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Boingo Wireless drops monthly unlimited price to $49.95: Without fanfare, but noticed by VentureWire (no article link available), Boingo slashed its $74.95/month all you can eat rate (unlimited sessions) to $49.95. A nice move, and I would guess that it signifies more users rather than fewer. You lower your price when you're confident of a model, if you're smart, rather than in panic. Note the inside joke describing the unlimited service: the Sky's the limit? [via alert Dave Gross]
Boingo's Sky Dayton on PocketPCs: Sky shared a few insights about the PocketPC market with me yesterday which I reproduce with his permission: non-laptop Wi-Fi devices will dramatically increase hot spot usage and the size of the potential user population. With Pocket Boingo, PocketPC becomes the first such device. Pocket Boingo on an iPaq, provides an instant-on, 5-10 second login experience, perfect for people who are moving through a hot spot quickly. It's pretty cool to be sitting in a hot spot streaming video on your PDA! Bigger picture -- with Wi-Fi component prices dropping through the floor and all the innovation around power conservation, we can expect to see a flood of non-laptop Wi-Fi devices. Not just PDAs, but cell phones, MP3 players, Game Boys. Anything with a battery that could benefit from fast wireless Internet connection. I concur, not just to be a sycophant, because we're already seeing useful devices that aren't Wi-Fi adapters or access points, but rely on the network's presence. Based on Boingo's announcement, I just purchased a Toshiba PocketPC (due in next week) with a Compact Flash format Wi-Fi card.
Can WPA Be DoS'd?: Acronym city. Can the Wi-Fi Alliance's new Wi-Fi Protected Access replacement for WEP be easily misled into shutting down over and over again, thus acting as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack? The article's author doesn't seem to distinguish between plain WEP-like WPA (shared secrets) and network authentication WPA (802.1x/EAP), and I believe the problem is in the latter system, if it exists. Because this problem is known, manufacturers in their implementations can fix it. Also, the point about not being able to find DoS'ers -- an increasing number of tools allow pinpointing locations, and because you have to actively inject packets to cause this DoS, I wonder how many crackers will be happy to wait for the police to show up?
Glenn, which Toshiba did you order? I have the E740 and I can report that it's built-in WiFI does not work with Pocket Boingo. Also, be careful which card you order as Boingo's compatability chart at http://www.boingo.com/compatibility.html does not list any CF cards. The announcement specifically calls out compatability with the iPAQ Pocket PCs which I think is due to the fact that the iPAQ is the only Pocket PC with a PC Card sleeve to support cards Boingo supports. The bottom line is that Pocket Boingo is only supported by a very narrow set device brands and WiFI cards.