Airport wireless access continues, if slowly (Thursday's New York Times): my brief article on the status of unwiring airports in the U.S. and Canada. For length, a bit at the end was cut about Nokia's expansion in Europe partnering with cellular telephone companies over there to deploy Nokia's new GSM SIM-compatible 802.11b cards and access points. The SIM card contains user account information, so the 802.11b PC Card can work with Nokia access points to use the cell telephone companies' back-office billing and roaming systems.

Sending data in mid-air: it's not 802.11b, but it's 2.5 GHz. The abbreviation MDSS I believe is a mistake for MDS or MMDS, which is multipoint distribution service paired with ITU (instructional television) licensed in the 2.5 GHz band.

Balkanization at 22 Mbps began today: Buffalo Technology is shipping today its Texas Instrument equipped series of 22 Mbps, backwards compatible 802.11b devices. These devices support full 802.11b (Wi-Fi) compatibility, but can talk to other systems that support TI's breakaway encoding scheme for 22 Mbps service. The IEEE was unable to meet in early fall to proceed on its Task Group G (802.11g) decision on whether to use Intersil's OFDM encoding; they had already voted down TI's PBCC methodology. But if the group couldn't agree on OFDM, they may still have to revert to TI's flavor. The Buffalo and TI equipment doesn't truly cause Balkanization because existing devices can talk intercompatibly to it.

Manchester is United Behind Bluetooth (little joke there for footie fans): a Manchester firm has deployed a Bluetooth hot spot in anticipation of upcoming Goodwill Games, and plans to put in dozens more. Obviously, the deployment and use of smaller devices seems to be evident in Manchester than in the States. 802.11b makes sense for a density of laptops; Bluetooth for a density of equipped phones and PDAs. Still, it seems unwise, given the short-term anticipation and some current availability of dual-mode Bluetooth/802.11b access points that will also feature some adaptive frequency controls.