The wildly popular squishy cow doing booth duty at ISPCon.

On Tuesday May 16, I flew to Baltimore MD to attend ISPCon.  ISPCon is a conference for Internet Service Providers and is held twice yearly in Baltimore in Spring and Santa Clara in the Fall.

The AccordionGuy, Joey Devilla, pointed out to me that I was attending a wide range of conferences in this week from the ultra un-conference BarCamp to Mesh, a cross between un-conference and conference to ISPCon, a full out traditional conference.

There were a lot of differences to be noted.  For example, everywhere you looked at BarCamp or Mesh you saw someone hunched over a Mac typing away.  It seems de-rigeur to type up your thoughts on your Mac during an un-conference.  I felt really eccentric making my notes on paper.  At BarCamp and Mesh, I only saw one or two Windows-based laptops (complete with Technorati stickers) the whole time.  At ISPCon, I only saw one Mac the whole time (it was being used by Zimbra's product manager, to do demos of their Ajax based email client).



And so ISPCon turned out to be a good reality check after a few days of how blogs and Ajax will revolutionize the world.  ISPCon had many attendees who run ISPs, including dial up.  I heard a stat (which I haven't verified) that 50% of US internet users are using dial up.  Dial up!  As one attendee pointed out to me, a great number of his customers are still only interested in dialling in, checking their email and sending a few emails. 

An interesting topic that was frequently being discussed at ISPCon was wireless broadband, particularly in rural regions where DSL / Cable is not available.  Earthlink participated in the keynote address to discuss their municipal Wi-Fi projects.  However, I found it more interesting to talk to ISP operators who had a rural market and were investing in wireless to sell more broadband.

The fact that broadband is only now being rolled out to many people in the US at the same time that more and more media is going on line is creating an interesting dynamic.  Many times, I realized that my perspective (and those of BarCamp / Mesh Camp participants) is driven by having access to ubiquitous broadband.  Many people in that crowd say wait until we have ubiquitous wireless with constant broadband access.  But I think that when the current portion of dial up users starts to pay for broadband, it will be to access content on line.  If email inspired people to pay for dial up, then what will encourage them to pay for broadband?