After Interop Las Vegas you may have seen our analysis of the data that we collected and delivered in our NOC view.  I thought I’d recreate the same data for NY and do a short comparison.

1) Like in Vegas, uptime for the network 100%.  This is no small feat considering that we introduced a new wrinkle in NY, taking down the primary NOC while the education portion of the show was still going on.  This was a forced failover to the backup systems, and it went flawlessly.  I’d like to give a little credit to EM7 on the 100% uptime as it caught a failover to battery power that allowed AC to be restored before a series of critical equipment would have gone down.

2) Again like Vegas, the average monitored device in the show network didn’t even hit 10% CPU utilization.  Still lots of computing overhead availabe in the show network.

3) The NY show network wasn’t nearly as busy as in Las Vegas, sustaining an average of only 27Mbps of usage (versus 56 Mbps) in Vegas.

4) Power consumption for the network and NOC in NY clocked in at 445kwh per day, about 25% less than the Las Vegas show.  This wasn’t because the equipment was any more power efficient, but instead because the show was smaller and therefore there was less network gear.

5) Finally, a stat we didn’t track too carefully in Las Vegas, but that I find interesting.  During show hours the wireless network average 1,100 users attached.  That’s a lot of people and a lot of wireless devices.

The good news is there was nothing too unexpected in the data, overall the smaller show led to a smaller number of tickets and smaller consumption of resources across the board.  We hope to have the opportunity to work with the InteropNet team again next year and take a look at this data year-over-year for each show.

• Devices: These are the hardware and operating system combinations that host or store the execution environment.
• Applications: Applications execute on host environments (devices + OS) and transform data into information useful for the business.
• Data: Digital representation of information that is acted upon by applications.
• Networks: Enable collaboration and the sharing of information across multiple devices and/or applications.

Today's announcement sees Meraki nicely footing the bill for extending their service into neighborhood affordable housing, municipal-speak for low-income housing that's subsidized typically through government efforts and funds. Meraki will install networks at 12 buildings in the Tenderloin, known as San Francisco's roughest neighborhood, now going on many decades with that designation.

Meraki claims a "presence" in 42 of 52 major neighborhoods in the city, although their map tells a very different story about how usage is clustered in areas in which it would make perfect sense that usage was seen.

Meraki has engaged in a very interesting public project, and likes the imprimatur of San Francisco, even as they don't really need the city; the city, in contrast, needs them (or Newsom particularly) to salvage something from years of planning that blew up in their faces.

Anyway, SF's EarthLink network would never have been built; or, having been underway, would never have been completed.

Forgive my snark tone and cynicism: Meraki has put a lot of resources into building a publicly accessible network across a hunk of SF that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Cablevision will ultimately spend about $300m in building a Wi-Fi network exclusively for its customers; 2.4m of these customers qualify to use the service at no cost. There's no pay as you go option, no monthly subscription; you're either a subscriber of theirs, or not. It's a fascinating strategy, because they're leveraging all these dollars as a tool to crack its competitors in the market. With increasing competition from telephone companies that are offering television service, cable companies need to compete on voice, data, and video, as well as well as on mobile offerings. When the network is built, Cablevision can conceivably offer Wi-Fi telephony service, too.

I'm dying to know what the reduced churn rate and increase in subscriptions will be in six months. Given that hotspot access costs $10 to $30 per month depending on the network, Cablevision is delivering something of value. It's great honey for new subscribers and glue to keep current subscribers.

The company is claiming that with this latest activation, they have the largest Wi-Fi network for consumers in the U.S. They're likely correct. The only other public access network of scale that's being used by large numbers is in Minneapolis, and based on what I know about both networks, Cablevision probably deserves bragging rights. The network in Taipei, Taiwan, is likely still larger, but I haven't heard any usage number in nearly two years; at that point, subscription rates were 10 percent of what had been projected.

Fourth US airline to go Wi-Fi: Aircell says they have a fourth airline--after American, Delta, and Virgin America--on board for its in-flight Wi-Fi service. The aerial broadband provider's latest partner will be announced soon. Aircell's service went live in 15 American Airlines planes two weeks ago, and there's been a surprising lack of reporting from regular travelers or journalists since the big splash at the launch.

Microsoft, two universities research methods for better Wi-Fi handoff for vehicles: The researchers developed a method they call Vi-Fi, writes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop, which allows a system to maintain connections with several base stations at once, using a primary access point for traffic until a discontinuity is predicted or encountered. This allows seamless handoffs and continuous voice conversations.

Speaking of autos and Wi-Fi, concerns raised about Chrysler's in-car Wi-Fi option: Randall Stross wrote nearly two weeks ago in The New York Times about the problem of distraction. With the Internet at your fingertips, can you restrain yourself? The only problem with the humorous and accurate analysis is that millions of business travelers have 3G access via laptop cards already, so you'd think we'd already be seeing the bad effects of automotive area networks.

A Wi-Fi booster can't post availability signs on highway: The Nebraska town of Louisville has free Wi-Fi downtown, and wanted to post "Visitor Wi-Fi" on a highway sign as another amenity. The state highway department has a policy that doesn't allow the promotion of Wi-Fi, because they believe they'd be inundated. A resident who runs a local Internet firm installed his own signs on the highway; the roads department removed them; he remounted them; they were removed again. The idea of zoning and mounting a billboard apparently hasn't come to the city officials' minds (or perhaps they're prohibited).

The folks spreading misinformation about Wi-Fi health effects cause Ulster school to disable network: I can understand why non-technical folks might think that Wi-Fi has been proven to be unsafe, given the kind of information that's available on the Internet about wireless safety. While there are ongoing studies about the safety of cellular signals--and I'm convinced at this point there's no increased risk to an adult's health by using a cell phone--there is no specific and credible research linked to Wi-Fi, which broadcasts signals at a far lower level than a cell phone, most of the time in most uses.

Washington state shuts down rest-area Wi-Fi: The $3 for 15 minutes, $7 per day, or $30 per month Wi-Fi service at 28 of Washington's 42 rest areas has been turned off after a year for lack of use. Figures. The fees charged by Parsons and Road Connect aren't unreasonable for a nationally scoped plan, but are ridiculous for limited use. States should either bite the bullet and offer these service for free, partner with national roaming operators who can resell service into large networks of business travelers, or use ads to support the service. Highways in remote areas can typically pick up cell data networks, and ongoing costs should be minimal to operate such networks.

IEEE approves fast-roaming standard, 802.11r: This new standard is designed to improve the handoff of devices between base stations. This is accomplished in part by allowing base stations to communicate security and quality of service information so that a VoIP over WLAN phone can immediately reassociate without the delay of authentication and other handshaking.

Denver airport sees 7,000 connections on a single day last week due to Democratic National Convention: FreeFi released the usage figures recently to show how their service is operating. The network started with about 600 daily users when the switchover from fee to free happened 10 months ago, and now carries about 3,500 daily connections.

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf goes free: The chain of about 700 cafes will have free Wi-Fi installed by now in all its company-owned stores (about 300).

Parlez-vous open source? While wide-spread open source usage is still debated in many companies, the French have been advocating for all open source all the time in government and education. French President Nicolas Sarkozy set up an economic commission that recommended tax benefits to stimulate more open source development. Lesson learned from France: start ‘em early. “All students in France use open source.”

Just in time for Labor Day, John Edwards (no, not that one) comes out with an informative guide on “Who provides what in the cloud”. No doubt, this will be a rapidly expanding list, but what’s really interesting is the comment on the article. People have very strong opinions on the cloud…

Research firm Aberdeen Group reports that network costs will increase slightly more than 5 percent over 2007. Contributing factors: “need for speed”, shift from standard to mobile PCs (more end points of connectivity), and the ever-expanding network. And of course the hidden costs of multiple tools with multiple management consoles – if you’re not smart enough to choose say a comprehensive network management solution that is vendor agnostic…One tool to monitor them all…

And just because I miss the Olympics already, here’s an irreverent take on what it’s like to lose to Michael Phelps. http://www.thetechstop.net/?p=1503

Enjoy your long Labor Day Weekend!