Adam Stone

WiFi: It’s not just for mobility anymore. So says Chuck Williams, technical consultant and part-owner of Lexington Wi-Fi, a company working to deploy wireless broadband service across a broad swath of the Kentucky city that bills itself as the Horse Capital of the World. So far the project has spread Wi-Fi over two and a […]

The medical arena is one of the more challenging settings in which to implement a WLAN. There’s little room for error and there are a slew of regulatory constraints, along with the high likelihood of interference with other devices. Yet a new study shows that wireless is gaining steady ground in hospitals and other healthcare […]

When is a constraint not a constraint? When money — and marketing — will solve the problem. The problem in this case is the FCC’s Part 15 rule, which tries to control manufacturers of wireless antennas and other equipment. Specifically, Part 15 says that you cannot mix and match antennas with Wi-Fi gateways. Only antennas […]

Last summer, Sprint PCS said its users would have access to 2,100 hotspots nationwide within a year. In fact, the telecom giant has exceeded that goal, with roaming agreements that have brought into the Sprint fold some 3,000 hotspots. Where to next? We talked with Wes Dittmer, general manager of wireless LAN service for Sprint, […]

Much of corporate America still raises a skeptical eyebrow at the mention of Wi-Fi connectivity. In the insurance industry, meanwhile, the drumbeat of return on investment (ROI) is sounding ever louder, and executives in search of a competitive edge have begun to heed the call of wireless networking. “Claims adjusters are out in the field, […]

There are those who say the hotspot model of Wi-Fi access can never be a money maker, on the grounds that you can’t get enough people using a single hotspot at one time to make the thing pay off. The solution, they say, is an interconnected series of hotspots — a hotzone or maybe a […]

From July 9 to 18, the role of Wi-Fi as a means of logistics support will be put to an Olympic-sized test. The venue: Cal State Sacramento’s Hornet Stadium. The event: The U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials. The challenge: Provide Wi-Fi access not just to hundreds of reports and thousands of spectators, but also […]

There are airports, and there are airports. As New York’s busiest flyway, John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) handles over 30 million passengers a year. That’s a lot of Wi-Fi coverage, if wireless is what you want. “Airports are mini-cities. You don’t just have passengers. You have airlines, you have concessions, you have a need […]

We’ve talked about the ins and outs of setting up the physical infrastructure of a hotspot, or public-access wireless network. You can stop there if you want: Charge a fee or don’t, and operate the network yourself. But there is another way of doing business. You can tie your fortunes to those of a hotspot […]

For free or not for free? That is the question that must be asked in the passage toward becoming a “hotspot,” a public terminal offering wireless Internet access. As more laptop makers and other device manufactures make wireless capability a standard offering, consumer adoption of Wi-Fi access is gaining momentum. T-Mobile took an early lead […]

So-called “smart dust” networking has not yet hit the mainstream, but it is coming soon, and it could have big implications for the Wi-Fi community. The term refers to tiny sensors, perhaps as small as one cubic millimeter. They would be scattered over an industrial space, for example, and would form an ad hoc wireless […]

When it comes to deploying wireless LAN, the old maxim holds true: Forewarned really is forearmed. It stands to reason that the best way to keep out intruders is to first take a lay of the land. As some users have found, a creative use of radio frequency (RF) monitoring can help to do just […]