Those darn jets - and other notes

Day one of DemoMobile 2003 proved that mobile communications are still vulnerable to interference by Navy F-14 Tomcat jets.

During a morning break, a flock of investors, demonstrators and reporters stepped into the warm late summer California sunshine and assumed the hunched posture typical of cell phone users. One could almost feel the deals being hatched, the pitches being pitched.

And then you could hear the faint ripping sound that heralds low flying warplanes.

The sound quickly grew louder, crowding out everything else. Suddenly a flight of Tomcats arced low overhead, from either the Marine air station at Miramar or the Naval Air Station at North Island, San Diego.

The dealmakers and pitchers looked skyward, scowling, smartphones and notosmart phones useless, and suddenly you could see in their faces a sudden realization: "Now, THOSE are great toys!"

Firetide, mentioned in our DemoMobile preview story, was first up at the show. And the first to take the spear in the chest: as we reported yesterday, a group of its wireless router-access points were plugged into wall outlets to create an instant wireless LAN without pulling cable.

But it didn't seem to work.

It turned out that everything was in fact working. EXCEPT the wireless clients onstate couldn't associate with the nearest Firetide node. But during three tests earlier that morning, everything had been perfect. Firetide CTO and Co-founder Ike Nassi, thinks the association may have been foiled by the scores of attendees with wireless notebooks, tablets and PDAs.

Later that morning, the Firetide network was running fine. Nassi and crew had secretly set up the nodes the day before, on Wednesday, at different locations in the Hilton La Jolla, the site of DemoMobile. It wasn't long, Nassi says, that Firetide has handling 40 million WLAN packets, according to a net scanner setup by Firetide. The hotel's WLAN, limited to the lobby and dining area, was handling only about 3 million.

The reason? Plugging the Firetide nodes into wall outlets had spread a WLAN blanket over a large part of the hotel. Guests turned on their laptops and jumped onboard.

Gene Wang, CEO of Bitfone, was on stage Friday to demonstrate Prism, a system that lets mobile operators offer an over-the-air software update service to their subscribers. Prism's Web interface lets the operator set up and manage groups of software updates, and can download them automatically to one or more subscribers.

But in case the cautious uptick in high tech tanks again, he also demonstrated he's got an alternative career path: he wrote and composed a song about Prism and sang it, strumming a guitar. It was more Sesame Street than E Street. But no one walked out.