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« Eleven-B, Good Buddy | Main | Broadcom Updates Draft 802.11g Firmware »

February 25, 2003

Gee, Isn't July Lovely?

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Wi-Fi Alliance sets July as tenative date for 802.11g interoperability testing: News.com reports that products certified as interoperable with the 802.11g could be on shelves as soon as August. I've already seen a few signs that I can't discuss yet that indicate rapid movement among vendors to assure continuous improvement in existing implementations.

Speak Softly and Deploy a Large Footprint

The Wi-Fi Alliance releases its draft on wireless ISP roaming (wISPr, pronounced "whisper"): It's a cogent and not overly long document full of sensible recommendations. The goal of this document is provide a framework in which roaming could be facilitated by having systems that act the same way, regardless of wISP. Without a common framework, wISPs have two choices: adopt the Boingo approach of building client software that handles the many, many authentication systems out there invisible to the user; or build back-end systems that can handle logins from any partner and pass messages over the Internet back to that peer's authentication system. Both are problematic.

I'm sure that individual wISPs and aggregators will have issues with specific items, but given that the document is written in the form of an IETF RFP, there are per se requirements so much as recommendations for and against certain behaviors at different levels of severity: highly recommended, should, may, etc. The discussion in the appendix of 802.1x/EAP is a good primer on the subject with illustrations.

LEAPing to Conclusions

Proxim's response to Cisco's technology sharing announcement: Cisco announced a laundry list of companies that will share its technology for wireless networking. Many comments have come in today about how this is an attempt by Cisco to take proprietary extensions that it has and bypass the industry trade group, The Wi-Fi Alliance, through partnerships.

A Proxim spokesperson sent me their response: We think this is just a further proprietary move by Cisco to lock customers into their infrastructure. Proxim supports open, interoperable enterprise security solutions. In our opinion, the announcement had little content, beyond listing general things like "security", "management" and "voice support" which are obvious and every vendor is working on.

We believe that the industry has already resolved these WLAN security issues with solutions like WFA's WPA and IEEE's 802.11i. Overall, we believe that Cisco is trying to set the industry back to the "proprietary days" before IEEE and the Wi-Fi Alliance.

I don't know what the patent or licensing issues are, so it's unclear why Cisco wouldn't take their ideas to the Wi-Fi Alliance at large, or even the IEEE or IETF unless they feel that a consensus-driven standards or trade body can't fulfill the function of providing uniform consistent quality across an industry. QED.

Wired News has more on the Cisco story. It's proprietary, but free. The devil will be in the contract details.

Other News

Is that a phased-array antenna, or are you just happy to see me?: Nigel Ballard offered up a link to the Hot or Not collaborative physical-attribute ranking service which shows a guy pursing his lips next to a sexy, naked Vivato antenna. Yup, naked. The Vivato when sold will have either a textile cover (indoors) or a ruggedized enclosure (outdoors).

Etenna tunes antenna to reduce static: I can barely understand what their special technology does, but it sounds awfully 21st-century. If I'm interpreting it right, they've developed a way to prevent certain kinds of interference caused by lack of isolation between parts of a continuous antenna or multiple antennas resulting in a clean separation for different protocols.