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Industry Related News	Interesting New Products I finally had time to walk the floor at a recent show (http://www.wi-fiplanet.com). What an amazing time to be in the Connectivity Industry. Especially the Wireless Internet Service Provider side of things. A few products really caught my eye so I thought I’d jot down my thoughts. Let it also be known that none of these companies pay me anything, I don’t sell most of them etc. This is totally about what caught my eye, no fluff here. www.verniernetworks.com has a cool network control box. It sits between your LAN and your servers. This box keeps people from getting to your servers, the internet, other network segments etc. It’s based on who the user is, time, date etc. etc. etc. Pretty cool. My only problem with them is that it does nothing to protect wireless users. It’s got a built in switch so it can keep PC’s out of PC’s but that doesn’t help with access to wireless switches (Access Points). www.propogatenet.com claims to have a product that will let you predict the coverage of your indoor AP’s. I don’t know. I’d think file cabinets, people, and who knows what else would have a measurable effect on how accurate this is. I suppose it’s better than nothing if you’ve got a large building to light up and you can’t physically get there. I’m still of the mindset that you need to put in an AP and measure the coverage zones. One of my personal favorites of late. www.belairnetworks.com They have come the closest to doing mesh right out of anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve not heard of a single mesh system that actually works once deployed in a real world situation with real interference, customers etc. Nokia bought Rooftop years ago and never did get that to work. Everyone is running basically the same structure as that. BelAir is different because they use 5 gig for the backhaul and 2.4 and 5 GHz for distribution. Plus the backhaul is via directional antennas not the same omni that they broadcast with. If they can gain traction I predict that this will be the product of choice for municipal and campus type networks that don’t have copper or fiber to feed every node. There were a lot of PC security companies on hand too. www.senforce.com had an interesting way of keeping the hackers and crackers at bay. Something about building the firewall into the protocol rather than doing it via an add-on software package. www.airdefense.net also has some interesting ideas. There were a lot of hotspot systems or software packages there. I still think that (outside of airports and conference centers) are a dead market from a profitability standpoint. As an ISP and a WISP I think that the idea of building the whole network as a hotspot has some merit though. This would allow me to eliminate my billing department. A great guy by the name of Steve Stroh may have found the niche for hotspots though. That would be a two (multi?) tiered service, low speed free access for Joe Q. Public with a higher speed, prioritized secure service for road warriors. I’m not convinced yet, I think that mostly there will be free access at hotels, coffee shops etc. etc. etc. Right now I book hotels based at least partly on broadband availability and cost (more and more often it’s free) and next will base it on speed. Having said all of that I did run across a company that was pretty interesting to me. Their job is to handle roaming agreements between any and all Hotspot operators. So I could put in a (or many) Hotspot and allow any of my customers roaming on any other hotspot networks (that also had an agreement with them). That seemed like a great way for a small (read, not national) operator to follow a cell phone model, lots of independent operators all working together at one level or another. www.ez-wi.com and www.billingconcepts.com are the two addresses that I have from them. I didn’t know that IEEE was working on a POE (Power Over Ethernet) standard. Not only have they been working on one, it’s done. 802.3af is the standard. It’s 48 volt so we can easily go all 300’ of ethernet and not need different power supplies depending on how long the cable is. www.powerdsine.com (note that design is spelled wrong….) has a really cool product. It looks like an ethernet switch but you put data into one port and data and power come out the other one. I could sure clean up some tower sites with a product like this! One power supply to feed all radios would be great. It’s too bad they don’t have the ability to adjust voltage and polarity on each port, then I could use it on legacy products as well. Oh well, can’t have everything. It still looks great moving forward, especially for large building networks. It would be nice to be able to run data to each location that needs an AP via ethernet (much less self inflicted interference that way) and not have to make sure that that location is also near power. www.newburynetworks.com had a very interesting product. It uses radios parked around the area that monitor what’s going on. If an AP shows up where it doesn’t belong, it’ll spot it. They even claim they can somehow spot people outside of the area trying to connect to your network. They can also tell you physically where every remote radio is at. Accurate to 10’ as I recall. I can certainly see how this would be useful for office buildings and campus networks. We’ve had broadband in the local Sheriff’s cars for almost three years now. They use laptops but www.intermec.com looks like a much better way to go. A whole PC with a touch screen LCD display all in one small package. If only they’d take their brochure designer back behind the wood pile and teach him not to make phone numbers and URL’s so small and hard to find! Duh. www.bvsystems.com has some very cool toys. That new Firefly looks like the cats’ meow for larger companies that use standards based radios. The most amazing thing that I saw there was www.ipwireless.com and their 802.16a product. MOST companies there were smart enough to keep the radios turned off (the noise floor was really ugly, there were three spectrum analyzer companies there so I know of what I speak ;-). IPWireless had two full screen video streams running at the same time. I actually accused them of faking it. The owner gave me a dirty look (I really beat up on these poor guys at an earlier show) and unplugged the cable from the client radio. Video locked up. He plugged it back in, video back on. WOW!!!!! Abso-frikin’-lutely amazing!!!!! As someone used to dealing with the idiosyncrasies of 802.11b I sure had my eyes opened about what the WISP of the future will be using.

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