City of London Wi-Fi lights up: The business district of London has its square mile activated. 350,000 people work in the 2.6 sq km area. Service is £12 per month with a year commitment covering the national network run by The Cloud, which built this network and will build out several city center networks this year.
Wi-Fi on trains is among appeal in Europe as flight alternative: Trains are fast, arrive in city centers, and some even have Internet access. For shorter distances, for comfort, and for productivity, trains beat planes in many cases on the Continent. The article cites the Thalys line, which has a terrible Web site for figuring out what they offer. A 2006 press release says they're working to put Wi-Fi on all trains. The best I can find on their site is a German-language press release from Aug. 2006, says that the combined train authority had narrowed technical partners to 10 companies.
OECD ranks US 15th among its members: The OECD, which includes 30 leading nations worldwide as its members, including most of Europe, Japan, the US, and Australia, places the US at 15th in broadband penetration. Broadband is defined as 256 Kbps or faster. If the cutoff were truly symmetrical broadband (say, 1.5 Mbps over 768 Kbps), I would imagine the dropoff in penetration would be more startling compared to leading nations.
BART-Fi: Matt Peterson, an early influence among community Wi-Fi groups, wrote in to note that he spotted this screen at a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station. While he hasn't heard of Wi-Fi Rail (nor I), he notes that its IP range is allotted to IP Networks, a metro-scale Ethernet firm with rights-of-way agreements with the local power utility.
IEEE brings on the pirate 802.11 spec (that's 802.11rrrrrrrr, to you): The 802.11r group covers fast roaming, which allows devices to move from one access point to another with near-continuous connectivity while maintaining security and quality of service. There have been efforts over the years to pass tokens between APs to allow a device to re-authenticate without the ensuing delay, some of those efforts being proprietary.
TG Daily editor shows LA Times reporter how easy sniffing Wi-Fi can be: The reporter got a lot of the little details wrong, but the big stuff correct. Humphrey Cheung sat with David Colker from the LAT in a Starbucks and showed him all the data passing, unencrypted, over the local network. Colker then talked to some of the folks whose data he saw, and freaked them out. T-Mobile's 802.1X support would have prevented that (providing a unique encryption key for each logged in client), but as Colker notes, the connection software is Windows only and hardly emphasized.