Biography|Patrick Lo — The Home Router Line Occupied This Berlin Aisle

People treat consumer networking as a Best Buy endcap story. For a decade the proving ground was a trade-fair aisle.

Internationale Funkausstellung opened at Messe Berlin on 31 August 2012 and ran through 5 September. Netgear took floor space among the television and home-electronics houses.

Michael Movchin photographed the stand on 3 September 2012. The frames show blue banners, stacked retail boxes, and the routers that followed the Ethernet hubs of 1996.

Lo was still chairman and chief executive. The original brief — appliances a household could buy without a reseller — had become a global retail line sold in tens of thousands of stores.

IFA is the European show where a Santa Clara catalogue has to work in German and Polish living rooms. It is not a California keynote hall.

The halls are still there at the west end of the Messe. The booth geometry changes every year.

The 2012 frames are what survive of that particular aisle. A visitor walking the current halls will not find the same carpet.

They will find the same fair that Netgear used to show the home internet as a boxed product.

Photo: Michael Movchin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons