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Wi-Fi phones are coming (requires paid Wall St. Journal registration): My college classmate Kevin Delaney writes from Cannes, Frances, for the Wall Street Journal about the coming wave of cell phones that will work over Wi-Fi networks all within about 12 months. Motorola Inc. expects to unveil a cellphone by the end of next year....Texas Instruments Inc., which supplies an estimated 50% of cellphone chips, says it is releasing at least two cellphone reference designs...within the next few months that would allow its manufacturer clients to make dual-mode devices. Chip makers Intel Corp. and Philips Semiconductors are pushing forward along similar paths....Meanwhile, Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. in December unveiled a hand-held computer with built-in Wi-Fi and cellular capabilities that also enables users to make voice calls....At the 3GSM World Congress here [in Cannes] this week, Hewlett-Packard Co. is showing one of its iPaq hand-held computers connected to a cellphone seamlessly switching back and forth from Wi-Fi and cellular networks...Nokia Corp. also sells a dual Wi-Fi and cellular card to be used in laptops....Nokia, Palm Inc., Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, and Qualcomm Inc. all say they are looking into Wi-Fi phones and either don't have exact plans yet or won't reveal more until they announce specific products.
Ricochet's return in parts of Denver, San Diego: The Ricochet network's buyer has started to light up parts of Denver and San Diego, and claims speeds of up to 176 Kbps. Goli Ameri, quoted in the article, rightly questions whether hot zones can compete with ubiquitous cell coverage. I've been pushing the new meme: speed trumps ubuiquity. Cell companies count on ubiquity winning, while hot spot operators are hoping for speed. Glenn's wireless data axiom 1 is: Near ubiquity is as good as total ubiquity. Axiom 2: Speed kills. Axiom 3: Cheap unlicensed trumps in two directions: free spectrum, cheap equipment. [via Dewayne Hendricks]
Wi All Fi in a Yellow Subcompact: Cory Doctorow and others form the Wi-Fi caravan from Portland to San Francisco on Feb. 21 with the technical assistance of VIA Technologies. A multi-car, high-speed, mobile Wi-Fi network. Pull over and set a spell boys, and spin us some bandwidth.
FatPort, Netwireless partnership in Canada: Vancouver's FatPort and the nascent Netwireless network have partnered to roll out 175 hot spots in the next year using FatPort's FatPoint turnkey hot spot hardware/back-end system. FatPort and Netwireless now have access through international roaming agreement with what they say is 1,000 hot spots worldwide. Netwireless has just three hot spots listed at the moment, but their parent company runs 150 computer retailers and integrators across Canada, so you can imagine how that sort of business lends itself to opportunities for deployment.
A transmitter grows in Boston: Public housing meets broadband in an experiment to bridge the digital divide. The projects sounds well directed with reasonable expectations. The story told here is similar to that elsewhere: when you give kids access to information, they'll suck at that hose no matter how much you push through it. Kids want to learn. (And play.) [via TechDirt]