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Subway and McDonalds: the Cometa Core?
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February 23, 2003 - March 1, 2003 Archives

March 1, 2003

Subway and McDonalds: the Cometa Core?

By Glenn Fleishman

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Biggest franchisers in the US: Frank Boosman and I were corresponding via a mailing list and then directly about how Cometa could even find partners of the scale that would allow them to roll out 5,000 and then 20,000 hot spots.

Frank provided an interesting list of some of the top franchisees in the US:

My question, of course, is that with the exception of Barnes & Noble, which of those outlets is really a place that has appropriate seating and shall we say ambiance to allow the customers that Cometa wants to work? Many food outlets have barely comfortable seating and even 30-minute occupation limits!

Of course, of the 30-million-odd business travelers (out of 40M) total that are estimated to have laptops, I'm sure a very large percentage frequent the above outlets many many times in their trips. I'm just being elitist, since I patronize some, but not all, of those locations as well.

T-Mobile's Erratic Math

T-Mobile charges more for prepay minutes than pay-as-you-go: I did my math wrong a couple of days ago. T-Mobile's new rate plan charges $6.00 per hour (10 cents per minute) for pay-as-you-go service, but it has a mininum $6.00 (one hour) charge. If you prepay for 300 minutes at $50, you're buying time at $8.33 an hour, but they only bill you for $1.40 (10 minutes) minimum.

This is the first time I've ever heard of having to make a Hobson's choice for hot spot pricing. This is practically as bad as those dial-around plans that advertise $1 for 20 minutes: yes, it's a $1, but if you get voicemail or an answering machine and hang up, you've paid a $1 for one minute.

The tradeoff here is complicated. If you pay per visit, you're paying at least $6. If you know you'll be there for more than an hour, it's a better deal than prepaying. If you thought you could game the system, however, by prepaying and using different accounts based on what you needed at the moment, your prepay minutes expire 120 days from purchase.

I bought $50 worth of minutes back in December in West Hartford, Connecticut, visiting my in-laws, and used about an hour of it. If I don't get to a Starbucks soon, I've donated $41.66 to T-Mobile coffers. Paging Mr. Hobson, Mr. Hobson please come to the white courtesy stable...

Microsoft and Wi-Fi Usability

Microsoft recruiting Wi-Fi usability at Starbucks: In the latest example in a series of millions of how it's hard to do anything without being noticed, my friend Jeff Carlson just shot me email from a downtown Seattle Starbucks where he was working on his Apple Titanium PowerBook:

A guy who works for Microsoft asked me if I had a WiFi card, and I had to explain that this is a Mac and it's built-in. He said he was looking for someone with a PC laptop and a WiFi PC card to participate in some usability study.

Microsoft's XP support for Wi-Fi is good in many ways, although it can be funky, especially with closed networks and with WEP keys. It doesn't offer a profile management interface to make it easier to switch among networks. It doesn't offer encrypted key storage that could be accessed, often requiring key re-entry.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 12:40 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Unclassified

February 28, 2003

Filleting the Herring

By Glenn Fleishman

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Red Herring leaves unusual smell: It's my unfortunate duty to shred an article written by a colleague in The Red Herring about the wireless hot spot business. I don't know Dan B____y, and my apologies to him; this won't be pleasant. (Update!: I swear it's not my fault, but the Wall Street Journal is reporting at 11.30 am Pacific today, that Red Herring's March issue is its last.)

Third paragraph: Four years ago... Larry Brilliant put together AerZone, which was another big idea with dubious prospects in a sea of bloated expectations. AerZone was a division of SoftNet, which had also purchased Laptop Lanes. AerZone, by late 2000, had contracts with several airports and airlines to provide service. In mid-December, four days after I had interviewed the CMO, SoftNet closed the division and put Laptop Lanes on the block. They couldn't raise additional capital. Part of AerZone's model was, as with other wISPs at the time, to pay for everything.

But, the company and the wi-fi market it hopes to exploit are starting to look like a hype bubble -- some much-needed skepticism injected into the overall Cometa coverage. Much of the coverage has focused on the scope and nature without drilling into costs and practicality.

Wi-fi is yet another example of a grassroots technology for which early adopters have grown accustomed to paying little or nothing. It really depends on which audience, and they're hardly early adopters any more. People who use Wi-Fi consistently on the road are entirely accustomed to paying for it. I'm not sure who gets it for free unless they're conveniently near a community node or an open node.

Now we get into muddy waters; put on your waders. ...David Hagan, president of Boingo, one of the pioneer wi-fi service providers, with 800 hot spots in hotels and airports around the United States, and a staunch believer in the build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy of customer acquisition. Actually, Boingo believes in the you-build-it-and-we-will-come model, because they aggregate not build infrastructure.

Now the author starts sinking into the mire. Boingo's expensive philosophy is precisely what Cometa intends to avoid. (Boingo raised $20 million in venture capital a year ago and says it has two years' worth of cash left.) Boingo is developing software and partnerships, so their philosophy is quite cheap compared with infrastructure build out. Boingo is relying on distributed infrastructure in which no one company winds up building out massively, like Cometa, and bearing huge costs, but rather builds strategically and relies on aggregators to fill their pipes.

Cometa is relying on the widespread corporate adoption of wi-fi, a trend that is still nascent. It might be my InfoWorld mentality here, but the penetration of Wi-Fi into the corporation is nearing mid-term, not nascent. Within two years, every laptop that a corporation buys will either have Wi-Fi preinstalled or prebuilt (a la Centrino), or will be a mandatory part of configuration. Many corporate surveys show most corporations have already deployed wireless LANs or are in the middle of testing; most of the rest, a small number, plan to install WLANs soon. Security remains the stumbling block, but not much of one.

This next part is terrific, however, and delightfully expressed. Cometa's stated goal in creating its 20,000 hot spots throughout the United States is to provide wi-fi access within a five-minute walk of any urban point or a five-minute drive of any suburban site. But experts say it will take far more than 20,000 sites to accomplish that ambitious goal, especially since it requires several hundred hot spots just to cover a decent-size college campus.

Now, we get into mixed market issues. Given the players, it seems appropriate that Cometa is making a bet on the enterprise market. After all, home networking enthusiasts have been known to be stingy. But analysts predict that growth in the small office/home wi-fi market will far outstrip the enterprise wi-fi market. But that's hardware sales and installation, not service plans. How would Cometa serve a home audience? It makes no sense. Intel is providing hardware for consumers and businesses, so their part of Cometa is following that market.

The author now provides an example of why listening to the company you're interviewing too closely causes you to drink the blue zombie soup and repeat their tropes. With IBM (site installation), Intel (wi-fi chip manufacturing), and AT&T (broadband access) running the show... (Just by the way, this illustrates how Cometa isn't the core of these companies but rather IBM Global Services, not IBM proper; Intel, not Wi-Fi chip manufacturing, but Intel Capital; and AT&T's bandwidth division.) ..., however, corporations are likely to feel more comfortable exchanging sensitive data wirelessly than through, say, companies called HereUAre or Surf and Sip. Dude, hereUare has been out of business for months. And Surf and Sip runs as tight a ship as any of the other ISPs; they're even Intel Centrino approved (see the bottom of this article). What, the brand name makes corporate execs nervous? I'm not sure marquee names make CIOs less jumpy given what happened to Worldcom.

And Cometa executives are confident they can drive standards through the industry that will allay any security fears that corporations may have. Bzzz. Thank you for playing! A multi-billion dollar industry is going to roll over for a hot spot operator. Please pick up your consolation prize at the door. Oddly, a broad consortium of companies and individuals in the IEEE, IETF, and Wi-Fi Alliance, among other groups, have created a variety of reliable security standards that will allay the fears as they are deployed over the next nine months, some of them in the next few weeks.

I heard Larry Brilliant speak a few days ago, and he spent quite a while discussing how CIOs want secure, audited hot spots. He also explained how corporations are using VPNs. Because no VPN technology has been compromised that I'm aware of, there's no need to audit hot spots. With a VPN tunnel and an appropriately configured laptop, a hot spot's security is irrelevant -- which is the whole point of a VPN in the first place: to allow use of untrusted networks! CIOs may be asking for this, but it's education on the subject that they need, not audited hot spots.

What makes more sense is for Cometa and all hot spot operators to participate in the public drafts of the wISPr (wireless ISP roaming) proposal that came out of the Wi-Fi Alliance a few days ago. That proposal could become the working document for building well-run hot spots, requiring spot checks through an independent group instead of individual audits or separate standards for each network. If I can bring up the specter of MobileStar twice in two days, the CEO of that departed firm told me in fall 2001 how important it was for them to only partner with companies that matched their high standards.

Finally, we get this amazing quote, which is a coup for the author: Rose Klimovich, the Cometa representative at AT&T, says it best when she admits: "We have to figure out the right way to make money. We will see over the next year or two whether Cometa has figured that out. It hasn't been tested yet." Dear Lord almighty, this is how the telcos still work: throw money at the wall and see if it sticks! (The trick? Soak the money in your own flop sweat first while you think about the future of your career if it fails.)

I feel dirty.

The Red Herring article aside, except for the good parts, it's clear that Cometa has an interesting plan for low-cost hot spot buildout. Because they're using AT&T for bandwidth, they don't suffer T-Mobile's high T-1 costs. Because they're a bunch of giant companies, they get sweetheart highest-volume discount rates on the equipment they install in each location. Because IBM Global Services is involved, again, they're not paying full cost of freight; for all we know, IBM's investment is donated labor and materials for the hot spot buildout.

What we really don't know about Cometa are the following issues:

I sound like a cynical jerk, right? I'm not trying to dis Cometa, but rather explain clearly why the degree of detail they've released so far makes it sounds as though we're living through the late dotcom era again. It's unlikely Cometa will release more details because it doesn't benefit them to do so. But their potential partners and investors will continue to be have questions like the ones I raise--and not everyone can be disclosed under contract to learn the nitty gritty.

Later Thought: The notion of Cometa pushing security standards is actually at odds with Intel's own Centrino co-marketing program in which Intel will be partnering to lend their name with firms like FatPort (announced yesterday), Surf and Sip, and various hotel operations (this last week). (Centrino is Intel's new Wi-Fi-integrated, lower-power laptop OEM system.)

Intel's name means a lot more to CIOs than Cometa could in the short term. The other program is the Wi-Fi Alliance's Wi-Fi Zone. If that program is successful coupled with their wISPr proposal, the most recognized name in wireless networking, Wi-Fi, becomes the mark that achieves CIO approval.

In a press release about FatPort and Intel's program to test FatPort's FatZones as Centrino compatible, an Intel exec said this: "Intel Centrino mobile technology is designed to enable a rich, wireless mobile computing experience. We're excited to be working with FatPort to bring these services to Canadian locations." Cometa is competing against arms of itself, lending credence to the notion that Intel's involvement in Cometa is farther away from the center, as I note above, than the press releases would indicate. Cometa is an investment; Centrino is a core initiative.

T-Mobile Pricing Update

T-Mobile offers $30 yearly commitment, $40 month-to-month: T-Mobile has posted its new pricing plan and it's not exactly as reported. Gone is the $30 per month yearly commitment regional plan and the $50 per month unlimited national plan. In its place are two national plans, both unlimited: $30 per month for a yearly commitment, $40 a month for a monthly commitment. This is a nice compromise for the road warrior versus occasional traveler.

The bandwidth limit has been removed: unlimited data transfers on all accounts.

Per-hour rate is $6, not the per-day rate, which makes more sense in terms of worrying about people camping out for the day. Interesting choice on the per-minute part of per-hour: you can prepay for 300 minutes for $50 and use minimum 10-minute increments. If you pay by the minute at 10 cent a minute, you have a minimum 60-minute billing or $6.00. So the least you pay with the prepay plan is 60 cents versus $6.00 on pay-as-you-go.

I read the fine print on the new service agreement. First of all, it goes into effect March 1, not today, although they might implement changes earlier. Second, there are some penalties for cancellation of the monthly plans: $200 after the first 30 days for the yearly commitment plan (which is only $360 per year total); $25 after the first 30 days for the month-to-month plan.

The minutes expire 120 days from purchase or refill.

Without the day rate, T-Mobile is still out of sync with the rest of the hospitality hot spot industry (except STSN), but the new monthly rate makes harmonization possible, at least.

Other News

Internet Exchange launches UK wireless service at prices undercutting British Telecom: This Internet cafe has added Wi-Fi at 30 stores for five pounds (about US$8) per day; BT charges 15 pounds (over US $25) for the same service. Other rates are comparably cheaper. This is the week to cut prices, it seems.

Toshiba to blanket Canada with 1,000 hot spots: As the North American market heats up, we need to look north to our less temperate--I'm talking Celsius!--brothers and sisters. Toshiba of Canada. The article mentions Spotnik (no points deployed yet) and Bell Canada (testing but not charging), but not FatPort. Of course, the Global and Mail is based in Toronto and the service discussed is mostly Ontario, while FatPort is in Vancouver, BC. (North of the border insider joke: What did you do to annoy the G&M, Sean? Praise Conrad Black?)

PC Mag interviews Dennis Eaton, sidesteps hard question: The interview is solid, but the writer fails to note Eaton's dual role: Chairman of the Wi-Fi Alliance, but also a marketing director at Intersil, a company that has introduced draft 802.11g products like many others in the industry. A new piece of information: Eaton expects USB 2.0-based 802.11g adapters to be popular.

Wi-Fi over power: Amperion is offering an interesting bit of technology. They have a system that lets an electrical utility encode bandwidth over powerlines, but here's how they solve the step down problem -- the problem of getting bandwidth from the powerlines to the home through transformers. They're using 802.11b signaling from the poles to a customer premises equipment (CPE) device called PowerWiFi. Where they're clever additionally is that the CPE could be individual computers if there's a strong enough or clear enough signal or to some sort of bridge. They mention HomePlug, an in-house data-over-power system, but I assume they'd still be bridging via an external device into the house's power.

Atmel integrates: It's a bit techie, but part of a larger trend in chipmaking. Atmel has stuck processors, two Ethernet controllers, a USART, and a Wi-Fi MAC onto a single chip. You'd still need a baseband/PHY chip, which Marvell makes as a single CMOS unit, just by the way.

Why is Dan's name not spelled out?: I posted the author's name so that I wouldn't be a coward in criticizing his work directly. However, it struck me yesterday that I'm branding this guy because of this blog's high Google ranking. If I spell his name out, that means that every time someone searches on freelancer Dan B, they'll get this page among the top listings, shredding his article. (I guess the last issue of Red Herring didn't get the kind of scrutiny that it might otherwise have.) This would be unfair, and thus I've removed his full name.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 7:52 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Unclassified

February 27, 2003

T-Mobile Brings Pricing In Line

By Glenn Fleishman

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T-Mobile bows to daily pricing, lower monthly fee: The timing is sensible. They now have a true national footprint, although substantively in Starbucks until closer to summer, and they should be focusing on increasing use of infrastructure even if it involves price reductions. I'm totally surprised and fascinated that they will offer a $6 daylong usage deal; it might encourage the kind of cybersquatting Starbucks was trying to discourage.

The article states that unlimited network access is currently $40, but the rate plan page (not updated yet) is in sync with my memory: $50 per month for unlimited national; $30 per month for unlimited regional. I'm speculating that they're cutting the national rate down to the regional rate, but I'll wait for clarification.

At $30 or $40 per month for unlimited national access, we're starting to see a rate that's casual-traveler friendly instead of road warrior oriented; when T-Mobile adds its airport executive lounges and Borders, it starts to become highly worthwhile. In fact, I cashed in some of what I hope will continue to be valuable frequent flyer miles to join United's Red Carpet Club in anticipation of the T-Mobile service. Don't let me down, bankrupt carrier of mine.

This new price is in line with Boingo's reduction a few months ago of their unlimited session rate to $50 per month. (Both require service commitments of a year, of course.)

T-Mobile continues the MobileStar policy of including only 500 Mb of access per month and charging 25 cents per additional Mb. 100 Mb = $25. Pretty steep. None of the other wISPs are bothering to track this, as far as I can determine. Also, if you use their prepaid minutes plan, there's no limit.

Of course, this will probably change with their new dayrate -- does that include unlimited downloads, too? I have $40-odd in a T-Mobile account, will be it be converted to day pass credit? Refunded?

I'm going to put on my Sky Dayton hat here and ask another question: With the quotes in the article at News.com that broke this news from the eyeforwireless conference, it's clear they need to increase the revenue load on their infrastructure. You don't have to read between the lines. Why don't they establish a standard and open to roaming? I believe their day-rate pricing is the first step towards roaming because it puts them on the same page as aggregators and competitors. Load the infrastructure, and profit might be obtainable. Stay isolated, and subsidize Starbucks intranet.

The Hotels Have Landed

Marriott pushes further: Marriott hotels, including the brands Marriott, Renaissance, Courtyard, Residence Inn, TownePlace Suites, Fairfield Inn and SpringHill Suites, have 200 properties set up with Wi-Fi--although the extent isn't mentioned in any article (rooms, meeting spaces, public areas?). They plan to unwire 200 more with Intel's help on co-marketing. Marriott charges a bizarre $2.95 for 15 minutes and 25 cents per minute thereafter according to several stories, but they must have a day rate as well.

Alongside Marriott, you have the long-established Wayport relationship with a number of property companies owning major brands (Westin, Four Seasons, Embassy, Summerfield, Wyndham, etc.) with wired and wireless combinations, Omni Hotel's recent announcement for free access in its 30 properties, and Starwood (Sheraton, Westin, and W).

In practical terms, some kind of broadband should be available in most premium hotels in the near future. In each room, it's likely that wireline Ethernet will still predominate, however, until Vivato's model proves itself. Less premium hotels could certainly poach customers and distinguish themselves by offering free or $2 per day unlimited Wi-Fi access.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 7:49 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Unclassified

February 26, 2003

Broadcom Updates Draft 802.11g Firmware

By Glenn Fleishman

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Broadcom pushes out firmware upgrade for 802.11g draft chipset: Various companies pushed ot firmware updates today using Broadcom's latest upgrade: Linksys (WAP54G), Belkin, and Apple (AirPort Extreme Base Station). Broadcom has also achieved 802.11b Wi-Fi certification with this release, which is another step in interoperability.

Frequent correspondent Nigel Ballard reports some remarkable results with the new firmware installed. I set up a bridged wireless Ethernet link through three solid walls (150 feet) using a pair of the Buffalo WBR-G54 radio's. I'm passing a Mitel VoIP phone, a 300K video stream, a 75Mb backup file transfer and randomly checking three Email accounts all across the air interface. I get an impressive 8.5 [Mbps] steady throughput even when talking on the phone and polling my Email. And that is in the close proximity to a 100Mw Cisco AP and a 30Mw Orinoco AP both of which are serving wireless clients.

Other News

Boingo tops 1,200: Boingo now has over 1,200 hot spots in its aggregated partner network.

Time Warner Cable co-markets broadband wireless: SkyRiver Communications dropped me a line today to let me know that they had worked out what I think is a unique arrangement. Time Warner Cable will market SkyRiver's broadband wireless services in the San Diego County area market (300 square miles) that they serve alongside their cable and T-1 offerings. The quote from a Time Warner executive noted that especially for business services, this bypasses permits, backhoes, and other issues in bringing out service quickly. The press release says that customers could be up and running within three business days, one of wireless broadband's key advantages over even comparable wired high-speed service. (Lack of buried/pole infrastructure is another.)

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 2:28 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Unclassified

February 25, 2003

Gee, Isn't July Lovely?

By Glenn Fleishman

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Wi-Fi Alliance sets July as tenative date for 802.11g interoperability testing: News.com reports that products certified as interoperable with the 802.11g could be on shelves as soon as August. I've already seen a few signs that I can't discuss yet that indicate rapid movement among vendors to assure continuous improvement in existing implementations.

Speak Softly and Deploy a Large Footprint

The Wi-Fi Alliance releases its draft on wireless ISP roaming (wISPr, pronounced "whisper"): It's a cogent and not overly long document full of sensible recommendations. The goal of this document is provide a framework in which roaming could be facilitated by having systems that act the same way, regardless of wISP. Without a common framework, wISPs have two choices: adopt the Boingo approach of building client software that handles the many, many authentication systems out there invisible to the user; or build back-end systems that can handle logins from any partner and pass messages over the Internet back to that peer's authentication system. Both are problematic.

I'm sure that individual wISPs and aggregators will have issues with specific items, but given that the document is written in the form of an IETF RFP, there are per se requirements so much as recommendations for and against certain behaviors at different levels of severity: highly recommended, should, may, etc. The discussion in the appendix of 802.1x/EAP is a good primer on the subject with illustrations.

LEAPing to Conclusions

Proxim's response to Cisco's technology sharing announcement: Cisco announced a laundry list of companies that will share its technology for wireless networking. Many comments have come in today about how this is an attempt by Cisco to take proprietary extensions that it has and bypass the industry trade group, The Wi-Fi Alliance, through partnerships.

A Proxim spokesperson sent me their response: We think this is just a further proprietary move by Cisco to lock customers into their infrastructure. Proxim supports open, interoperable enterprise security solutions. In our opinion, the announcement had little content, beyond listing general things like "security", "management" and "voice support" which are obvious and every vendor is working on.

We believe that the industry has already resolved these WLAN security issues with solutions like WFA's WPA and IEEE's 802.11i. Overall, we believe that Cisco is trying to set the industry back to the "proprietary days" before IEEE and the Wi-Fi Alliance.

I don't know what the patent or licensing issues are, so it's unclear why Cisco wouldn't take their ideas to the Wi-Fi Alliance at large, or even the IEEE or IETF unless they feel that a consensus-driven standards or trade body can't fulfill the function of providing uniform consistent quality across an industry. QED.

Wired News has more on the Cisco story. It's proprietary, but free. The devil will be in the contract details.

Other News

Is that a phased-array antenna, or are you just happy to see me?: Nigel Ballard offered up a link to the Hot or Not collaborative physical-attribute ranking service which shows a guy pursing his lips next to a sexy, naked Vivato antenna. Yup, naked. The Vivato when sold will have either a textile cover (indoors) or a ruggedized enclosure (outdoors).

Etenna tunes antenna to reduce static: I can barely understand what their special technology does, but it sounds awfully 21st-century. If I'm interpreting it right, they've developed a way to prevent certain kinds of interference caused by lack of isolation between parts of a continuous antenna or multiple antennas resulting in a clean separation for different protocols.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:34 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Unclassified

February 24, 2003

Eleven-B, Good Buddy

By Glenn Fleishman

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Truck stops, ferries may soon be Wi-Fi hot spots, if not hot beds: Nancy Gohring finds Wi-Fi in the likeliest of places, including truck stops. Rig owners need to always have a load, and cell phones and pagers might be useful, but powering up a laptop could be more efficient. Meanwhile, the Washington State Ferry system is still waiting on a bill that would let them explore putting Wi-Fi on popular runs. The local ferries are riddled with high-tech commuters who would latch onto this service in a second.

Tim Higgins sees throughput not interoperability as key draft 802.11g problem: In his usual exhaustive fashion, Tim digs into the Intersil 802.11g draft chipset's performance. He notes that in his testing of various "g" devices, he's seeing problems maintaining speed not in actually getting equipment to function.

Cisco to share...something: Cisco has announced they'll share some wireless technology with chipmakers to expand the use of...something. I wondered if this was PEAP (Protected EAP), a secure tunneled method of encapsulating EAP transactions using 802.1x, and I should have just consulted the press release. Cisco says it will share PEAP, WPA support for PEAP, and LEAP. It also said it will support marketing word marketing marketing word, but this just means they'll allow their WLAN management unit that lets you configure access points in aggregate and collect their reporting also work with gear from all the makers who implement it. There are obviously some other bits and pieces. I can't figure out yet why Cisco would offer this to the laundry list of competitors and partners: Agere Systems, Atheros, Atmel, Intel, Intersil, Marvell and Texas Instruments.

Benefits of mesh from Intel: The BBC reports on Intel's mesh networking technology demonstration and gives a primer on mesh's utility.

Nokia Rooftop discontinued: In researching an article I'm working on, I attempted to get in contact with Nokia about their Rooftop product line, which was a meshed wireless ISP system to allow deployment of broadband to residential and commercial areas. Their site seemed dead, but I couldn't believe a product introduced so recently and that's such a hot button would just go away. In fact, it has. A Nokia representative confirmed for me today that it's been discontinued. Did I just miss the press release on that? Or did it die a quiet death? Rooftop's absence leaves Locustworld (shipping MeshAP) and Sky Pilot (in trials) as the only two pure mesh distribution systems I'm aware of.

Smart consumer advice for managing Wi-Fi security: A brief intelligent piece (quoting our favorite Wi-Fi pundit, Nigel Ballard, of course) on using Wi-Fi without giving up your secrets. Although VPNs are beyond consumers today, I wouldn't be surprised to see tunneled services become more prevalent in the near future.

Ethical hacker acquitted in Wi-Fi security demonstration: The Register reports that a hacker trying to demonstrate the of a justice Wi-Fi network in Texas was acquitted quickly after being arrested for causing $5,000 in damage to the systems. Right. This is the same logic that led to the leading perl explainer being convicted many moons ago of causing lots of damage to Intel when he embarassed them by showing their password security was ridiculously weak. When in doubt, you sue the person showing you the problem for the amount of money required to fix the problem that they're showing you, not that they caused. If any of you ever endeavor to help clueless systems get better, I'd suggest having a form of release that your subject (victim?) signs holding you harmless for demonstrating their failure. [via TechDirt]

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 7:24 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Unclassified

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