Ed Sutherland

Visitors to the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, this week can log in to a local Wi-Fi hotspot and have the session billed to their cell phone bill back home. London-based Quiconnect says it has signed up three wireless carriers in Europe and Asia to facilitate the roaming. Eventually, the company says, it will sign […]

While predicting “solid second quarter growth” of Wi-Fi adoption by consumers and enterprises, Cisco and its wholly-owned subsidiary Linksys were named as the top WLAN vendors for both home and office, according to ABI Research. D-Link and Netgear came in second and third respectively in the consumer space, while Symbol Technologies and Proxim rounded out […]

In the latest in a series of announcements surrounding Wi-Fi hotzones, Airpath Wireless has joined forces with Tropos Networks to bring traditional hotspot technology to metro-scale networks — including to exclusive Nantucket Island. Waltham, Mass.-based Airpath, a company known for helping wireless service providers manage Wi-Fi networks, will combine its WiBOSS application with the Wi-Fi […]

In a sign of the growth of metropolitan Wi-Fi networks, hotspot management company Pronto Networks has announced a partnership with metro-scale wireless system builder Tropos Networks. The partnership “is an affirmation that this is a growing market,” says Bert Williams, vice president of marketing for Tropos. Williams says that a year ago, companies were not […]

In a bit of technological time travel, two vendors are using Wi-Fi and power line devices to bring broadband Internet access to the oldest parts of the nation’s capitol. DC Access, a wireless ISP based in Washington, DC, is teaming up with power line communications vendor Telkonet to wirelessly transmit a broadband connection, then distribute […]

It’s one thing for a company like BlueSocket to say it’s putting an intrusion detection system (IDS) into its WLAN management platform. But it’s another thing entirely when companies are getting out of management altogether to concentrate on security. That seems to be the way the wind is blowing these days. Take, for instance, Cirond […]

Are WLANs headed for the dollar store? Reston, Va.-based Full Mesh Networks wants to bring the cost of running your wireless network down to one buck per user. Full Mesh, a startup company which uncloaked from stealth mode in January (and despite the name, doesn’t have anything to do with mesh networking technology), is now […]

Meru Network’s recently announced one-click solution to WLAN management is just the latest sign that tracking and optimizing the growing torrent of Wi-Fi signals is taking on new importance. The change is just in time. Managing data exchanged over radio waves is a “critical need” which has become a “perpetual challenge” for Wi-Fi vendors and […]

As competition for in-flight Wi-Fi slowly heats up, a coalition of airline workers and consumer electronics makers hope to make the use of wireless gadgets by the flying public easier. A 35-member working group, made up of wireless device and component makers, airlines, pilots and flight attendants, is developing an industry-wide “recommended practice” which will […]

Mesh could be the solution to a proposed $1 billion wireless municipal network for New York City emergency workers. The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has requested proposals from vendors hoping to take part in several three-month pilot programs. One of the most ambitious and demanding wireless municipal networks envisioned, the system hopes […]

Littering the Wi-Fi roadway are the bodies of hotspot operators seeking the perfect business model. Since the late 1990s, public Wi-Fi access has made countless course changes, none really elevating public Wi-Fi hotspots to the point of economic viability. Now, in the wake of Cometa Networks’ death-spiral, we talk to hotspot players holding two differing […]

As promised last year, Avaya , Motorola , and Proxim plan to offer a dual-mode “enterprise phone” allowing employees to make calls using either wide-area cell phone connections or corporate WLANs. The trio expect to ship the handset and accompanying infrastructure this September. The rub is, the proposed phone will require companies to install 802.11a […]