1. Bye-bye Comdex, Hello CES

By now you're probably overloaded with gadget news from CES, and frankly, so am I. After wandering among all the silicon and plastic for four days I don't want to see another digital gippy or hear the expression "digital lifestyle" for at least a few months...

Nevertheless, I must do my duty (and justify my trip to Sin City) by passing on my networking-centric view of what happened at this week's CES. So let's get started...

CES certainly seems to have replaced Comdex as the fall / winter show of choice for makers of consumer networking gear. The "enterprise" guys (3Com, Cisco, Symbol, etc.) passed on the show, but it seemed like all the consumer players were here. NETGEAR 's new booth was the largest and most attractive and attracted lots of traffic. To my eye, it seemed like they've replaced Linksys as the destination of choice for networking product shoppers on the show floor.

Linksys -a-division-of Cisco-Systems-Inc was over at an invitation-only room at the Venetian. Although I was supposed to get together with them, traffic snarls and scheduling conflicts forced me to take a pass, so I didn't get to see the networked audio and DVD players they announced.

Other companies with good-sized booths were IOGEAR, Belkin, and D-Link, but lots of smaller companies were there, too, including Mirra and Ximeta (more on them later). SMC was noteable in its absence, both from the show floor and even from private meeting rooms.

Buffalo Technology was in a private room at the MGM, where they were demonstrating the A.O.S.S. auto-configuration technology introduced at Comdex. It worked fine - auto-configuring both router and wireless Ethernet bridges from out-of-the-box state to connected and WPA-protected in well under a minute - but will be undergoing some user interface and useability tweaks before appearing in products next month.

The big surprise (to me, at least!) was the push that Motorola Broadband was making into the consumer networking product sector. Although they weren't located with the rest of the networking companies, they had quite a large booth and a number of new product introductions in the show.

The mystery of why I hadn't seen their products at the extensive list of retailers they touted (Radio Shack, WalMart, BestBuy) is that the list represented sellers of Motorola cable modems, which have been around pretty much since the beginning of broadband. A Motorola rep assured me that their wired and wireless networking gear would be gracing those same shelves shortly.