802.11g compromise?: News.com is describing more of a compromise decision on the IEEE's vote on the 802.11g specification than previously reported.
iPass spans globe, wireless networks: a nice analysis at 802.11 Planet of the business model and practical issues for iPass in creating a global roaming network comprised of partnerships with dial-up, wireline, and wireless ISPs.
I interviewed Anurag Lal a few weeks ago and was impessed with the company's focus on their market. They do require a special client software package for their customers, which finds the closest network or dial-up for them. But this client package has a variety of VPN software bundled with it, reducing the administration overhead for corporate IT folks in managing a roaming system. It's also intercompatible with Cisco and other vendors equipment.
I'm moderating a panel at the upcoming 802.11 Planet conference (Nov. 27-28 in Santa Clara, Calif.) that will feature Mr. Lal, Clark Dong of hereUare (an iPass competitor), as well as Phil Belanger of Wayport, Rick Ehrlinspiel from Surf and Sip, and Stephen Saltzman from Intel's Wireless LAN Operation. The whole conference looks terrific. My moderation session is on day 2; I'm on a panel about the future on day 1 in which I'll be overviewing the standards battle.
802.11g standard once again pushed back: the IEEE task group couldn't reach 75 percent support of the Intersil encoding scheme for 802.11g. The next meeting is January. Meanwhile, Texas Instruments continues to press forward with their unapproved variant, and Intersil's stock took a run-up and a slide.
More wireless news from Comdex: lots of Wi-Fi devices, plus Bluetooth emerges. Some industry dollar/unit statistics, too.