N+I Atlanta Report Archives

September 12, 2002

Weapons of mass disruption

For our final blog entry on N+I, a note to the show's tchotchke selection committee: We love the free Symbol 802.11b WLAN cards, but next year (if there is a show), we could do wihtout the foldable "all-in-one" tools that were put in every N+I show bag this year.

Apparently, those things look a lot like a butterfly knife to an airport x-ray machine.

On the way home from the show, it took an Atlanta airport security guard around 15 minutes to remove every item from my suitcase as he looked for the contraband. All I could do was stand there in my socks, wondering what could have set off the weapon-detectors, while my boxer shorts were put on display for everyone in line.

After covering the table with all my stuff, the guard found the all-in-one tool buried deep in the N+I show bag. It turns out the thing had a tiny knife blade on it, as well as pliers, and screwdriver. Since I was flying on Sept. 11, I didn't argue when they threw the thing in the trash.

Posted by Phil Hochmuth at 10:10 AM

Something for everyone

On our way out from the convention yesterday, we were surprised by an enthusiastic young woman, wearing a black haltertop which exposed plenty of midriff, who walked up to greeted us.

"Free passes guys! We're open until 4 a.m.!" she said while handing us four passes to "The Masters," an exotic dance club -- something Atlanta seems to have no shortage of.

"Jesus is the master, guys," said a young man, standing only a few yards from the halter-topped young woman. He was dressed more modestly in slacks, a white dress shirt and tie, a worn-looking bible in his hand. "The son of the Lord has walked the earth!"

We gave him a sheepish grin, then returned to the hotel for a quite evening of studying MPLS draft proposals.

Baby can hack you

The wireless security zone at the NetWorld+Interop I-Labs features a wireless PC near a wireless access point that is sniffing traffic and displaying what it finds.

What it finds are a lot of passwords being used in the clear by attendees who are logging into the show network via wireless PCs. The equipment is set up as a very effective demonstration of the simple fact that security is a must for wireless networks.

The sniffing PC is picking off wireless traffic via a setup that includes an empty baby-formula can as an antenna. This has its humorous aspects, similar to the demo at an earlier trade show in which a vendor ran DSL over barbed wire just for the heck of it.

But the formula can is also practical. "It gives us a little more gain than the antenna in the wireless card," said one of the I-Lab volunteers.

The terrorists didn't win

NetWorld+Interop opened an hour late today in memory of last year's 9/11 attacks that struck just as the show opened its doors.
Those few people who were in the building at 8:46 a.m. observed a minute of silence while a memorial observance was held in Centennial Olympic Park down the street.
When the show did open at 11, attendees were undeterred and crowded into the exhibition hall. It looked like business as usual.
Fashion statement for the day: red, white and blue lapel ribbons and shirts that worked the stars and stripes into the motif.

Make (plenty of) way for Segway

On a walk back to the hotel from the show yesterday, my colleague and I came across a helmeted man riding one of those Segway scooters down the street.

Segways are motorized electric scooter-like devices that are being billed as a "local transportation solution." They are being considered by the U.S. Post Office, and other businesses that rely on employees who spend a lot of time walking. The device looks like a futuristic dolly, and uses gyroscopes to sense what direction the rider wants to go.

The Segway jockey we saw seemed a little wobbly on the thing as he jerked the device along, careening around the sidewalk. A few people standing on street corner ogled and pointed at the man, some of them laughing. My colleague and I stayed on the other side of the street out of harm's way.

VoIP quality: can you hear me now?

At a NetWorld+Interop session here on VoIP, users and network consultnats discussed the art of derermining voice quality over an IP connection.

"You can buy a lot of expensive equipment to test voice quality," said Susan Knott, global network architect for PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting. "But I've found that if my vice president of finance can talk to my CIO [over a VoIP connection], and they both say the quality of the connection is OK with them, then I say that's good enough."

In other words, VoIP quality is in the ear of the end-user. Matthew Liste, practice manager for ThruPoint, a network consultancy, agrees with this notion.

"The best way to test quality is to just put phones out there and see what people say," he says. The formal way by which voice quality has been tested in the past was to put a group of people in a room and have them rate phone sound quailty on a scale from one to five. This Mean Opinion Score (MOS) test can be carried out in an enterprise on a less formal basis, Liste said.

"If you put [IP] phones out," he said, "and ask people to occasionally write down the quality of their calls from one to five, you basically have a MOS score right there.

Retro Cisco

Cisco probably hasn't ever had a NetWorld+Interop booth this modest unless it once bought space in Startup City.
This year's display consists of a counter with two people sitting behind it passing out schedules for Cisco seminars being held in a room upstairs from the show floor.
Not a router in sight.
If you've been to this show before, you know that Cisco invests in booths that practically need their own zip codes, so this is quite a change.
This time the booth is roughly the same size as the one occupied by Computer Connection, purveyors of new and used network equipment.

N+I Sideshow

There is a wealth of free entertainment on the show floor.
The Sprint dancers dressed in black suits are pretty good with their precision moves, but the Radware guy on the seven foot unicycle wearing a straight jacket was eye-catching as well. He kept up his Radware patter while he worked his way out of the constraints, but nobody really paid much attention to the pitch.
Cingular's booth hosted an artist in a cutaway jacket who painted a portait of Elvis Presley on a black sheet of paper with his hands in five and a half minutes. Elvis tunes played in the background. Earlier in the day, he did a similar performance, only John Lennon was the theme.

Paint the big picture

Sprint honcho Ronald LeMay pointed out a lot of problems with the telecom industry at this morning's keynote address at NetWorld+Interop.
He said everyone involved in it should work hard, but even then some providers will fall by the wayside. The best companies will thrive in this environment, he said, and Sprint - surprise - will be one of them.
But he said the weeding out of some companies will be good in the long run. "Industry shakeouts are as good as they are inevitable. It makes the rest of the industry more vibrant," he said. "You should be enthusiastic about telecom's future."
That was inspirational talk during these tough times, but his speech might have held more weight if he'd managed to steer clear of the Sprint hype that pervaded it.
Much of his presentation was basically a Sprint ad, including an actual, lengthy commercial displayed on three video screens. The commercial even included the pitchman in the black trench coat that you see on TV all the time.
Less of that would have made a better keynote.

Ouch, Ron!

Sprint CEO Ronald LeMay was telling an anecdote about his daughter to open up his NetWorld+Interop keynote this morning and in the process gave his hosts a little whack.

He was recounting how his daughter, who is apparently studying algebra, seemed confused by his announcement that he was going to speak at "N+I". She thought N+I was part of an equation.
"Does N+I equal anything, Dad?" she asked.

Forty or 100?

That's a question Foundry Networks CEO Bobby Johnson threw out during his keynote address at NetWorld+Interop here on Tuesday, as he pondered what comes after 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Johnson said he thinks the industry may look at 40 before 100 Gigabit Ethernet, as the former technology currently exists in the form of 40G bit/sec OC-768, while no technology is out there now that can do 100M bit/sec.

In the past, Johnson said, the development of high speed Ethernet involved "piggybacking" on top of technology from existing high-speed connectivity technologies: Gigabit Ethernet borrowed from Fibre Channel and 10 Gigabit Ethernet borrowed from OC-192.

So if past is prologue, we should see 40G bit Ethernet in the next two to five years, he added.

Networld What?

Last night while watching my beloved New England Patriots with some co-workers at a hotel sports pub here, I got to talking to an IT consultant from Accenture who was also watching the game.

At first glance, my colleagues and I mistook the guy -- who sported a goatee and shaved head -- for Network World columnist Mark Gibbs. As it turns out, this consultant fellow was an avid Network World reader, and he got the joke right away. He even put on a decent English accent for us -- not knowing Mr. Gibbs hails from New Zealand.

Assuming the consultant was here to attend Networld + Interop, he gave me a quizzical look when I began talking to him about the show.

"Networld + Interop, what's that?" he said. Apparently, he was in town working on a WAN project for a client, a large banking firm -- not to attend N+I.

NOT booth babes

Just in case vendors forgot to bring enough people to Atlanta to staff their show booths, a talent agency was hawking its services yesterday as the exhibition floor was being set up.
Someone wearing an enormous plastic Elvis Presley head and someone else wearing a similar likeness of Marilyn Monroe passed out fliers announcing booth staffing. These are highly specialized workers, with job titles like crowd gatherers demonstrators, costumed characters, Las Vegas showgirls and performers/dancers, according to the handout.
"Ask us about our celebrity big heads," the flyer urges.

Cutting edge

It's not as nutty as it sounds if you consider that the popularity of the games will force service providers to create a low-delay Internet service so enthusiasts don't suffer a handicap by virtue of the their Internet link.

Such a service would of course be great for corporate networks that need highly responsive Internet services with application-layer service guarantees, according to Johna Till Johnson, CTO of Greenwich Technology Partners at her talk this morning.

Johnson, also a Network World columnist, was a panelist speaking about Breakthrough Technologies.

Also on her list: instant messaging (a database in the sky that knows where you are) and grid computing (taking advantage of increasingly powerful desktops).

Take a cab

If you haven't gotten here yet but are coming to the combined NetWorld+Interop and Comdex show, be prepared to navigate around construction.

They're building a new Omni Hotel across Andrew Young International Blvd. from the old one and the entire street is blocked off leading up from Centennial Olympic Park. To get in from that direction, you have to walk up a narrowed sidewalk across the street, cut through the CNN building's lobby, pop back outside and walk a hundred yards or so to the main entrance of the Georgia World Congress Center. There's a big NetWorld+Interop/Comdex banner on the building to mark where to go. It's probably easier to ride in on the shuttle bus or in a taxi.

Speaking of banners, there's a dearth of them here. Companies in earlier years hung them all over the outside of the building to advertise their names and products. They pretty much covered the building like gift wrapping. This year, though, there are just three: N+I/Comdex's, Foundry Networks' and Mercedes Benz's.

Welcome!

Grizzled N+I veterans Tim Greene and Phil Hochmuth will report their observations and insights from the show here. Are you at the show? Click on the Comment link to let us know what you're seeing and thinking at the show. And click here for the most in-depth breaking N+I news anywhere.

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