Top network technology demos spark Interop

From rock bands to beer to booth babes, vendors at Interop have used every trick in the book to halt people wandering around the show floor and lure them into their booths, but this year the coolness of the actual demos overshadowed the gimmicks.

The Mandalay Bay Convention Center floor was audibly less boisterous with the lack of blaring music, jugglers and acrobats, giving the expo a more serious, business-like tone, but that doesn't mean a little flash didn't help. For example, one vendor managed to combine the attraction of a libation with a demonstration of its video conferencing system that held attention longer than it might have if the only reward was a T-shirt.

The vendor, LifeSize, demonstrated its LifeSize Room videoconferencing equipment with a virtual wine tasting. The potential customers sat in front of a high-definition screen interacting live with a wine expert on a high-definition screen. The expert walked the group through a tasting of a red and a white wine, a glass of each of which sat on a table in front of each attendee. The expert on the videoconference fielded questions about wine from the group. The tasting was periodically interrupted with patter about LifeSize Room, but that didn't seem to bother anybody. The booth was never empty.

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From rock bands to beer to booth babes, vendors at Interop have used every trick in the book to halt people wandering around the show floor and lure them into their booths, but this year the coolness of the actual demos overshadowed the gimmicks.

The Mandalay Bay Convention Center floor was audibly less boisterous with the lack of blaring music, jugglers and acrobats, giving the expo a more serious, business-like tone, but that doesn't mean a little flash didn't help. For example, one vendor managed to combine the attraction of a libation with a demonstration of its video conferencing system that held attention longer than it might have if the only reward was a T-shirt.

The vendor, LifeSize, demonstrated its LifeSize Room videoconferencing equipment with a virtual wine tasting. The potential customers sat in front of a high-definition screen interacting live with a wine expert on a high-definition screen. The expert walked the group through a tasting of a red and a white wine, a glass of each of which sat on a table in front of each attendee. The expert on the videoconference fielded questions about wine from the group. The tasting was periodically interrupted with patter about LifeSize Room, but that didn't seem to bother anybody. The booth was never empty.

Trusted Computing Group managed to keep its tiny booth crowded by virtue of what the gear in its booth was doing: actually implementing TCG's network access control architecture called Trusted Network Connect (TNC). The devices just sat on tables, but interested IT experts peered into monitors to see that, yes indeed, equipment from multiple vendors could assume the standard roles assigned by TNC and work together to insure only safe machines were able to join the secure demo network.

Network analysis vendor AirMagnet showed off its new product, Vo-Fi Analyzer, that tracks down what's wrong with voice over Wi-Fi phone calls so administrators can fix the problem. The software sits on a network-attached workstation monitoring phone calls and evaluating the quality of the calls by assigning them rankings under the MOS system

Users can then sort calls based on MOS score and drill down into details of those that scored low to find out why. It can also display charts that show the percentage of calls that fall into each MOS category. The device keeps track of jitter on calls, number of calls being handled by individual access points and the voice-data mix on a particular access point as some of the factors that might cause call quality to deteriorate.

Vo-Fi currently works only with Cisco voice over Wi-Fi gear, but the company says it is working on compatibility with other IP PBX vendors.

Interop Labs drew a steady stream of people who poured over an enormous network diagram of tests the labs performed on VoIP security and integration, the sheer scale of which held people rapt. The lab had set up five model enterprises using gear from two dozen vendors, then tried to disrupt the traffic using attack generators. The network revealed valuable results such as the performance of VoIP through VPNs, tricks of connecting VoIP to the public phone network, the problems network address translation poses to VoIP calls and the value of QoS in VoIP over Wi-Fi implementations.