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Verizon to offer in-flight WiFi
Verizon says it is ready to begin offering in-flight broadband service to airline passengers sometime in 2007. Verizon's announcement follows last week's issuance by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of updated rules on spectrum auctions, which open the door to broadband WiFi service for passengers high up in the air. Bill Pallone, president of Verizon Airfone, urged the FCC to auction new licenses in the 800 MHz band. "There are many interested airlines and general aviation …
Vonage starts shipping WiFi phone
At last, it is here. VoIP vendor Vonage yesterday began (officially, that is) shipping its F1000 WiFi phone for VoIP. The company unveiled the device last January. The phone will allow users to make calls from hotspots. Its price tag is $129.99, but there is a $50 instant rebate. The phone was developed by UTStarcom and supports 802.11b but offers no direct support of 802.11g networks. The phone offers features such as three-way calling, call waiting and forwarding, and voice mail. …
New York City mulls muni-WiFi
New York City--yes, the Big Apple--is considering following in the footsteps of Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans and a host of other cities planning to offer free WiFi to local residents. On Monday city council member Gale Brewer, chairwoman of the Committee on Technology in Government, held a legislative hearing on a proposed bill which would create a special commission to advise Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city council on how the city can get affordable broadband access to …
SPOTLIGHT: The potential of full-mobility WiMax
The day of WiMax mobility has arrived. In the WiMax universe we should distinguish between two kinds of mobility: basic and full. Basic mobility covers nomadic (using the service in different locations) and portable (basic mobility without soft hand-off) applications; full mobility allows communication during high vehicular speed and seamless hand-offs between cells. WiMax basic mobility is a natural evolution of 802.16-2004 (OFDM256). Full mobility is a different story. It will …
ALSO NOTED: First also noted headline; second headline; and much more...
> Looking for WiFi-related holiday gifts? See this list of suggestions.
> The Bluetooth SIG, already collaborating with UWB, says it is looking to combining technology, functionality and user interface with other technologies such as WiFi and near field communication (NFC). Report
> AirDefense, …
FierceWiFi December 7, 2005
- Wi-Fi Alliance to certify battery-saving tools
- Analysis: Patent litigation at crossroads
- Trend: Realistic assessment of WiMax
- QUALCOMM, finally, joins Wi-Fi Alliance
- Linux driver available for Broadcom WLAN chipset
- SPOTLIGHT: The competition cometh
- ALSO NOTED: First also noted headline; second headline; and much more...
Wi-Fi Alliance to certify battery-saving tools
Not a moment too soon, the Wi-Fi Alliance will address one of the main problems with WLAN phones by certifying features which extend battery life. In addition to the organization's interoperability certification, the industry group will add a label it calls Wireless Multimedia (WMM) Power Save, which identified products that had reduced the power required to use multimedia applications over WLANs. This is a good and necessary move. Using a WLAN for VoIP, streaming video and other …
Analysis: Patent litigation at crossroads
Fights over patents are becoming more pervasive and more consequential. Three examples: The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of MercExchange, a small Virginia company, against auction giant eBay (the issue before the Court is whether lower courts must issue an injunction if they suspect a patent infringement, or whether they have some leeway); BlackBerry may be forced into ceasing operation in North America owing to an ongoing battle with NTP; and a Senate committee …
Trend: Realistic assessment of WiMax
We have long argued on these pages that, for some reason, it has become de rigeur among commentators to attach the adjective 'over-hyped' to WiMax. It was as if dismissing the technology's promise would give any no-name analyst an instant air of sophistication and urbanity. The proper response to these self-satisfied analysts is and has always been: balderdash. We are glad to see support for this view from the sober Philip Solis of ABI Research. The latest WiMax study by the research …
QUALCOMM, finally, joins Wi-Fi Alliance
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. QUALCOMM, bringing up the rear, has finally joined the Wi-Fi Alliance. The company's executives used to spend a lot of energy bashing WiFi. More recently they have switched targets and now concentrate their fire on WiMax. What has not changed is the self-serving quality, and a certain touch of the absurd, for much of what emanates from QUALCOMM regarding these two technologies. Now these executives say they wanted to make sure the company's 3G cellular …
Linux driver available for Broadcom WLAN chipset
Who says reverse engineering takes place only in China? More than two years ago a group was formed to reverse engineer the Broadcom WLAN chipsets to provide Linux drivers. This chipset is used by many OEMs, among them Apple's AirPort Extreme in PowerBooks and iBooks, Linksys' WAP and WRT series of consumer grade wireless routers, different laptops from Acer, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, and others, and many more external and internal devices, including CardBus cards.
That …
SPOTLIGHT: The competition cometh
Cingular Wireless has just launched a wireless network allowing customers to use 3G to access Cingular BroadbandConnect, which is available to nearly 35 million people in 52 communities around the US. Cingular's 3G network is the first service (or, rather, the first widely available service) in the world to use HSDPA technology. HSDPA is the high-speed evolution of GSM/EDGE. GSM is the world's most popular wireless technology, which is used by more than 1 billion people in "210" …
ALSO NOTED: First also noted headline; second headline; and much more...
> For the first time, more people bought laptops than desktops (52 percent to 48 percent) during the week ending November 26, according to Current Analysis. Report
> UWB chips tops gigabit speeds. Article
> Proponents of UWB and WiMax are interested in getting their wireless products incorporated into UMA technology. …
FierceWiFi November 30, 2005
- 802.11n plot thickens as January IEEE decision nears
- Netgear settles suit over exaggerated WiFi speed claims
- ST shows solution for pico-cell base-station modems
- New Orleans to offer first-in-nation free muni-WiFi
- Metric: 100M WiFi chipsets sold in 2005
- SPOTLIGHT: Citius altius fortius
- ALSO NOTED: Nokia 9300i; New Zealand bypasses regs for WiMax spectrum; and much more...
802.11n plot thickens as January IEEE decision nears
Last summer the IEEE almost reached an agreement on the specifications of 802.11n, but then things got discombobulated as the haggling between the two rival coalitions continued and a third proposal was offered. There was an IEEE meeting in Vancouver last week, but nothing much happened there to advance the cause of an agreed-upon standard. There is going to be a vote on the standard in January, though, and smart money says that the IEEE will go with a joint proposal that combines the …
Netgear settles suit over exaggerated WiFi speed claims
Even allowing for the typical embellishments in advertising, Netgear's claims about the performance of its pre-802.11n equipment were always suspect. Some customers found that the suspicion was justified and decided to do something about it: They launched a class-action lawsuit charging the company with exaggerating the data speeds of its WiFi networking devices. The company has agreed to settle these claims.
In its last week's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission …
ST shows solution for pico-cell base-station modems
STMicroelectronics (ST) has unveiled what it claims is the industry's most comprehensive solution for pico-cell base-station modems. The STW51000 combines the performance of SoC baseband processor with multi-standard software libraries, optimized for GSM, EDGE, W-CDMA, and WiMax networks. ST said it has tested and specified the device to be used with 20 concurrent
voice users in a Release 4 WCDMA network.
ST's device should be of interest to business. Pico-cell base stations …
New Orleans to offer first-in-nation free muni-WiFi
Talk of a silver lining: The city of New Orleans is about to deploy the nation's first municipally owned wireless Internet system which will be free for all users. The deployment is part of the effort to accelerate the city's recovery by making living and doing business in New Orleans as appealing as possible. Telephone and cable companies have opposed such muni-WiFi systems in other cities as unfair, taxpayer-funded competition; moreover, Louisiana prohibits any locality from offering …
Metric: 100M WiFi chipsets sold in 2005
Staid Alan Greenspan talked of "irrational exuberance" to describe the late-1990s dot-com craze, and almost-as-staid research group In-Stat says that consumers and businesses alike have shown an "insatiable demand" for wireless networking technology, thus helping drive up annual unit sales of WiFi equipment to more than 100 million chipsets in six years. In-Stat estimates that WiFi device shipments are enjoying an "explosive" 64 percent average yearly growth rate. "WiFi has already …
SPOTLIGHT: Citius altius fortius
What with the growing demand for high-quality multimedia services, consumers need greater communication speeds. How do we get them? Some approaches (think 802.11n) try to do so by enhancing existing standards to increase efficiency. Other approaches (think UWB and cognitive radio) are pursuing more aggressive strategies such as sharing spectra with other users. As we reported a few weeks ago, another approach is to follow what we have always done in the past: Move to higher, unused …
ALSO NOTED: Nokia 9300i; New Zealand bypasses regs for WiMax spectrum; and much more...
> Nokia will offer the Nokia 9300i, which incorporates WLAN connectivity with a full keyboard and 65,536-color screen. Report
> Samsung has released its latest WiFi cellphone, the SPH-V6800, but only for Korean customers. Article
> Sony Playstation Portable 2.6 firmware adds WMA and WiFi Podcast streaming support. …
FierceWiFi November 23, 2005
- Editor's Corner
- BPL moving hesitantly forward
- Telstra chooses HSDPA over WiMax
- Motorola targets Asia/Pacific for 802.16e campaign
- Mesh metro-WiFi comes to Europe
- WiFi-enabled mosquito net kills bugs dead
- SPOTLIGHT: WiMax certification: The evolution
- ALSO NOTED: AirMagnet updates LAN analyzer; Nokia E-Series phones offer WLAN capability; and much more...
Editor's Corner
FierceMarkets is pleased to announce the launch of FierceIPTV. This once-a-week email offers concise summaries of new developments in IPTV technologies and insight into the business strategies about the bundling of video, voice and data processing. To download a copy of our first issue, and sign up for a free weekly email, please visit: www.fierceiptv.com. - Ben
BPL moving hesitantly forward
There is a new (well, not so new, but now more readily available) player in the broadband technology market: Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) is now available as a broadband Internet access service. The technology uses electrical power lines to move information to users. One advantage of this option is that power lines are available everywhere, so market penetration, in theory, should not be a problem. The downside here is that BPL comes in late. "There are already two well entrenched …
Telstra chooses HSDPA over WiMax
On its face, the direction is clear: A mobile version of WiMax has been launched in South Korea; Motorola is targeting the Asia/Pacific as its main focus for aggressive promotion of 802.16e; and WiMax certification has began. Then comes a reminder that things are a bit more complicated. In evidence: Australia's Telstra is not jumping on the WiMax bandwagon. The company's CEO, Sol Trujillo, has just announced that the operator will spend more than $1 billion on a turbo-charged 3G GSM …