San franciso went with the Google/Earthlink partnership for bringing metro Wifi to the city. The partnership will be free for the city and provide free access to visitors and residents. There is talk of a pay service above the free, but presumably that means an ad free experience and uncapped speed. The decision was met… Continue Reading
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The Revolution Will Be Wireless
The City of Santa Monica is rolling out a Municipal Wi-Fi system in select parts of the city. The logic being that it’s another service the city can offer to it’s visitors and residents. With the number of high tech companies around, it makes the city just that more attactive if they can offer to… Continue Reading
Canadian WiMAX Network Launched
Canadian Telco’s Rogers’s and Bell have partnered to launch a WiMax network in various areas across the country. The new service offers 512Kbps and 3Mbps from Bell and Rogers is offering 1.5 Mbps service. Bothe companies offerings are comparible to thier wired broadband offerings. This should help provide remote and rural customers with the advantages… Continue Reading
Ofcom Starts Radio Spectrum Sale
Ofcom in the UK is starting to sell off parts of the spectrum for new mobile broadband and multimedia applications. The plan is to sell of 40Mhz to start with, eventually selling 400Mhz worth over the next few years. This availability of spectrum should lead to some interesting new technologies. Via [news.bbc.co.uk]… Continue Reading
Introduction To Kismet
Kismet, like Netstumbler, is one of the defacto wardriving and wireless troubleshooting apps available for free to the public. Kismet, unlike Netstumbler has a number of features that make it a much more useful tool for network discovery and reconnisence. If you have not tried Kismet, you really should. It’s a great tool to have… Continue Reading
Wardrivers And Leeches And Hackers, Oh My!
With all the press lately about people abusing others open WiFi AP’s, you think security is getting better. Well it’s not. Police are still playing catch up and the law is still pretty vague. Given the consiquences of someone abusing your AP, it’s as good an idea as ever to lock it down securly. Via… Continue Reading
NTT DoCoMo Flirts With Mobile WiMax
Japan’s NTT DoCoMo is applying for a Wi-Max license and plans to begin testing in Tokyo in the near future. With thier interest in 3g and the Japanese market for such a service, it’s no wonder that NTT DoCoMo is looking into the technology. Via [networks.silicon.com]… Continue Reading
Dell’s Latest Latitudes Use Wireless To Get Ahead
Dell’s new Latitude D series laptops are available equipped with an EDGE or EVDO card for connection to cellular broadband networks from either Cingular or Verizon respectivly. This defiatly shows that there is a market (probobly mostly for business travellers) for Wireless WAN hardware to be integrated into the laptop itself. A service contract with… Continue Reading
Wireless Cracking Tools
Knowing the tools that attackers could use to attack your network is the first step in knowing how to secure your network. These same tools can be used to discover weaknesses yourself and patch them before the bad guys find them. Via [it-observer.com]… Continue Reading
NSA Awards Harris $41.6 Million For Secure WLAN
The NSA has just ordered $41.6 Million worth of Harris SecNet54 wireless routers. Based off of standard 802.11a/b/g standards, the accesspoints radios are hooked into hardware cryptographic accelerators, turning them into a high level encrypted VPN device. This use of higher level encryption over normal protocols makes the units a bit less proprietary but alot… Continue Reading
Report Finds Friendlier WiFi Security Needed
We all know that WiFi security sucks. Well, who’s to blame. It’s hard to blame users when manufacturers don’t make it very easy to setup thier equipment with security. This is why many people end up turning off the security and leaving it open. It’s easy and once it’s working, it keeps working without worrying… Continue Reading
Google Employees’ Wireless Patents Published
Google was granted a few new patents for wireless. The patents cover several aspects of delivering ads from access points and modifying the browser look depending on the access point connected to. The idea is that in exchange for using the access for free, users will have ads show up on thier devices. While not… Continue Reading
Ballet School Leaps Into Voice Over Wi-Fi
Canada’s national ballet school of all places is making the jump to use VOIP over Wi-Fi. The ballet school recently moved into a new building and was looking for a modern solution to thier communication needs to match thier modern building. The partnership with NEC shows how everyone can benifit from emerging technology. Via [computerworld.com]… Continue Reading
Intel Backs Wireless Sensor Networking Startup
Intel is backing a new startup called Arch Rock and thier desire to build wireless internet enabled sensor devices. The idea is to have these things on everything, utilizing a low power mesh network to string them together to allow operators to have a firm grasp of what is happening in the physical world, through… Continue Reading
A Better Path To Video-Over-WLAN
Video over wireless is something that the public wants and the vendors want to provide. However, there is quite the list of problems to be overcome first before it can really be considered a mature technology. WLAN technologies are’nt the most appropriate for video delivery, but there are some things that can be done. QoS,… Continue Reading