm Collins emphasized how a converged network of voice and data cannot compromise the function of either service. As an analogy, he used the spork - the plastic eating utensil popular in many elementary school cafeterias. "A spork combines the function of a spoon and fork," Collins said, "but it's no better than the two utensils it replaces." Having a converged voice/data network with poorer quality for each respective service is just as bad.

NetWorld+What?

It used to be every cabbie knew when N+I was in town at the Las Vegas Convention Center and assumed that's where all the conventioneers were headed. No more.

One attendee last week getting into a cab said, "To the convention center, please," thinking that would get him to N+I.

"Which one?" the cabbie asked.

Apparently the driver was unsure which of the many competing expos to head for. Scattered around at various hotel convention centers were other major events, including an international garage-door trade show and a lawn and garden extravaganza.

A rogues' gallery of wireless

Companies at a network show so heavily abundant with wireless and security products still have a long way to go in practicing what they preach. Companies that were monitoring the abundance of rogue access points that vendors had installed at their booths (a rogue access point was defined as any equipment not under management by the show producers) included Cirond (its AirPatrol product) and AirMagnet (its AirMagnet Distributed offering).

On Tuesday afternoon, about half of the 225 rogue access points Cirond detected didn't even have basic Wired Equivalent Privacy security enabled. Cirond CTO Mitchell Burton said the system detected a high of 260 rogue access points during the three-day show. And 802.11a access points are creeping into the system, with about one-third of the rogue access points using 802.11a versus 802.11b or 802.11g technology.