Bluetrait

Well we headed off to CeBIT today. We got bored at uni so we left early and headed down to the exhibition centre.

It was a better turn out than I expected, thinking back now I may have been a few years ago (or to something similar), not sure.

Anyway the two big themes seemed to be networking equipment (heaps of rack mount gear and cases) and VoIP.

We headed over to the Freshtel stand where they had a phone that could make outbound calls. So we rang a mobile to test out latency. Unfortunately it wasn’t great. About 1 second.

We found out that everything is routed through Melbourne, so that would explain some of the issues. Although the call was usable and voice quality was decent.

Currently with VoIP you can only make outgoing calls. You still need your POTS line for incoming calls. This is said to change in the next 2 months.

One of the large concerns over VoIP was phone numbers. It isn’t possible to bring over your current phone number to VoIP. You are assigned a new number based on your location. This isn’t good for businesses (fine for upstart businesses and maybe home use), they don’t want to change their numbers. It is possible to route the old numbers, but it is messy.

So that left a bit of doubt in VoIP. Although it is still a pretty cool technology. It will get there one day.

Also we had a good chat to the iBurst guys. They currently have a good student deal at UTS. Pretty much iBurst kicks unwired in every aspect (excluding marketing). There were about 50 booths that made use of iBurst for their internet connectivity.

Apart from that there wasn’t anything fantastic at CeBIT. It was a good way to burn a few hours, probably be back next year though.