Today's 802.11b Networking News is sponsored by IIR's Public Access Wireless LANs
conference, 1-3 October 2002, Lisbon

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Warchalking hits government: in the coolest intersection of government, blogging, and wireless, the State of Utah's CIO blogs (using Radio) about the idea of warchalking to help identify resources inside an organization! I've never seen an idea get co-opted (in a good way) so quickly.

AOL/Time-Warner fires the first salvo in suppressing free wireless: Rick T. documents the letter he received about his alleged free wireless access point that connects to his AOL/Time-Warner (Roadrunner) cable modem service. A/T-W may be entirely within its rights, but the letter is creepy: it doesn't simply say, we think you're stealing our service and we're giving you a chance to stop. Rather, it alleges and hypothesizes about ways in which this might be a problem to Rick T. Nonetheless, this letter brings to an official head something I've been warning about for quite a while: if you have a contract with an ISP that says you can't share bandwidth and you're running open access points, you are violating that agreement. Yes, a lot of these agreements are hidden (you have to go online to read them and understand the fine print); yes, it may be an unreasonable business model for these outfits to even worry about this. But it's well within their rights as they can say to you, You Can Go Elsewhere. With cable modem service, you have more of a monopoly effect at work: in many less-served areas of the country and in some urban areas, cable modems from a single licensed provider which already has the cable franchise is the only high-speed data option.

802.11a fire sale, already: Atheros sent out an alert that NetGear was offering a rebate off their already inexpensive 802.11a hardware. The list is $100; with the rebate, it's $70. With Amazon.com's newest shipping offer, it's free shipping within the U.S. for that item. I've been using Proxim's 802.11a card and hub for a few days with a Windows laptop, and it's quite stunning: at distances and locations in my office where Wi-Fi fails, slows down, or sputters, I'm still running at 24 to 36 Mbps. [via Alan Reiter]

The softer, software side of Wi-Fi: I'm not sure this is news, as several months ago, discussions were reported by several manufacturers about moving some hardware Wi-Fi functions into the operating system. With so much CPU power, this could make sense: reduce the complexity and cost of the cards.