The spate of news about WiFi has slowed down lately, but expect more announcements and innovations as we head into the summer.

The New York Times Magazine ran an article about being connected by James Gleick which mentioned WiFi in passing:

If you install a small base station somewhere on your home network, you can carry laptops from room to room, basement to kitchen counter, and never go off line. By the end of this year, thousands of hotels, airport lounges and coffee shops will be filling their airspace with this same invisible radiation field: information and connectivity all around. Microsoft and Starbucks are teaming up to deploy it. One can imagine grocery stores and department stores beaming real-time information to their gadget-toting customers. One can even imagine properly functional motor-vehicles offices and polling places.

One proviso, which I mentioned via email to the author: MobileStar is installing the wireless network into Starbucks at their own expense. Starbucks is essentially giving them free access to install a corporate network for the company as well as offer wireless service to their customers. Microsoft's involvement appears to be limited to offering a customized, localized home page with free information to customers who access the MobileStar network from a Starbucks outlet without having a MobileStar account.

Technical article on Intersil's tight integration of components in new WiFi radio chipset

Part 2 of an article on using wireless networking cards with FreeBSD: for some reason, the author talks about WaveLAN cards; the WaveLAN brand was bought by Lucent, changed to Orinoco, and then spun off with its Agere Systems offering recently