Meraki offers wall plug, solar unit, apartment package: Meraki has added two products to its line up. A wall plug ($179) can be screwed into an outlet's center screw hole for theft prevention and stability, perfect for hotels and public venues. The long-awaited solar product is nearly ready, with a 4-December ship date ($749 with no solar panel up to $1,499 with highest-end panel). Meraki switched battery technology to lithium iron-phosphate during the year-long delay, partly due to an increase in cost and shortage in solar panels. Meraki's also got a new bundle: $5,000 for a set of nodes designed to cover an apartment building. Over at Ars Technica, I wrote a long recap of the state of municipal Wi-Fi, noting that Meraki seems to be on the winning side of the equation with its start-small approach. A number of municipal wireless projects (not all Wi-Fi) are getting rave reviews. We may be over the hump: applications (purposes as it were) are now driving network building rather than networks seeking reasons to be. Violet prepares to ship an RFID tag reader, Mir:ror: The new device plugs in via USB to a computer and can read standard RFID tags, as well as new ones offered by the company. Some of Violet's tags look like postage stamps and are adhesive; others, like tiny versions of their Nabaztag/tag bunny. It's weird, but interesting, like all their stuff. Qualcomm brings in Skyhook's Wi-Fi positioning: Qualcomm becomes the latest GPS giant to add Skyhook Wireless's technology

Are you noticing that hosted services are starting to disappear? Me, too: I haven't launched a new blog in some time, but was motivated to start up ItDied.com recently after receiving about one email a day about a photo gallery, video service, online storage, or other company or division shutting down. It's not related to Wi-Fi, but if you're tracking what's about to go belly up--or worried that a service that stores your data in their cloud is about to disappear--check 'er out....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Virgin America has formally announced their in-flight Internet launch and plans: Virgin put out the news a few weeks ago that they'd have a press event flight on 22-November to show off their in-flight Wi-Fi with GoGo (AirCell's branded service). They're now formally noting that service will start for all flyers on a single aircraft 24-November, and expand to their entire fleet by second quarter 2009. Earlier reports indicated the airline would equip about one plane per week, which probably conforms to overnight maintenance schedules for their fairly new planes. Virgin America goes quite a bit beyond other airlines in the electronic amenity department. They have an advanced seat-back system that includes in-flight chat (currently intra-plane, soon across the fleet as Internet access is added); it's gotten rave reviews. They also have power available at every seat, which is an easy choice to make when you're building planes for today's passengers. I'll be on the press event flight, covering it for a few publications including this fine site, and will try to blog from the air just for the fun of it. If you can blog from the top of mountain, it seems necessary to do so. (Disclosure: I'm paying for all my expense associated with getting to and from the press event.) Virgin America is the only airline worldwide that's committed to putting Internet service on all its planes, although it has a fairly small fleet. (Planespotters has the full list of 27, including their names, such as

Boingo adds biggest U.S. ferry system to network: On the heels of acquiring the Opti-Fi set of airport Wi-Fi networks from Parsons and ARINC, Boingo Wireless has purchased Parsons's separate business operating Wi-Fi-based Internet access on the Washington State Ferry (WSF) system. WSF handles 26 million passenger rides per year, which is about half of all U.S. passenger ferry volume. (Just north, British Columbia's ferry system handles slightly more riders.) The announcement is slated for Monday. Boingo already had a roaming relationship in place with Parsons for ferry use, and thus the purchase doesn't affect users of any of Boingo's monthly subscription plans; subscribers still have access folded in to the company's $8 per month handheld/mobile, $22 per month unlimited North America U.S., and $59 per month global (2,000 minutes) plans. While neither Parsons nor Boingo released statistics on use, I ride ferry on a regular (not routine) basis, and have found the Wi-Fi relied and widely used. WSF runs two big routes that serve Seattle metro commuters: from Bainbridge Island, which unloads passenger after a half-hour run in downtown Seattle (right near Pioneer Square), and from Kingston, which brings riders also after a half hour into Edmonds where they catch express buses. Those two routes represent half of all WSF passenger trips. Wi-Fi service is available on the majority of WSF's routes, as well as in terminals and in the car waiting areas. For regular rush hour commuters w

The in-car Internet system gets reviews: Autonet is packaging a car-oriented router that combines a cell data modem and subscription with a Wi-Fi gateway. The device costs $500 and plans are $30 per month for a measly 1 GB of data or $60 for 5 GB. The higher rate is precisely what you'd pay a carrier directly for such an item with a 2-year contract; Autonet requires just a 1-year commitment. Unlike portable cell routers that come with car-power adapters, Autonet's device is installed in the trunk or back, and is wired into a car's electrical system. Antennas are part of the unit, however. Edward Baig of USA Today reminded potential buyers that a 3G connection requires a 3G cell network, and traveling in areas with spotty or no 3G coverage could be disappointing. Overall, he's not unhappy with it. He concludes, "Having a rolling hot spot is an appealing, if expensive, service for a lot of families. Just keep your expectations — and those of your kids — in check." The Wall Street Journal's elder tech statesman Walt Mossberg finds the service too slow for video beyond YouTube snippets, just as Baig does, but seems to agree that for the right person or family, having continuous Internet access is worth the cost. I haven't tested Autonet, but the router's cost isn't out of line with similar systems: Junxion, acquired recently by Sierra Wireless, sells its devices for $600 to $700 a pop, with discounts for quantity, because they're aimed at corporate road warriors. But

First, it was the poles; then the performance; then the lawsuit: Now, the settlement. The city of St. Louis Park, Minn., wanted to build a city-owned Wi-Fi network that would cope with the problems of its dense canopy. They chose a vendor, unfortunately, that had never built a network using the technology that the vendor chose to use. The network required 16-foot tall poles that were originally rather unsightly. And 400 poles would be needed city wide. Citizens were revolted and did revolt; a new design for the poles reduced their ugliness, one can see from photos, but the network--solar powered to boot--never achieved the performance required under the contract, the city said. Last December, the city moved to terminate its contract and later filed a lawsuit. The settlement signed by Arinc and approved by the city a few days ago calls from Arinc to pay $1m, and grant ownership of about 8 miles of fiber run by Arinc along with related gear. The city will be responsible for the estimated $150,000 cost to remove the equipment from poles and take the poles down, but the Wi-Fi nodes and solar panels go back to Arinc. (Which will sell them on eBay, most likely.) Arinc claimed at various times that it had performed the tasks for which it was contracted, and that interference was beyond its control. Given that there's an incredibly successful network nearby in Minneapolis that appears to have suffered from few or none of the problems in St. Louis Park, it's hard to credit that. (Minn

Starbucks U.S. operations have launched its Gold card, a paid membership with Wi-Fi included: The Starbucks Gold card was in testing for some time in Seattle--the outlet near my office has had a Gold logo in the window for months, I believe--but it's now unleashed for general consumption. The card costs $25 per year, and includes two hours of continuous Wi-Fi access each day; the firm's stored value card offers Wi-Fi for 30 days following a purchase or adding value. Gold has a bunch of frequent sipper benefits: a free drink when you purchase the membership, followed by 10 percent discounts on most stuff you buy (drinks, food, merchandise, hard goods), a free beverage on your birthday each year, and other discounts and deals that will be announced during the year. I suppose the logic is that for someone who spends over $175 per year at Starbucks would likely make up the difference (10% of $175 plus a couple free drinks should top $25). It's possible I spend that much, even though I only have casual interest in their shops, because of frequenting them in strange towns, enjoying their sandwiches (not their roasts), and airport purchases. Update: Contrary to the plain text with no footnote on the Gold sign-up site--"Free Wi-Fi access for up to 2 hours each day in participating Starbucks stores"--Starbucks contacted me to clarify that Gold card holders must also make a purchase or add value every 30 days to have continuous access to the Wi-Fi offer....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fl

Houston, we have a problem: While the city reports its Wi-Fi-connected parking meters work great doubling as Wi-Fi hotspots downtown, their much-ballyhooed "bubbles" efforts to unwire housing projects seems to have narrowed in scope. The headline on the story in the Houston Chronicle, in which yours truly is quoted, is perfect: "Houston's Plan for Wi-Fi Bubbles Has Burst." The city now plans to use Wi-Fi only to connect up community centers rather than bring service to residents. As far as I and the reporter I spoke to for this story could figure out, the networks will be running as password-protected clouds that only computers in central locations will be able to access. I have no idea why anyone would think this is a good idea. Bringing Internet access to libraries, schools, and community centers is a perfectly marvelous idea, but in low-income neighborhoods, the notion of putting free or affordable Internet access in the home, paired with programs to offer inexpensive or free refurbished computers along with training, is to deal with the commensurate problem that kids can work from their homes instead of being out on the mean streets. In many neighborhoods that are both poor and high crime, parents keep their children in to avoid trouble. Thus, community centers aren't the logical way to ensure greater access and bridge the digital divide. These efforts should be trying to bring access parity across income levels to match the ecumenical availability of information to rich

WEP in 24,000 packets: I forgot to mention in all the hubbub about the WPA flaw discovered by two German researchers last week that they also combined a variety of WEP-cracking techniques to reduce the number of packets necessary to extract a key. The fellows from two technical universities examined and improved previously known algorithms and code for extracting a WEP key, and optimized the process. Erik Tews and Martin Beck's paper, Practical Attacks against WEP and WPA (now available for download), walks through how they re-examined and combined processing attacks. But the takeaway is that WEP, already known to be very broken is, well, very very very broken. Previous attacks, per their analysis, required from 32,000 to 40,000 packets to be processed to gain a 50-percent likelihood of key recovery. They moved that down to about 24,000. WEP is still widely used in certain quarters, by home users who don't care about security but simply are setting up a no trespassing sign (which is enforceable by law in many states and countries now); by those who know no better; and by retailers who use systems that are either expensive to upgrade or must be replaced to stop using WEP. Retailers who accept credit cards may not deploy new systems with WEP starting 1-April-2009, and must discontinue all use of WEP by 30-June-2010 according to new guidelines set by the credit industry giants....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content

Boingo Wireless acquires Opt-Fi Networks and its 25 airports: Boingo already operates 30 airports (mostly in North America) as part of its Concourse Communications networks. The purchase of Opti-Fi from its owners, Parsons and ARINC, means they cover 43 percent of "passenger enplanements" (i.e., the count of people getting on a plane, even counting transfers) in the U.S. Opti-Fi runs smaller airports, such as Edmonton, El Paso, and Buffalo Niagara, but you add those together, and you still get millions of yearly passengers. Opti-Fi was already part of Boingo's network, so the acquisition means Boingo will derive more revenue from keeping sessions in house, as well as be able to use portals at the new airports to acquire more customers. It also increases Boingo's leverage with other WiFi networks in the U.S. and worldwide. Under the Opti-Fi brand, Parsons also powers VIA Rail of Canada's train-based Internet service. Separately from Opti-Fi, Parsons provides Wi-Fi across the Washington State Ferry system, which handles about 50 percent of all ferry passenger trips in the U.S.--some tens of million of trips per year. (In fact, two runs alone account for 25 percent of all U.S. rider trips.) Neither project was mentioned in today's announcement. Odd, huh? Oakland goes free: FreeFi has added the Oakland International Airport to its existing service in Denver. The company says that its deal with Denver, nearly a year old, has meant more income for the airport, even as the service w

WPA isn't as broken as reported: If you read the coverage early this week on two German researchers' paper on a vulnerability in Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), the weaker of two encryption and integrity algorithms in the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) certified standard (and part of the underlying 802.11i protocol), you'd think that TKIP was broken. It's not. As I wrote Friday, don't panic, but do pay attention. I'm posting about this again just to be clear. The flaw that was discovered does not allow a WPA-protected network's key to be recovered. It does allow short packets (network data quanta) used typically for network identification purposes to have their encryption keystream recovered: that's the overlay of per-packet encryption derived from a key that two Wi-Fi components use to protect information sent to one another. With a recovered keystream, a single packet of the same length can be sent back into the network (using another flaw) to fool a client (but not an access point). That's not to say that WPA keys (both the weaker TKIP and strong AES-CCMP) cannot be recovered. That's just not part of this weakness. As was theorized back in 2003, in an article Robert Moskowitz allow me to post on my site, choosing a weak passphrase could lead to a key that can be cracked through brute force. Moskowitz was part of the IEEE 802.11i security task group, and he knew of what he spoke. His advice? For effective security, choose a passphrase that's at least 20 characters lon

The open-license 3.65 GHz band could be a great opportunity for startups: The band is available in a good hunk of the U.S. under a licensing regime that allows anyone to obtain a license, and providers in the same geographic areas have to work to coordinate among themselves. Redline Communications and the extremely sharp Monica Paolini of Senza Fili Consulting are offering a free 45-minute Webinar (Web-based seminar) on 12-November at 11 am PST/2 pm EST on the topic. Redline is one of several firms offering 3.65 GHz gear. Meru further virtualizes virtual SSIDs: This might seem a little technical, but it's fascinating. Enterprise Wi-Fi maker Meru says they've developed virtual ports, that allows each Wi-Fi connection to act as if there's a separate AP controlling it. This has been used for quite a while to create virtual SSIDs: unique network names fed by a single access point. Meru says their approach centralizes the virtual SSIDs (which use BSSIDs, the underlying network address for a Wi-Fi access point), allowing roaming without the adapter appearing to change its network association. That goes one level beyond current roaming. The connection is essentially virtualized to be independent of the access point. With a unique per-user virtual WLAN, Meru says that they can optimize a connection, including throttling and provisioning to provide guaranteed bandwidth and priority....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content

The flaw in WPA is minor but important, and won't affect home users or most networks (yet): I spoke yesterday to Eric Tews, one of the co-authors of a paper covering a WPA flaw that he'll present next week in Japan at PacSec, a security conference. Tews and his collaborator Martin Beck, who discovered and tested the flaw, found that it's possible to use weaknesses that remain in WPA's TKIP encryption type (the weaker of two available in WPA2) to decrypt certain data. I wrote about this at great technical length at Ars Technica--see Battered, But Not Broken--but let me provide the high-level summary here. The flaw is not a generic crack: it doesn't allow a WPA key to be recovered, nor does it work on all data passing the network. The flaw only affects packets encrypted using the TKIP system, which is a backwards-compatible upgrade to 802.11's original WEP system. It's also only possible at this point to recover the original text for short packets--those with predictable contents that are quite short. And it requires the use of 802.11e, the Quality of Service (QoS) standard that prioritizes voice and streaming data above that of normal data to provide voice quality and avoid video and audio stuttering. With the Tews/Beck technique, short packets with mostly predictable content can be cracked through first applying a WEP-style crack that gets an attacker most of the way there, and then using a very slow method of determining the value of the remaining unknown bytes. This allows

Wayport acquisition by AT&T makes me go whoompf: Yesterday's announcement that AT&T would purchase hotspot operator Wayport for $275m in cash gave me pause for reflection. I started covering the Wi-Fi field in late 2000, spurred by testing Apple's AirPort system, which, despite being on the market for a year, I was quite dubious about. It worked well, and it led me to find that Wi-Fi was being deployed as an amenity. I hopped on the story, and wrote a very early feature for The New York Times about public-space Wi-Fi in airports, cafes, and elsewhere. (See The Web, Without Wires, Wherever, 22-Feb-2001.) Of the firms mentioned in the article, several disappeared within a year. And later startups like Cometa had big runs up and then giant flameouts. (I run down the failures as well as some other details of the Wayport deal at Ars Technica.) Wayport may have survived and thrived due to two moves. First, the operator was an early partner with Boingo, renegotiating its contracts with venues to allow the pricing model of wholesale aggregation resale to work. On a panel at 802.11 Planet after Boingo launched, if I recall correctly, Wi-Fi veteran Phil Belanger (then at Wayport) explained that contracts with its venues needed to be renegotiated, but it was worth it to increase volume of use. Wayport was right. Firms that resisted reasonable resale pricing or availability seem to have all gone by the wayside. The latest of these was T-Mobile, which had very restrictive roaming/resale a

It's always in threes: Three big pieces of Wi-Fi news today, folks, and I'll post more information as I have it. Wayport is being purchased for $275m by AT&T: This is a purely logical move, because Wayport not only has 10,000 McDonald's that they operate the Wi-Fi service for under a direct contract and resell to AT&T for the telecom's customers, but Wayport is also the managed services provider--the outsourced company--that handles AT&T's "internal" Wi-Fi network of Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, and other locations. The deal is cost conservation, bringing outsourced expense inhouse. With the close of the deal, AT&T's Basic footprint--free to its broadband, laptop 3G, iPhone, and some BlackBerry users--expands from 17,000 U.S. to 20,000 U.S. locations, sweeping in premium hotels and other locations. Is TKIP dead, already? A report in advance of the PacSec conference from IDG News Service says that researchers have found a non-brute-force method of sending data to a Wi-Fi client that it accepts was transmitted by an access point. I've gotten more information than the IDG reporter, and the attack works only on small packets and only with the weaker TKIP key type that's part of WPA and WPA2. The stronger AES key method isn't vulnerable. This isn't a generic vulnerability, and is likely to be of concern only to corporate users. Virgin America has press flight set for 22-November: I'll be on the plane if all goes well. The promotional flight of the one Wi-Fi equipped craft will be fo

Clearwire, Sprint venture to be called New Clearwire: Along with FCC approval and the new name, New Clearwire has to build out 37,000 cells and raise money in a difficult climate--although they already have commitments from Google, Intel, and others. Wi-Fi chipset sales will top $3b in 2008: So says ABI Research, which has a good track record on analysis and estimation. This number does not include anything but Wi-Fi chips and a few associated components; the sales figures for assembled cards and access points would have to be at least an order of magnitude higher. ABI says chip sales in 2006 were $1b and $2b in 2007. Meraki offers 1 sq mi of Wi-Fi for 10 grand: The mesh-networking equipment vendor has a special deal for cities: $10,000 buys all the equipment and service needed to cover 1 sq mi, and includes a 60-day money-back guarantee....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Because we didn't have enough on our minds on election day, the FCC met and made three relatively massive decisions: Let's start with white spaces. I have been avoiding posting too much about the topic, because it's mindbendingly boring to the average reader or businessperson who is more interested in technology or developments when they happen, not when they're discussed ad nauseum. The gist of the white spaces proposal is that computer industry giants want television channels that are unused in specific markets to provide assurance of a lack of interference among adjacent channels. Microsoft, Google, Intel, HP, and many others covet the space to use for high-speed wireless networking for broadband and wireless LANs. Over short distances, rates rival 802.11n Wi-Fi speeds; over longer distances, speeds will likely be closer to 10 Mbps. The expectation is that the frequencies, way down in the 54 to 698 MHz range, would have enormously superior propagation characteristics when coupled with higher power limits than Wi-Fi's 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz deployments. With adaptive scanning required to avoid stepping on licensed users, the white spaces technology would likely be much more resilient than Wi-Fi, too, as well as having a larger span of channels on which to choose to operate. The National Association of Broadcasters, representing owners of TV stations and networks, protested that regardless of how well designed devices were to avoid interfering with TV signals, it was inevitable th

Ultrawideband's future as personal area networking technology seems dim: With leading UWB chipmaker WiQuest going out of business last week, with very few devices on the market two years after UWB was supposed to have its big introduction, and with apparent little interest in that changing, it's hard to see how UWB winds up in printers, cameras, laptops, desktops, and hard drives. It's not that UWB will disappear (likely): the technology has other uses, some niche, and some as mainstream as being one of the options for wireless high-definition streaming as an HDMI cable replacement. Alereon, another chipmaker, announced today that it would acquire Certified Wireless USB assets of Stonestreet One, a firm involved in tests of UWB in mobile devices, like smartphones. Alereon's CEO Eric Broockman would like to spin the story, as he writes in his blog, that there's a very long timeframe for most new technology adoption, and that market leaders are rarely the first to capitalize on the advantages. Right. But with Intel, a leading UWB backer, seemingly having shifted its interests; with a leading UWB chipmaker gone; with just Lenovo and Toshiba offering any kind of UWB option; with no word on any UWB-enabled peripherals going into Christmas; well, I could go on. Broockman is certainly correct that there's always a shakeout, but I'm surprised how long UWB has been under development without any deep niche adoption. Early flavors of Wi-Fi were in devices sometimes years before standard

The Examiner reports that Wi-Fi Rail may be in trouble about signing contract with BART, raising money: But Wi-Fi Rail says it ain't so. Cooper Lee, the company's head, just called to let me know that the focus of the article was a bit off. In an earlier version of this item on Wi-Fi Networking News, I wrote: "Wi-Fi Rail spoke bluntly to the San Francisco Examiner five months after the board of the Bay Area Rapid Transit plan had approved contract negotiations for a full-blown installation. The negotiations aren't finished, and the tight credit market means it might take months after signing a deal for Wi-Fi Rail to raise the necessary funds." Lee said, however, that they've already raised the money they need for the next 12 months, and that they believe they'll sign a contract soon. Lee said that the company needs to spend a total of $20m over 24 months, but that $9m are in equipment leases, which is simple financing. He also said that much of the negotiation with BART was ensuring that the ramp-up for customers and revenue was fair relative to the fees paid to BART; BART doesn't want Wi-Fi Rail to be saddled with obligations they can't meet before customers appear, which makes sense for a transit authority looking many years into the future. They'd rather have a stable than a squeezed provider, obviously. Lee said the company is moving forward with the expectation they'll be able to start work soon, hopefully before Christmas....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rig

$5 off new edition of my book on using Macs with Wi-Fi: Folks, I've just thoroughly overhauled my book on Apple Wi-Fi networking, Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network. The latest edition, 244 pages long, costs $15--but for you fine people, just $10 with a $5 coupon. The book covers how to use an AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, and Time Capsule base station from Apple with Mac OS X and Windows for the best advantage. The latest Extreme model, along with Time Capsule, can share multiple printers and hard drives to Macs or Windows systems. With 802.11n built in along with options for wireless and Ethernet connection, you can build a robust network that can handle video streaming and large-file transfers. The coupon code CPN007281031WNN can be used at checkout to pay just $10 for this $15 instantly available electronic book....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

AT&T finally gets off the dime--sorry, quarter--and opens its Home network to iPhone subscribers: AT&T had promised some kind of Wi-Fi deal for its legions of iPhone subscribers for more than a year, and at least twice posted information that was premature. Yesterday, the company pulled the trigger. The mechanism to get service at about 18,000 domestic hotspot locations--mostly McDonald's and Starbucks--is complicated. You join the network, visit a gateway Web page, enter your cell phone number, and wait for a (free) text message. The message contains a link to a secure site that, when followed, activates 24 hours of access, but only at that location. You can apparently activate service at as many locations as you want in a single day. British lad arrested for kiping Wi-Fi: A 16-year-old was arrested for breaking the encryption on his neighbor's Wi-Fi network. The arrest was apparently "canceled" later--I don't understand British jurisprudence enough to get this part--with the boy's father fileing "a complaint for unlawful arrest and detention," The Register writes. The misuse was discovered because the fellow's network name was set to be his own (by his father), and this showed up in the Wi-Fi gateway's list of DHCP assignments....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Atheros thinks single-stream 802.11n has potential to replace 802.11g: Atheros has introduced the Align, a family of chips that use a single antenna to bring some 802.11n advantages without the spatial multiplexing, improved receive sensitivity, further transmit range, or antenna diversity, among other characteristics. The company told EE Times that they wanted to get beyond 802.11g for future devices to bring the advantages of newer designs. This should allow G prices with some improved N features. This won't break 802.11n compatibility, as 802.11n can hear a single spatial stream just as well as it can multiple ones. In fact, 802.11n provides the flexibility to have multiple streams sending the same data redundantly, which is what Quantenna has opted to do with its consumer gear--sacrificing raw speed for resilient performance. Atheros is claiming 50 Mbps in TCP throughput with 20 MHz channels and 107 Mbps with 40 MHz. This isn't out of line with the base raw symbol rates in 802.11n (65 Mbps instead of 54 Mbps). TCP throughput still has overhead, of course, so it's likely that single-channel N will be about twice as fast as the 20 Mbps or so 802.11g could achieve....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Enterprise 802.11n gear has up to 10 times throughput of previous generation: Network World put four equipment makers' enterprise 802.11n gear through its paces, and found enormous improvements over 802.11g. However, as I've seen repeatedly with consumer-grade gear, maximum throughput is limited by internal system resources, like the system bus. 802.11n offers such a vastly higher rate of speed that firms and their engineers clearly need to move up yet another notch in designing equipment that can take full advantage. Network World examined Aerohive, Bluesocket, Motorola, and Siemens access points. Aruba, Cisco, and Trapeze declined in various ways to participate, which is a shame. University of North South Wales shocked--shocked!--to find illegal downloads occurring: This Australian university may turn off its free Wi-Fi because students are acting like students, downloading what the IT director calls illegal content. The university fines students up to A$1000 for illegal downloads. Micro-Fi round-up: Hillsboro, Ore., gains Wi-Fi through effort of local resident with Meraki boxes; Birmingham (UK) has extremely limited free-Fi, choosing to have residents, visitors pay for access via BT, criticized by Flickr's visiting community manager; Niagara Falls gets 12 square blocks of free wireless; Portsmouth, NH, accepts $350K in Cisco gear for downtown service with few strings attached....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this co

Google announces update to Geolocation API with Gears: The company's browser engine allows extending JavaScript beyond what's possible by itself, and their library for geolocation (finding oneself through information a Web page can query the browser for, in this case with your permission) now includes Wi-Fi positioning data. This is true for both laptops, where the Geolocation API now works, and mobile devices that support Google applications. Google wouldn't say how they've developed their own Wi-Fi location database. Read my full account at Ars Technica. Boingo says they've broken 100,000 (103,749, to be exact): The Wi-Fi aggregator signed up 2,600 hotspots from Telefonica in Spain and Argentina, while sharing 7,000 of their locations with customers of the telco networks. The 2,200 Spanish locations are online now; Argentina's 400 follows. Last month, Boingo folded in 1,100 Swisscom locations, typically supremely high priced even in Europe for stand-alone usage. Baseball team gets lots of coverage for future add-ons: The Washington Nationals installed an 802.11n network from Meru at their ballpark, and I've seen articles all over about both their choice of N as well as their plans to add Wi-Fi-accessible instant reply clips for fans, an ability for fans to send in photos and text messages, as well as internal applications. The installation sounds cheap: $280,000 for 200 access points and all the planning and deployment. So far, the network has been used for wireless ticket

Fon ups the ante on joining its network by raising its daily connection price to $5/€5 for "aliens": The Fon network of what they claim is nearly 200,000 active locations is all about participation. You can be a participant (a Fonero) and charge or not, but anyone with an active Fon hotspot gets free roaming on the entire network. Fon charges for access regardless of whether someone collects part of the fee (a Bill, not available in Japan, Russia, or the UK) or opts not to (a Linus). The fee affects Aliens, those who aren't running Fon hotspots, and thus aren't contributing to the network's size. But $5 or €5 is a lot in most countries, and buys you a fair amount of time in an Internet cafe, making VoIP calls, or an hourly or daypass on a Wi-Fi hotspot network. At 5 monetary units, doesn't that push Aliens to finding a free or cheaper alternative? The only explanation I can find of the price change is on the German Fon blog. That entry explains that they're trying to focus on building a community, and that raising the price should encourage more people to participate in sharing their Internet access. That doesn't square precisely with their goal of making money, though, because there's no monetization outside of Aliens paying fees to use the network. Like airport parking lots, you can only raise prices so far until people find cheaper, even if less convenient, alternatives. [Thanks to Klaus Ernst for the price increase alert!]...Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman.

The New York Times and BusinessWeek are bullish on the Sprint Xohm launch in Baltimore: Two veteran tech reporters, who have had time to see it all and be cynical about it all, are fairly positive about the Sprint launch of WiMax. This is the first city-wide launch in the U.S. for regular signups, and one of the largest networks now operating in the world. (As far as I can tell, Seoul's WiMax-compatible WiBro network is still not designed for 100-percent city coverage, but is boutique.) Bob Tedeschi at the Times found solid performance wherever he tested, but he notes the caveat that the network is nearly empty at the moment. While comparing Sprint's promised up to 4 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up, he uses an outdated number for AT&T's 3G network. AT&T used to give out the numbers he states, but as of their HSUPA upgrade a few months ago, they claim 700 Kbps to 1.7 Mbps downstream and 500 Kbps to 1.2 Mbps upstream. I haven't had the opportunity to test these rates, but this is their current claim, not what Tedeschi reported. Tedeschi checked out various adapters and devices, including the Nokia N810 WiMax Edition ($500) that just went on sale. He had problems with video playback, but that could have been the network or the phone's operating system or the site he was accessing. He did like the quality of VoIP calls. BusinessWeek's Stephen Wildstrom was more enthusiastic, seeing rates of 3 Mbps down and 500 Kbps to 1 Mbps up, and was able to watch Hulu.com streaming content as a pas

In-depth on Quantenna: For Ars Technica, a great technology site for which I recently started a regular writing relationship, I wrote up a long interview with Quantenna's founder, in which I examine more detail about how they achieve 1 Gbps with standard Wi-Fi. The secret? Lots of radios, lots of antennas, deployed in what they say will be an inexpensive fashion. Could shake up the market, even if Quantenna isn't the winner, but they appear to have a real lead over established chipmakers. Taproot releases WalkingHotSpot: Yet another software package for turning certain smartphones into Wi-Fi hotspots using the built-in cell data service as backhaul. The $7 per month or $25 per day software license turns on the service on Symbian S60 or Windows Mobile phones. There's a 7-day trial, too. Only WEP security is supported because ad hoc mode is used; infrastructure mode isn't available. T-Mobile clarifies 3G availability: T-Mobile must have gotten tired of explaining that 21 markets doesn't mean 21 cities. For instance, in Los Angeles, they note via email, that market includes Anaheim, Irvine, Long Beach, and Pasadena. For clarity's sake, they're now saying 92 major cities across 21 markets now; Wednesday, with the G1 with Google smartphone launches, they'll be up to 95 cities. They say by the end of November, 120 major cities. Devicescape expands platforms, renames software: Devicescape announced its availability on HTC phones, dominate in the Windows Mobile market worldwide; on a

Hats off to Harrit Baskas, MSNBC travel writer, for this thorough examination of in-flight filtering: Baskas didn't just make a couple calls, she did the footwork (uh, by phone) to find out precisely how each airline that's offering or planning in-flight full or partial Internet access will or won't filter content. Tremendously good work here, and the illustration is just perfect. Let me just bloggishly crib from her, while suggesting you read the whole run down. American and Delta, as we already know, plan to engage in some limited filtering, seemingly to prevent egregious and obvious Web sites from being viewed. Given that there are a million billion porn sites, I'm not sure how that will work. Southwest will filter, "much like you have a filter at work," which probably means excessively. Continental will only offer email and messaging, so they don't need to yet. Virgin doesn't currently filter any entertainment content, and isn't planning Internet filtering. That does not surprise me. The various Virgin airlines treat their passengers like capable adults, possibly too much so. Air Canada and Alaska are both examining the options....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Virgin Media says broadband speed tests underperform: Sure, an ISP would like to tell you that the numbers produced by speed tests aren't accurate, that they undermeasure, but there's definitely truth in the statement. Virgin claims, via the BBC, that the faster the broadband, the less accurately the tests perform. Tests typically send large files or series of files of different sizes and measure throughput. Right now, Virgin says, the file sizes are too small to be meaningful. They're talking about latency here: latency and bandwidth are related but distinct properties. Bandwidth measures the diameter of the pipe, or its capacity to carry water, say; latency is the measure of how long it takes for water to reach the faucet after you turn on the tap. There's also the issue of congestion between a user's system and the testing location, which can have nothing to do with real-world performance for downloading media files or handling commercial Web sites. With 50 Mbps service on the way in the UK, they're apparently a bit anxious about being told they're slow. Cisco releases Network Magic 5 for simplified network setup: The software's designed to take the frustration out of increasingly complicated home networking setups, where users don't want to take IT classes to get devices to talk to each other. Versions from from $30 to $50, with Mac support adding $25. Manassas, Virg., takes over broadband over powerline network: The previous operator was unable to sell its network as pla

European wholesale prices for Wi-Fi require Boingo to move global plan higher, restrict minutes: Boingo has a few tweaks in the works for its worldwide hotspot plans. The good news first: Their subscriptionless option, Boingo As You Go, will now include all the Americas at $8 per session. Central and South America used to have a higher charge. In neutral news, their unlimited US and Canada offering (Boingo Unlimited) remains $22 per month. Asia-Pacific As You Go pricing also remains the same, at $10 per day pass. Now for the bad news: Boingo Global shoots up from $39 to $59 per month with a drop in minutes from 3,000 to 2,000; a 24-hour As You Go pass in Europe rises from $10 to $20. Boingo head David Hagan explained to me that the pricing in Europe has required this charge, because European operators charge by the minute for wholesale time. Hagan said that retail prices in European hotels and airports tend to be about 25 to 30 euros a day, far higher than most of the rest of the world. "Ninety percent of our usage is less than 2,000 minutes per customer," Hagan noted, but that last 10 percent can be a killer. In hotels, "people get connected in a hotel and leave it up all night," which the hotel's Wi-Fi operators passes on as minutes used to Boingo. As a transitional move, existing Global subscribers will get a year free of Boingo Mobile (normally $8 per month, and thus $96 for a year). They've started to send mailings to their Global customer base. The Global plan launched

The folks at Quantenna made a splash with their "1 Gbps" Wi-Fi announcement today: Venture-backed chipmaker Quantenna says that they have a tiny chip that should make it easier and cheaper to push high throughput Wi-Fi around a home using wall-outlet adapters. The company claims 450 Mbps of throughput from the highest-end Draft N standard (600 Mbps raw), and that it has a 1 Gbps wireless offering that uses multiple bands and channels to achieve throughput. There's not enough detail to know how proprietary that is, or if it's a form of channel bonding. Quantenna announced three chipsets and a reference design: simultaneous dual band at raw rates up to 1 Gbps, 5 GHz at up to 600 Mbps, and 2.4 GHz at up to 450 Mbps. The reference design is for a compact wall outlet Wi-Fi extender. The company said it's using a proprietary version of the 802.11s mesh protocol to allow devices to interact with each other. Quantenna's focus appears to be on spreading signals across a house, such as with streaming high-definition, where lots of bandwidth will be needed as telcos, satellite operators, and cable firms deliver HDTV into homes today, but plan much more in the future. Storing HD and then being able to have multiple live streams sent among devices is apparently the wet dream of those involved in home entertainment. You can be clever about pushing HD around a home (like Ruckus) or brute force it by flooding an area with high throughput like Quantenna, which isn't a bad strategy, but it's a

Cablevision doubles Wi-Fi network area: Cablevision continues its inexorable march to install Wi-Fi for its cable customers across its territory. The company said this morning that they had installed Optimum WiFi in more areas, including Connecticut and Westchester/Dutchess counties in New York. Cablevision's plan calls for them to spend $300m to install thousands of Wi-Fi nodes for outdoor use only by their current cable data customers at no additional charge. Burbank airport might go free: The local paper says that the airport authority might switch to free Wi-Fi to attract more passengers. But the paper gets the details wrong on the finance side. The three cellular providers who pay the authority a fee of about $30,000 per year would remain, operating their cellular voice and data services. Rather, T-Mobile is the Wi-Fi provider, and the regional authority would have to work out a deal with them, ostensibly. No other airport authority in Southern California provides free Wi-Fi, but it's an increasingly common option among 2nd and 3rd tier airports that attracts hundreds of thousands to millions of passengers a year, such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Sacramento....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Massachusetts expands trial of train-Fi: The state's train authority will spend $1.4m to expand a trial program for Wi-Fi on certain state commuter lines to all 258 coaches. The program's formal launch is Wednesday. The annual cost is estimated at $300,000, but the authority didn't try to estimate savings or other expenses involved in shifting people from cars to trains as a result of the service. Skyhook says 300 iPhone apps access location: Location guru Brady Forrest breaks down the data about how many iPhone applications are aware of their surroundings. No numbers here about the number of queries per day Skyhook is handling from iPhones, which we would all love to know, but is certainly proprietary to their deal with Apple. Forrest doesn't mention another interesting sidenote: Skyhook corrects their database of Wi-Fi locations with every query sent by an iPhone, which as a highly mobile device, must have a dramatic effect on extending and enhancing their routine truck-based scanning....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

ElcomSoft accelerates cracking WPA/WPA2 keys: The Russian firm offers what it delicately terms password recovery software. They've now paired their WPA/WPA2 key crackin with the power of graphic processing units (GPUs), the brains that drive video cards, and which can carry out certain kinds of calculations vastly faster than CPUs, a computer's main processor. (Apple plans to tap GPUs for Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, due out next year.) ElcomSoft claims a 100fold increase in the ability to brute force extract a WPA or WPA2 key. Further, their software can be used in a distributed fashion. A network of computers with fast graphics cards could provide the equivalent of multiple supercomputers' worth of focused cracking power. Short WPA/WPA2 passphrases (which are hashed into keys) have long been known to be at risk to cracking and dictionary attacks. Five years ago, Robert Moskowitz let me publish his paper on weak passphrase choice, which showed how words in dictionaries used for passphrases could be broken if the phrase was overall less than 20 characters. Passphrases are hashed using a formula that includes the SSID (network name). Crackers have precompiled large dictionaries that use common SSIDs. ElcomSoft uses brute force, which require untold billions of attempts. Shorter keys, even with high degrees of entropy, could fall very fast. But longer keys increase the difficulty of cracking inordinately. An 8-character WPA/WPA2 passphrase might fall in hours or even minutes, b

Mozilla releases early version of geolocator technology: Geode, an add-on for Firefox 3.0 from Mozilla Labs, uses Skyhook Wireless's Wi-Fi positioning system to provide approximate coordinates for your current location. A more full-blown geolocation service will be built into Firefox 3.1, allowing choice among providers, use of GPS, and other extensions. Firefox 3.0 with this add-on supports a Web site querying a user's location; the browser prompts the surfer for whether they want to reveal this and at what granularity (exact, neighborhood, or city). Mozilla is supporting the W3C Geolocation spec in both this add-on and the full 3.1 implementation. Starbucks page gone missing from Apple, Engadget discovers: Apple's had a page up about its partnership with Starbucks, one that's stalled in expansion the last year, where the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store is available via iPhones, iPod touch players, and laptops. I speculated back in February that the move from T-Mobile to AT&T for Starbucks signaled a closer partnership with Apple, but that hasn't materialized yet. (The full iTunes Store requires a laptop with a "real" Wi-Fi connection via AT&T or T-Mobile, depending on which firm operates the store, instead of the limited free Wi-Fi used for the music-only iTunes subset.) American Airlines joins the in-flight filtering club: Passengers aren't viewing inappropriate content, apparently, but the possibility of it--and perhaps flight attendants being able to use that to their advantage

A few days ago, I wrote that CSIRO had come out on top in an appeal by Buffalo of a district court decision: CSIRO, the Australian technology agent, has a broad patent that appears to cover aspects of OFDM, a technique for improving throughput in multi-path (reflective) signal environments. OFDM is used in 802.11a, g, and n, as well as in WiMax, and other wireless technologies. CSIRO has Cisco signed as a licensee, as Cisco bought an Australian firm a few years ago (this covers Linksys as well), but other makers are fighting. Buffalo lost a district court decision and has an injunction preventing the import of Wi-Fi gear, which has likely cost them tens of millions of dollars. They're a leading seller in their founding country of Japan. A few weeks ago, I picked up an item from ZDnet's Australian branch stating that CSIRO had won an appeal. It appears that's inaccurate. While extremely technical in only a way that a court decision about patents can be, Buffalo won the appeal on a very narrow argument about the obviousness of the combination of two IEEE papers related to the CSIRO patent. Another issue, about how the original patent application covered 10 GHz and higher but was amended to covers the entire range of radio frequencies, appears to be set aside. Buffalo issued a press release....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from

Delta has mid-air reversal on filtering Web content: Delta said it wouldn't filter its in-flight Internet system (not yet launched), but now says it will have a short list of inappropriate sites that no one would disagree were inappropriate. That might work. While filtering is impossible to enforce on a broad scale, choosing a small list of sites the airline feels are off limits, that might balance some basic interests. Wi-Fi attraction for students: Nearly half of students surveyed would prefer Wi-Fi over beer at school. Three-quarters think Wi-Fi makes helps them get better grades. Take that, Lakehead University! MetroFi antennas won't fall like autumn leaves: Portland, Ore., must wait until April 2009 to declare MetroFi's Wi-Fi nodes abandoned and take them down. While MetroFi gave the city a deposit, it will cost the Oregon metropolis $36,000 of its own cash to remove them, although the city's wireless go-to guy says they'll try to recover cash from MetroFi. To my knowledge, MetroFi has not filed for bankruptcy, even though the company no longer has working phone lines and hasn't returned comments....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Devicescape has gone legit on the iPhone, iPod touch: I was tired of entering hotspot passwords 15 months ago, a few days after I bought the first-generation (2.5G) iPhone. I've been waiting ever since for Devicescape to bring their Wi-Fi connection software to the iPhone, even at one point jailbreaking my iPhone--rendering it able to install any software, not just that approved by Apple--in order to use an early package they'd developed. Devicescape has finally wended its way through Apple's tortuous application release process for the App Store, and its Easy Wi-Fi program can be yours for $1.99. (The application release date is 13-Aug-2008, but the press release about its availability showed up in my mailbox last night.) I purchased Easy Wi-Fi, entered my Boingo account, cleaned up some personal passwords, and tried it out. Works like a charm. I'm about to head out on a trip (posting will be light, for those paying attention), and not having to enter passwords in airports will be a great pleasure....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Southwest Airlines will try out Row 44's satellite-backed Internet service on one plane this year: The discount carrier plans to equip one 737-700 with Row 44's Ku-band satellite Internet service by the end of the year for a 2-to-3 month trial. In first quarter 2009, FlightGlobal reports, other 737-700s will be added, and a variety of flight durations will be tested. Row 44 continues to claim what seems to me to be an impossibly high speed: here, Southwest is saying 31 Mbps downstream. I will believe this when I see it. Ku-band transponders are capable of very high speed data transmissions, but I'm not convinced that this rate is sustainable to each plane and represents actual net throughput. We'll see. (The only other speed I've heard for Ku-band was 12 Mbps from Panasonic Avionics, when they were considering firing back up a network similar to Connexion by Boeing.) Southwest plans to filter. Yeah, let me know how that works out for you guys....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Atheros has released an open-source version of the driver software that talks directly to its chips: The company has long maintained that it required a closed HAL (hardware abstraction layer) to prevent rogue developers from changing settings in its Wi-Fi chips that would cause the chips to perform activities that were against its interest. For instance, it's a/b/g chips can use the 4.9 GHz band, which is illegal in the U.S. and many other countries, but allowed in Japan. Those objections must have been overcome, as the firm is providing a full, ISC-licensed free software code base for their HAL for 802.11a/b/g chipsets. This should allow the ath5k project to create a fully Linux kernel integrated driver for Atheros chips with no reverse engineering or licensing issues. This opening up of the HAL allows laptops and handhelds running versions of Linux to have more effective use of the Wi-Fi adapters built in or that can be added on. Note that Atheros hasn't opened up its 802.11n chips yet. This HAL isn't the same as the one used by the Madwifi project, headed for several years by Sam Leffler. Leffler was able to start Madwifi up by signing an agreement with Atheros that let him write a binary HAL that could be released alongside open-source or free drivers. Leffler reiterated a few days ago on a mailing list that his HAL still wasn't available for release. And, at this point, the Madwifi project appears to be deferring to the ath5k folks. (Confusingly, information about ath5k

The credit-card industry has finally revised rules to make WEP persona non grata: The PCI Security Standards Council was founded by Amex, Discover, JCB, Visa, and MasterCard, and each organization agreed to adopt the standards that the group decides on. The latest update of the Data Security Standard (DSS), drafted early this year, was adopted and released yesterday, and profoundly alters Wi-Fi security practices for any company that accepts any of major credit card. A summary can be downloaded under PCI DSS Summary of Changes. The new rules prohibit the use of the highly broken WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) standard as part of any credit-card processing--such as from a store terminal to a server--after 30-June-2010, and prohibit any new system from being installed that uses WEP after 31-March-2009. In practice, WEP has remained in relatively wide use among retailers as of last year because many individual and chain stores continue to use ancient point-of-sale gear. The supplier side changed slowly, too, with WEP still included as a standard feature long after WPA was widely available starting in 2004 in business and consumer Wi-Fi gear and computers. The use of WEP is what led to the TJ Maxx parent company network invasion. The DSS sets both security and audit standards: Merchants must conform to the document's guidelines, and if examined by their merchant card issuer, must be found to conform. If not, they could have the ability to process cards turned off, which makes it

Philadelphia network has 100,000 monthly sessions: NAC, which took over Phila.'s network from EarthLink, has assumed full control at the end of a 3-month transition period, Wi-Fi Planet reports. The company said that sessions average 4 hours. The new owners are looking to entice Phila. to have them build a wireless public-safety network and offer business services as well. While NAC's head Derek Pew say that EarthLink didn't focus on "municipal and commercial usage," I'd argue that the statement is half right: EarthLink's plan was to offer such service, and their networks were built with that in mind; they just didn't get enough traction, such as a complete and well-functioning network, that would have allowed them to take the next step. NAC estimates a full best-effort Wi-Fi network will be finished in 12 to 18 months. Cablevision announces Wi-Fi executives: I normally don't cover routine press releases that note that so-and-so has joined or left a certain company. But with Craig Plunkett, that's different. Craig has been doggedly building and running Wi-Fi networks in Long Island, Fire Island, and elsewhere in New York for several years, and co-developed the Wi-Fi on wheels system Wi-RAN. He's joining Cablevision, the folks with a $300m budget to build outdoor network for their cable data customers, as the VP of Wireless Market Development. Cablevision also snagged Tim Farrell (VP, Wireless Product Development), who had a similar role at Boingo Wireless. Craig and I have co

Broadcom adds Skyhook positioning to portfolio: Broadcom already has a variety of tools for allowing its chips to determine position quickly, including a ground-based system that tracks GPS satellite positions and uses this to feed out data over cell and other networks to provide assisted GPS, where a GPS receiver doesn't have to find satellites, just lock onto signals where it's told the satellites are located. Adding Skyhook means that Wi-Fi can be used as another variable in quickly providing a fix on coordinates, especially in locales where GPS signals penetrate weakly, such as urban canyons. The Minneapolis Wi-Fi provider uses point-to-point wireless for high-rise: Steve Alexander of the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune reports that residents of one 34-story building in his paper's city will have the option for 20 Mbps service from USI--but not precisely wireless. The company is running an 800 Mbps point-to-point connection to the building, and then distributing through short-run DSL, a typical technique for apartment and other spread-out or high-rise buildings. Because they can leverage their existing buildout while not paying Qwest or others for rental of wires or cables, 20 Mbps will run residents $50/mo, versus Qwest's fiber-backed $105/mo charge. Comcast charges $53 for 8 Mbps with 16 Mbps bursts or $153 for 50 Mbps in that city. USI is experimenting. With 300 residents, they'd likely need need 30 at that speed to pay their costs. Providing Wi-Fi service to buildings abov

Go? No: Go Networks, a metro-scale Wi-Fi equipment maker acquired in Jan. 2007 by NextWave, is being shut down. Go announced their technology on 3-April-2006 at the height of interest in the municipal Wi-Fi market, at which point they thought their beamforming, MIMO gear would take hold. They believed they could provide superior coverage at far lower cost, especially when factoring in the need for fewer utility poles. As far as I can tell, they never had a huge win, and then the easy market evaporated. It's amazing to me that the four independent metro-scale firms have survived this long; all are privately held, and so we know only what's publicly announced about their well being. BelAir has scored the Minneapolis and Cablevision networks, and thus perhaps has its future assured. Tropos appears to have developed alternative markets. For Strix and SkyPilot, the future must be uncertain, although I must stress that I have no particular knowledge of either companies' financial or sales situation. SkyPilot's only big win was with MetroFi, which is now gone missing; Strix has some international deployments that are perhaps what drives the firm, but domestically they were paired with now-dead Kite. Along those lines, Riverside's network deployment has stalled, but is resuming buildout: AT&T had partnered with MetroFi to build Riverside, Calif.'s metro-scale network, and it's taken a while to build. The article doesn't mention MetroFi, but says "the original contractor has gone outt

This is a study I've been waiting for since the University of Essex research was released last year: New research using MRIs from the University of Regensburg, Germany, indicates that electrosensitives are suffering both cognitive and neurobiological reactions--but not to the presence or absence of electromagnetic signals that these sufferers believe are causing their symptoms. (The link is to an Economist summary; the abstract is all I can find online so far of the actual study.) Back on 25-July-2007, I wrote about the cross-disciplinary, tightly controlled study of electrosensitivity carried out by an Essex (UK) team with government and industry funding. The study was yet another in dozens that showed that self-identified electrosensitive sufferers performed no better at chance in determining whether a signal was present or absent. The control group did no better than chance, either. But the revelation that, with appropriate biological monitoring, the electrosensitive group experienced severe and measurable symptoms whether or not a signal was present indicated to me that there was a correlation problem in how electrosensitives view themselves. Currently, these sufferers are either coddled by those who pander to them (typically to sell them stuff) or by those that are interested in faux science who need an audience for their crackpottery; a worldview in which controlled repeatable peer-evaluated tests aren't part of the picture. Conversely, they're also ridiculed by people

Trapeze Networks usually announces enterprise products and deployments, but not so with today's Chinese network rollout: Partnered with Commnet in China, the two firms will deploy 3,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in Hangzhou, a city of 6.5m. But rather than focus on a ubiuqitous network, it's clear from what's not stated in the press release that this is an efficient deployment of service where it's needed. The city has six urban districts that total 260 sq mi and nearly 2m people' 3,000 nodes couldn't possibly offer total coverage even if just those areas (rather than "eight metropolitan districts") were what was to be covered. But that's not really what's needed. The network will be built over the next 15 months....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

In-flight call providers form lobbying group to dissuade formal ban on in-flight calling: FlightGlobal reports that OnAir and Aeromobile have formed the Passenger Communications Coalition--Peacekeeper missiles, anyone?--to prevent the Hang-Up Act that would provide a formal, instead of regulatory and procedural ban on placing phone calls in flight. OnAir's CEO makes the specious remark that this would be "putting the US behind the rest of the world." Hardly. Americans aren't used to paying $2.50 per minute in the air that used to be a typical ground roaming rate until EU regulators pushed hard. US flyers would (surveys show) prefer the broadband that American, Delta, and Virgin are in various stages of commitment to. In any case, how would having a total ban on in-flight talking that affected all over-US flights make us less competitive? Oh, yeah, we'd miss that one call that doomed our business while our European competitor was chatting away....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Google plays bridge with wireless contracts in patent: Bidding on contracts isn't just for companies answering proposals or contract bridge players. Google has filed for a patent in which a wireless device could put its need for a connection out for automated and instant bid among operators with service operating in proximity. The cell phone owner or even laptop Wi-Fi user could review bids and accept whaich they prefer. It's an interesting idea, as even without ubiquity, there's plenty of overlap. In parts of Seattle by 2010, there could be several wireless services for voice and high-speed data--there are already four (the 3G carriers plus Clearwire). BT OpenZone to sever The Cloud roaming: OpenZone customers will lose access on 2-Oct-2008 to the thousands of locations in The Cloud's network. This reduces OpenZone to 3,000 hotspots in the UK. The Cloud partners with many other hotspot operators....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

The Spykee is a $300 Wi-Fi Skype robot: Lots of strange coolness here. I don't know how I missed hearing about this before, but apparently an actual customer got his hands on the thing and recorded a video. It's cute. You can access its video through control software or a remote Skype video connection. It's got a speaker and microphone, and can be used for VoIP calls. The control software allows it to move around, play sound effects, and produce music. Like the computer in Superman III (or a Roomba), it craves power, and knows to return to its charger. The name reveals some of its creepy appeal: Spykee = Spy Camera. I suppose the nanny you're trying to make sure isn't shaking your baby might be freaked out when it suddenly starts emitting Star Wars music, or such like. Made by Meccano under the Erector brand, its control software is Mac and Windows compatible. I, for one, welcome our new Spykee overlords--on 15-Oct-2008 when it starts to ship generally. Silicon Valley project finally gets underway: It's a still a pilot, small, with no promised outcome. And after all this time, a switch of partners, and new parameters, they've still mounted just 20 of 28 access points....Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Trade mag Flightglobal gets the full story on Qantas' in-flight calling, texting, and Internet plans: A few days ago, it seemed to come out that Qantas had dropped Aeromobile (its test partner last year) for OnAir, and was moving to Internet service on A380s instead of in-flight cell calling and texting. Flightglobal clears the air, and reveals that Qantas will offer all of the above. (I wrote about this in "Sorry, Qantas, No Unfettered Broadband.") OnAir was chosen for A380 service, with the initial rollout--especially for international flights--using the 64 Kbps Inmarsat satellite offering, which is too paltry for anything but limited text communication. When the recently launched Pacific satellite is active--which may take up to a year--OnAir and Qantas can upgrade to the luxurious nearly 500 Kbps per channel service. The head of OnAir is pushing some mighty serious horsehockey, however, when he says as quoted by Flightglobal that he "is confident that once the full service is up and running, passengers will be able to access the Internet 'in exactly the same way as they can on the ground.'" That may be the case in terms of access, but not in terms of cost. The cost will be enormously high unless OnAir has a magic deal with Inmarsat that's previously undisclosed. I suspect a per MB charge will be in effect that will discourage much use. Calls and texting could be carried over the same system, of course. Qantas plans to continue to work with Aeromobile for domestic service,