802.11 Planet brings together the best ideas and people in the world of Wi-Fi for business and the enterprise, Dec. 3-5
Blow your mind wide open at Supernova 2002, a 2-day conference Dec. 9-10 on decentralization, and the fundamental questions facing software, communications, and media.
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Boingo Wireless adds PocketPC software to its roster: Boingo supports several PocketPC models with its sniffing and connection software, which allows easy connection to its aggregated hot spot network, as well as managing configurations. The company also launched a PDA version of its Web site. Four preview screens of the software courtesy of Boingo: connection, hot spot directory, pda.boingo.com in a PDA screen, and profile manager.
News.com notes futility of TI's 802.11b+ flavor: This analysis connects the dots between the non-IEEE 22 Mbps flavor of 2.4 GHz networking TI included in its ACX100 chipset and the coming rise of 802.11g. While TI has pledged support for this non-standard mode (which uses its PBCC modulation to reach 22 Mbps) in new chipsets, there's not much future for it as a separate technology. As I've noted on several occasions in this blog, I believe it was unclear to purchasers who new about 802.11g that the ACX100 chipset couldn't be firmware upgradable to support it. This lack of clarity has little to do with TI marketing or claims, but rather the long, long timetable to reach 802.11g ratification.
USA Today on Wi-Fi: A generally well-balanced article surveying mostly hot spot aspects of Wi-Fi. However, the article repeats the fallacy that businesses were reluctant to use Wi-Fi because of WEP's weakness. I continue to argue that WEP is a non-starter for businesses that have actual IT operations that include authentication systems -- which means the scale of businesses mentioned in passing in the article. The writer quotes Gartner's silly nonsense about "86,000" hot spots by 2006: if there are that few, the hot spot industry will have proven to be a non-starter and some kind of 3G system offering lower but ubiquitous bandwidth will have replaced hot spots. More likely 500,000 or a limited patchwork, but not much potential at 86,000. The article also says that Wi-Fi transmissions aren't regulated by the FCC, which is incorrect. The transmission power and characteristics are. It would have been better to say that Wi-Fi users require no special permission from the FCC to operate licensed equipment.