1. Introduction

Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part, but it seems that prospects are a little brighter for this year's networking confab in the hot and windy Nevada desert. It's not that the show is a lot bigger - there are about 350 or so exhibitors and they still fit comfortably into about half the LVCC's Central Hall.

By the way, this is the last year for N+I at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Next year the show will move to the smaller Mandalay Bay Convention Center, waaay over on the other side of town.

I suspect it's more that my perceptions have been successfully re-tuned to MediaLive's smaller-but-higher-quality pitch. But, no matter, I'm looking forward to catching up with my usual suspects and meeting some new ones.

Since networking went "mainstream", most consumer networking companies have decamped to January's CES and N+I has morphed back to being primarily a big-iron show. So with show and travel budgets what they are, only companies that can at least talk that kind of talk are anteing up to be here.

D-Link is still a show no-show (though I suspect they're encamped at one of the off-site hotels) but NETGEAR and Belkin (more on them later) are holding down the N+I SOHO / SMB fort as primary representatives of that neck of the networking woods. It's also nice to see SMC Networks back at N+I, even if only in a private meeting room at the LVCC.

A quick tour of the Cisco booth this morning confirmed my suspicions that Linksys would have no presence at parent-company Cisco's stand. Cisco appears happy to continue to let the Linksys name sell itself via its continuing retail shelf-space dominance and seems to not even bother announcing new Linksys products any more [related story].