Planet ISPCON

Let ISP-Planet be your other ISPCON guide.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 12, 2006]

When you arrive at the show, you'll get a bag and a book detailing the sessions. You've also got the ISPCON website with its valuable session grid. For the inside scoop, there's the Inside ISPCON blog.

For finding important people, the most important part of the show, there's a new ISPCONNECT program that will help you find and meet the people you want to talk to.

But leave room for us too. Let ISP-Planet be your other ISPCON guide.

Wednesday's keynote, Neutrality Reality, is by David Isenberg. We've been to his Freedom to Connect conference several time, have heard him speak several times, and our favorite speech of his was last year at the final Wi-Fi Planet Conference & Expo: Wi-Fi vs. Telcos.

Our capsule (unauthorized!) bio of Isenberg runs like this:

David Isenberg earned permanent cred when, in his essay "The Rise of the Stupid Network" he told AT&T that they were building the wrong network, that the network of the future would be flexible, changeable, and programmable, unlike the proprietary, closed, and purpose built POTS network. He called the network of the future the "stupid network." It was 1997 and he worked for Bell Labs, who immediately tried to suppress the report (and failed). He now runs an independent, eponymous prosultantcy.

If you want to find out what he's thinking about now, check out his blog, and his message to ISPCON attendees.

Session highlight
The tech story within the Katrina disaster is covered in the session Real-world Disaster Recovery: The NOLA directNIC Story.

Speakers and shakers
We know a few people here. Allow us to introduce them. If you read ISP-Planet, you already know them.

Rich Bader has a pedigree that includes Intel and a personality that makes meetings move forward. The ideal moderator. We wrote about his business in A Cat in a Basement in Oregon.

Everyone will want to hear from Lisa Bickford, long a very active member of CISPA. Late last year, she sold the business to MobilePro, and is now vice president of network operations there.

Mike Cassidy was present at the first ISPCON in 1997. He has written numerous articles for ISP-Planet and has produced reports on the topic he'll be speaking about: The 10 Must-have Services Your Customers Demand.

Ken DiPietro is from CONXX, an astonishing wireless company described in The ATM WISP. He and wife Dawn ran a local WISP in Vermont before joining CONXX, and are both present on our ISP-Wireless list.

Fred Goldstein is a frequent contributor to the ISP-CLEC and other lists.

John McKown is a frequent subject of ISP-Planet stories. Delaware.net was one of the first ISPs to migrate from residential dialup to business services, starting the transition in 1999, and is now even more ambitious.

ISP broker Tom Millitzer has at times been subject or author of several ISP-Planet articles. He will speak in the broker session run by Paul Stapleton. For our article on last Fall's session by Stapleton, see If You're Thinking Of Selling, Look At The Big Picture.

Our former colleague (until JupiterMedia sold the website for a lot of money) Rebecca Lieb runs the online marketing industry website ClickZ. She is guaranteed to talk about real issues, not hiding from industry problems like spam and tainted lists.

Ross Rader is well known to the webhosting industry, particularly for his outspoken blog posts (such as his commentary on last year's ICANN-VeriSign agreement).

Wireless consultant Tim Sanders has written numerous articles for ISP-Planet

All we're going to say about Donny Smith is that he's one of the smartest founder-owners in the ISP industry.

We wrote about Michael Tague's operation in the article A CLEC Operations Consultant.

Kristopher Twomey, veteran CLEC lawyer, has written several articles in our CLEC Legal/Regulatory section and if you can think of number 11, he'll answer that too.

We profiled Rudy Yakym early this year. We talked to him about the e-rate, which he spoke about at ISPCON last year, in the article E-Rate Pays.

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