WHILE SOME firms didn't show up at this year's Expo Comm, the show is still one of the most important technology events in South America and there were a few nice surprises.

SMC Networks
SMC Networks Latin America, which is based here, had a huge, well-lit booth showcasing everything from cheap home Wi-fi kits and outdoor wireless subscriber units powered by POE, to Wi-fi directional antennas and rack-mounted, 24-port (and beyond) Ethernet switches.

At one point, a saxophone player showed up, which was a nice contrast to the e-piano pumping out endless lounge music at the other end of the showroom floor. For us, that gets SMC the 'best booth in the show' award.

BGH

Local firm BGH surprised us with a range of Nortel phones with VOIP featuring a touch screen and an embedded web browser, a product category which I thought had died years ago with the Alcatel Web Touch phones. The only difference is that these Nortel phones are geared towards the business sector and, to quote the regional sales director, they "actually work".

At $550 per phone, these aren't exactly cheap, but you can plug in a USB ke yboard and a mouse, and these phones even support VNC. Definitely not for the home or the small business, but Fortune 500 companies will probably buy these, we think.

But they didn't do quite so well on the demo when the web phones wouldn't boot as they were waiting for a back-end server which wasn't there.

Epuyen

This firm distributes cables - Cat-5, Cat5e, Cat6, telephony, audio, video, you name it. So what is so sexy about cables, you ask? Well, erm, see below.

Oh and did I mention the free carrier bags? It might help if they learned how to do an HTML/DHTML web page as that big fat Flash applet does not exactly qualify.

SolutionBox - Sun Microsystems

This local distributor had a nicely-assembled "Sun Cyber" display resembling a mini Internet cafe, with three working Sun Ray thin clients booted into Solaris. Judging by the reactions, people liked what they saw. Solaris isn't much different from Ubuntu or Windows as it uses Gnome as its the desktop, and has StarOffice and a Mozilla browser pre-loaded.

A Sun Ray thin client

Other rackmount Sun servers were on display, like the Sun Fire 245 with dual UltraSparc III CPUs, a Sun StorageTek C4 tape library system (huge!), and the even more interesting Sun Fire X2100, a "budget" 1U rackmount server sporting a dual-core AMD Opteron CPU and 8GB RAM. All three Sun Ray thin clients were boot ed from one of the Sun Fire servers.

Metrotel

A small ISP, Metrotel scored points for its David vs Golliath stance. It has its own fiber optic backbone in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area with 60 nodes, and its own data centre.

Along with IPlan - and to a lesser degree TelMex - Metrotel is often the best choice if you want to avoid the more expensive services of Telecom Argentina and Telefonica which have local-loop monopolies in the north and south of the country.

Metrotel recently hit the headlines after it made free Wi-fi available in the Buenos Aires subway as a way of publicizing the launch of their new VOIP service - iVoz.

Tecno Numata

Can racks be sexy? Yes, if you let Tecno Numata build a bunker-style rack full of equipment to showcase its products. An Expo Comm classic, Tecno Numata has one of the show's most visited booths. µ