Interop NY 2008 was up considerably in size from the show in 2007.  According to Lenny Heymann, the GM of Interop, this is a trend that they expect to continue.  My personal experience was that the size of the vendors was also up this year.  I think there were so few startups that “Startup City” was pulled from the show completely.  In any case, the show floor was full and there was plenty of attendee traffic to go around.

Definitely helping out from a traffic and draw perspective was the addition of the Web 2.0 Expo - Interop was co-located with both Mobile Business Expo and the Web 2.0 show. It seems like that buzzword still hasn’t lost most of its luster.

From the InteropNet perspective, the main feeling was one of being rushed.  With the show only lasting two days, and the InteropNet team only having a couple of days of ramp up time, everything was compressed into a much shorter period than in Las Vegas.  While this would normally be a challenge, it’s an even bigger challenge at the Javits where the InteropNet team was allowed to do almost nothing ourselves because of union rules.  You’d be surprised how frustrated you can make a network guy who’s told that he has to stand there and watch the electrician plug things in, rather than just doing it himself.  The only thing faster than the InteropNet team getting the Interop NY network up, was my pedicab ride to the InteropNet Booze Cruise.

In any case, everything came off without a hitch, and EM7 performed flawlessly catching a couple of power outages that last day and alerting everyone before the batteries on the UPSes had a chance to run down.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll analyze the data from the show to see how many tickets were handled, amount of bandwidth consumed, etc and we’ll do a comparison to Interop Las Vegas.

We’re (both ScienceLogic and me personally) looking forward to Interop 2009.

Finding Zune-Fi: Ina Fried of News.com wanders the polite streets of San Francisco in search of Zune connections over Wi-Fi. She finds a few, and has a good experience. One cafe owner sees the ease with which she can stream music and calls it cool. She can't connect at the long-running Google-sponsored free Wi-Fi at Union Square, however, which means the Wi-Fi likely has an accept button that must be pressed. Surely Microsoft could insert a little technology that would allow a browser-free acceptance of terms? Probably involves Yet Another Protocol: the Wi-Fi Terms Browser-Free Presentation Protocol (WTBFPP).

Kodak adds interesting Wi-Fi enabled all-in-one: The new Kodak ESP 9 is a multi-function printer (fax, scan, print, copy) that connects to a network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. The $300 device spits out 30 pages per minutes in color, 32 ppm in black only. Kodak claims that the model line to which the ESP belongs uses ink in a vastly more efficient manner than the "average of comparable consumer inkjet printers."

OnAir has so far tested their calling/texting-only service on two aircraft--one operated by Air France, one by TAP Portugal--even though RyanAir announced plans that its planes would started being unwired with the service by late 2007. Still no word on that fleet progress.

Qantas will apparently launch cached Web browsing and limited Web email (probably through a proxy) along with instant messaging, with full Internet service coming "later in 2009." This is clearly due to a lack of satellite coverage that was just remediated a few weeks ago (see below). The first plane with limited service, a new A380, should be in flight 20-October-2008.

The Morning Herald seems to overstate the importance and scope of a complaint filed by the union representing American Airlines' flight attendants. The detailed coverage in the U.S. had more to do with the potential for issues, and likely attendants lack of interest in policing yet another media on the plane. Filtering doesn't work, the attendants probably already know, and this may just be a negotiating point with the airline.

On why Qantas is waiting until late 2009? This requires unwinding how OnAir gets its signal.

Aeromobile and OnAir both rely on Inmarsat satellites for their service. Both companies had several years ago staked their futures on the fourth-generation network Inmarsat was to inaugurate with three satellites that would use beamforming to allow precise delivery of nearly 500 Kbps per receiver, with hundreds or thousands of regions being able to be targeted from a single satellite. Inmarsat's third-gen network--don't confuse this with 3G cellular ground-based networks--can deliver about 64 Kbps per channel.

Now, unfortunately, Inmarsat was three years late on launching its trans-Pacific bird. While the company claims 85 percent coverage of the earth and 98 percent coverage of population, there's a big gap over the Pacific that also prevents them from having good overlap between the U.S. and Japan/China/Korea, as well as the southern Pacific, covering Australia. Since the biggest market for long-haul flights would likely be Australia, Japan, and China, traveling trans-Pacific or trans-hemispheric routes, that gap is rather large.

Aeromobile opted to build out a service, deployed only by Emirates airline as far as I can tell, that uses the 3G service since it was available, and most necessary equipment is already installed on most over-water planes. OnAir was waiting for 4G, which has necessitated a long wait, but allowed them to launch in Europe with a seemingly next-generation service. Given that OnAir is controlled by an airline-owned integration firm, SITA, and by Airbus, they're not going anywhere.

Inmarsat finally lofted its third satellite on Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 19-August-2008, and the launch and separation was reported as successful. Previously, the company has needed up to a year to verify and deploy its 4G satellites. (You can read extremely close coverage of the launch at a Web site devoted to space enthusiasm.)

However, the dirty little secret about Inmarsat's BGAN is that it costs a fortune to heft bandwidth across it. Thus, in-flight broadband over BGAN, if it's ever available, is going to be changed on an extremely high per-MB rate. None of the providers want to say this. This is in contrast to Row 44 (and, once, Connexion by Boeing), which relies on leased Ku-band transponders where they can fix costs and they require high volumes to keep per-bit costs efffectively low.

OnAir's launch of calling on Air France's service involves paying a few euros per minute for calls, which might help you understand what data costs could ultimately run.

From the Consumerist:

Last week, “This American Life” featured a 30-minute piece on people who scam the scammers—in this case, three guys who prey upon small-time Nigerian con men and try to trick them into placing themselves in mortal danger. “This American Life” tells how they almost got a guy to enter a Western Union office in Chad carrying an anti-Muslim/pro-Bush note that announces his intention to rob the place. Whether you think these stunts are funny probably depends on your level of empathy even for criminals, and whether you think the avengers ever fully succeed. But c’mon, getting someone in another country to hold up a sign that’s offensive in your language is pretty much always funny

Listen to the episode over at this American Life.