Session notes for Tuesday

Today was a hectic and exhausting day. Didn't have much chance to blog on what I heard and saw. I didn't even have much opportunity to take notes. The three sessions I went to were standing room only, and there were 2 sessions that I couldn't get into the room for. It's pretty hard to type on an iPad when you are standing in the back of the room. A laptop would not have been any better. Also, there were no tables, just rows of chairs, so even when I could sit, it wasn't very conducive to typing.

I went to a panel discussion on the future of wireless. The panelists were entertaining. They felt that WiMax will die and LTE will take over in the cell phone arena. They expect that even Clear will shift from WiMax to LTE in the next year or two. Even though both Verizon and AT&T are going to LTE, they will be incompatible because one is doing time division multiplexing and the other is doing frequency division multiplexing. Apparently Verizon is once again picking the solution that very few other carriers around the world are going to. The panelists reffered to Verizon as the orphan child in this respect. There was a little discussion of what's beyond 802.11n and whether we need gigabit wireless or not. The consensus was that 802.11n will be around for quite a while, so companies shouldn't wait on the next standard. They also mentioned that Microsoft recently announced that they are purchasing Skype for $8 Billion!

I went to the second set of keynotes at 1 p.m. They were marketing presentations by Microsoft, Juniper and IBM. Nothing particularly interesting to say, but the cloud was mentioned a million times again. Referred to ask a fundamental change in the industry.

The next session I went to was about dealing with Mac and iOS devices coming into the enterprise. Alex Stamos was an excellent speaker and I was blown away with his depth of knowledge about security, protocols and how Mac, iOS devices, and everything else acted on the network. He had a lot of very scary things to say about security of data with mobile devices and how easy it is to do man-in-the middle attacks even when you are using carriers. He talked about how important it was to try and write apps that didn't store sensitive data on the mobile devices. Use the cloud to grab the data when needed.

The last session I went to was about Network Futures. There were 5 speakers from various network electronics vendors. Unfortunately, they all gave marketing spiels, so there was very little good content. I left early and hit the exhibit floor.

That's all on the sessions today. I'll do another post on the exhibit hall itself.