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Still catching up from a week of backlog: Not much new news, but still clearing out the announcements and developments of last week.

Wi-Fi with a French accent: saving rural areas: Rural dwellers in France are finding that the broadband gap is making them uncompetitive with city folk. The solution is fixed point-to-point wireless (which might not all be Wi-Fi, by the way; there's plenty of 2.4 GHz non-802.11 stuff out there). It's part of the ongoing lesson being taught to telecoms worldwide: your least profitable customers can be profitable to smaller companies with lower regulatory overhead than monopoly players.

Tim Higgins 802.11g Need To Know article: Another extensively researched, well-written, extremely exhaustive account from Tim on 802.11g, this time running through issues with the current draft implementations, how interoperability among b and g devices works, and pitfalls. It's a detailed analysis that any network admin, CIO, and journalist should read!

News.com on wireless security: Part three in News.com's series on wireless, today's installment provides a great rundown of vulnerabilities, practical risk, and upcoming solutions. Two comments: First, they say that it could take five hours to break a WEP key. I've heard 15 minutes or even less (10,000 packets is all that's needed in some cases). Second, the man-in-the-middle attack noted in a footnote of the sidebar doesn't apply to SSL: SSL requires certification authority verification, which must be done in-band. The MitM attacks that are possible involve SSL-like systems that don't use outside authority to verify identity.

You can help your fellow man...in the Navy: US Navy installs Wi-Fi as a way to avoid the labor cost of checking on spread-out systems. Sounds like an excellent combination of technology to avoid scut work.

Omni Hotels offer free wireless: The chain of 40 properties tried it and liked it, so free access for everyone (if you're a guest). [via Jim Sullivan]

Oh Bum Plan: Au Bon Pain, the pretentiously named pastry shop found where Starbucks haven't reached maximum density, is offering wireless access in three cities near university campuses (Northeastern in Boston, Yale in New Haven, and Brown in Providence). Strangely, since most colleges are offering free Wi-Fi to students, typically at super-high rates because of their high-speed backbones, this plan to charge at these outlets seems moronic. Wouldn't it be more sensible to offer it for free to tempt in students? (The Au Bon Pain in New Haven is on the site of the former Demery's, not quite a bucket of blood, as they say, but a place to see at least one fight out front every weekend night.)

USDA to back $1.4B in loans, loan guarantees for rural broadband: Of all the ideas to promote people staying in agriculture, this is one of the best. The details on this site are sketchy, but it's clear that there's a movement afoot. Unlike the evils of rural electrification, in which small cooperatives pursuing interesting alternatives were displaced by massive utilities, rural broadband has the potential to create thousands of entities with local purpose and local funding. One of the strains I hear again and again about local wireless networking is that it keeps money directly in the community.

Will you Wi-Fi on a train?: Wi-Fi service on a train between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Gothenburg, Sweden, starts this month.

Proxim's Maestro: Maestro is a new system from Proxim that pulls together all kinds of network wireless and mobile services, including voice, into a single management system that expands on what they've offered for several years with Harmony. Their release says: A key component of the Maestro architecture is the distributed deployment wireless-enabled switches at the edge of the network that integrate advanced mobility, security, network management, voice-over-WLAN, and power-over-Ethernet services. Maestro's "self aware" learning network software creates a wireless LAN that constantly monitors network growth and user density, dynamically adjusting bandwidth, access control, quality of service, and other parameters as mobile users roam throughout the enterprise. The prose is a little breathless, but I've talked to Harmony users who find that that predecessor system does offer many of these benefits for WLAN deployment and management. Later in the press release, it's noted that Maestro works with a variety of equipment, which might be the expansion of something great: heterogeneous WLAN equipment management. This isn't offered by anyone but AirWave at the moment.