Are you finding Wee-Fi useful? Let me know if this short round-up of events that don't get the full treatment at Wi-Fi Networking News is useful to you. It lets me "catch" news that otherwise falls through the cracks without overwhelming you fine folks with two many individual postings.
802.11n now slated for April 2009 approval: Don't worry. The hard work is over. There's more refinement, but a bit hunk of the timetable is a formal process. In fact, I'm wrong. It's bad graphic design on the Web page, making it almost impossible to read across without literally holding a straight edge of a piece of paper to the screen. Final approval is still slated for Sept. 2008.
SkyPilot adds mesh extender: SkyPilot adds a new kind of node for its metro-scale network. The higher ends of its network use eight sector antennas, to allow point-to-point communication on a scheduled basis, combining some of the best access of point-to-point and frequency reuse. Their new SkyAccess DualBand has just one sectorized antenna in 5 GHz to point to an existing multi-antenna node, and a omnidirectional antenna for Wi-Fi use. This reduces the cost of extending the edge of the network.
White paper for Cognio, Airspy detail defenses: The two firms collaborated on a white paper that covers how to deal with physical-layer threats to Wi-Fi networks, both accidental and intentional. It's a download with minimal registration details required.
WiPeer allows computer-to-computer file sharing: This was one of the features that I liked in Whisher, too.
Toledo meets with MetroFi; Officals from the Ohio town meet with one of two potential network providers. Local paper--the owners of which also own the competing bidder--has an article on how MetroFi's advertising-driven free service might not be up to sniff. Interesting comment: Three years ago, MetroFi's CEO Chuck Haas said the model would be proven by 2005; the paper asked him recently if that had happened, and he said that no market was yet mature enough. Which is true. Metro-scale networks have taken a lot longer to arrive than anticipated. A lot of financial detail about MetroFi is also in this piece.
Moscow subway gets Wi-Fi: Three busy underground stations have service from Comstar. One hour is 5 "currency units," which, if that's rubles, means US 20 cents. Service is 128 Kbps supporting up to 48 users—each at that speed? It's unclear. Update: Currency units aren't rubles, Martyn Levy from RoamAD notes via email (he's a fluent Russian speaker). They're "uslovnaya edinitsa," which are roughly a buck. So an hour costs about five bucks U.S., which is an awful lot.
Walmart's RFID scanners interfere with 900 MHz wireless ISP signals: We tend to forget about this lower band, which is used in some WISP's infrastructure.