Silicon.com continues with its Fair Wi-Fi campaign, which urges hotels in the U.K. to be more transparent as to how they charge customers for Wi-Fi use. Today, hotel Wi-Fi prices vary some charge a flat fee of £50 while others impose an hourly rate of £5. According to Graeme Powell, MD of iBahn, knowing the… Continue Reading
Clearwire: Taking WiMAX To The Street
Clearwire has gone public. The company’s initial public offering was scheduled for March 6, and through it, Clearwire hoped to raise $513 million or about $25 to $27 per share. Scott Sweet, managing partner at IPOBoutique.com, expected the share price to come to between $25 and $27, thus generating some $621 million for Clearwire, one… Continue Reading
Panasonic Intros $400 Wi-Fi Skype Phone
Panasonic has unveiled its new Wi-Fi Skype phone, which it plans to sell for $399.95. The KX-WP1050 Panasonic Wi-Fi Phone kit features a cordless handset with a 1.8-inch LCD display for viewing Skype contact lists, call histories, and address books, a wireless base station with 256-bit AES encryption (WPA) to ensure security of calls, and… Continue Reading
Paris To Offer Free Wi-Fi Broadband To Citizens And Visitors
Residents of and visitors to Paris will soon get free wireless broadband connection anywhere in the French capital. The city government has chosen Alcatel-Lucent and leading French mobile carrier SFR to build the citywide Wi-Fi network. The service, which will rely on 400 new access points, is expected to be operational by the third quarter… Continue Reading
Fujitsu, KDDI Improve WiMAX Amplifier
Fujitsu and KDDI are coming out with a high-efficiency mobile WiMAX amplifier that could pave the way for cheaper and less energy consuming base stations. After optimizing the amplifier circuits of a gallium-nitride (GaN) HEMT device, Fujistu went on to build a prototype transmitter amplifier that can attain power efficiency of about 30 percent with… Continue Reading
Staking Out WiMAX
After Sprint Nextel, other carriers have announced that they also plan to venture into WiMax. According to TeleGeography Research, over 200 operators worldwide are now testing the technology or have deployed commercial WiMax networks, with the most recent being Horizon Wi-Com and CTC Telcom in the U.S., the national Hellenic Telecommunications Organization in Greece, and… Continue Reading
Wireless Cures Hospital Bottlenecks
Sydney Children’s Hospital at Westmead has wrapped up a year-long trial of integrated wireless networking technologies to boost patient care and improve the efficiency of its manual processes. The project involved the installation of 40 Cisco 1200 series wireless networking access points, 40 Vocera hands-free communication badges, 10 Dell notebook computers, which used customized, battery-powered… Continue Reading
Tesco Expands Into VoIP Market
Tesco has begun offering VoIP service, allowing subscribers to call each other for free. Calls, however, to U.K. landlines and select international destinations entail a fee of as little as 2p per minute while those to U.K. mobile numbers require payment of 10p per minute except for Hutchison 3G, which is costlier by 15p. Costs… Continue Reading
The Killing Of Wi-Fi
According to John C. Dvorak, cellular service companies are out to kill Wi-Fi, being their largest threat in the long term. The technology’s popularity, as indicated by a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, has grown significantly over the last two years: about 34 percent of Internet users secure online access via Wi-Fi connections,… Continue Reading
Dual-mode Service Won’t Interest US Consumers
Research firm Ovum expects the uptake of dual-mode phones to be minimal – only about 2 percent or 5.5 million people in the U.S. As such, it is urging equipment vendors and carriers to concentrate more on other opportunities for fixed-mobile convergence such as identity convergence and remote access. Identity convergence enables customers to keep… Continue Reading
NetStumbler: The Best Wi-Fi Tool Money Can’t Buy
Kirk Kirksey, author of Computer Factoids: Tales From the High-Tech Underbelly, called NetStumbler as “one of the greatest freebies of all time.” The downloadable program is a tool that sniffs WiFi signals and informs users if their wireless network is properly configured. But prior to downloading, users need to check if their wireless cards are… Continue Reading
San Francisco Turns Free Wi-Fi Into Long Battle
San Francisco residents may have to wait longer to get free WiFi access. Although Mayor Gavin Newsom signed the contract with Google and EarthLink, building the network has yet to start as the Board of Supervisors refused to consider the contract and is now studying how to convert the facility into a city-run public utility.… Continue Reading
Stealing Starbucks’ WiFi Customers
Starbucks clients need not pay the usual $10 per day to connect wirelessly. The said fee is charged by T-Mobile for each customer who wants to sign onto its 5,100 hotspots while they stay at U.S. Starbucks. Madrid-based Wi-Fi provider FON is offering a cheaper plan of $2 per day. The scheme allows owners of… Continue Reading
How Skype Is Collecting Private User Data
Kurt Sauer, Skype’s Chief Security Officer, has issued a statement clarifying the company’s process for collecting private user data. According to Sauer, Skype has a license for an EasyBits plug-in manager software framework, which manages the Extras Gallery of Skype for Windows. The EasyBits software houses digital rights management functionality that allows for protection of… Continue Reading
Your Wi-Fi Can Tell People A Lot About You
According to David Maynor, chief technology officer at Errata Security, computers are “leaking all kinds of information that an attacker can use” once they connect to a Wi-Fi network, particularly in public areas such as airports. Existing tools can obtain important details like usernames and passwords for e-mail accounts and instant messengers. To address this… Continue Reading