Boingo Partners with Earthlink

Earthlink and Boingo co-brand Boingo's service: Given that Earthlink founder and chairman Sky Dayton also founded Boingo it's not a huge surprise that the two companies found a way to work together. In practice, it's reducing the friction for the several million Earthlink customers to use Boingo's service, rather than offering any unique benefits. Pricing is the same. If Earthlink customers download the Boingo client from Earthlink's site, it's branded with Earthlink's colors instead of Boingo's. But anything that makes it easier for a subscriber to punch in account information and log on without having to go through hoops is yet another nail in the structure that allows Boingo to appear to one monolithic network to its users.

Dvorak Dances on Satellite Radio's Not Yet Dug Grave?

Industry pundit John Dvorak points out how satellite radio may be over before it's begun: I point to this article because of the recent brou-ha-ha over the satellite digital radio companies' attempt to get the FCC to rejigger nearby spectrum neighbors' rules. Dvorak points out the weaknesses in the current generation of satellite radio, and it's a clearly high hurdle to overcome. Instead of satellite radio, how about low-bandwidth (plain 802.11) spread along the highways and commuting corridors, letting you listen to 30 kbps multicast signals from dozens of stations?

Final Mile for $100 or Less

Etherlinx tests final mile, sub-$100 solution for wireless links: Today's New York Times carries a story by John Markoff about Etherlinx, a company modifying off-the-shelf hardware to create a two-radio device with an antenna that handles both the long-distance link (20 miles) and the local area link (Wi-Fi). (I noted this story briefly yesterday at the bottom fo the Illuminating RF Lighting article.)

I have a number of suppositions about what this company is doing, which I hope to confirm in a phone call in the next day or so. First, it's likely they're modifying PC cards, not access points. Second, Intersil chips are almost certainly at the center of their product. Third, the $100 price tag sounds like a "when we're in widescale production" target, but the current price might not be far off that. Fourth, they're writing their own microcode, or the instructions that direct the lowest-level radio layer. Fifth, while they're using Wi-Fi in one radio to handle the local network, the other radio is running a variant on 802.11 using frequency hopping.

More on the above as it's confirmed or explained.

Other News for 6/10/2002

The Earth's a Big Blue Broadband: IBM decides that it should simply impose a technically excellent solution to bind all wireless networks into a seamless virtual LAN. Yeah, sounds great. Dismissing Boingo and other players, IBM's advance guard marches bravely into the quicksand, choking out a merry song as they vanish without a trace. If the industry to date has taught us anything, it's that there is no industry: no monolithic presence that dominates any part of wireless public space hot spots. Rather, many companies working independently and occasionally in concert will build the backbone of this new entity, and Boingo and others will bind together the infrastructure. Cell companies and deep-pocketed others may arrive and buy up chunks or spew hot spots out with a vengeance, throwing 1,000 up in a quarter. But real estate is still real estate: you can't cover everywhere; no one can afford that, and no one has access to everywhere. Wave to the nice people at IBM: buh-bye, buh-bye.

England legalizes commercial wireless networks: a small regulatory change opens the market to wireless ISPs in England, including both the final-mile, point-to-point variety and the Wayport/T-Mobile kind. [via Julian Bond]