Eric Griffith

Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, thinks it’s a happy accident that the 3,000th product the industry group has certified for interoperability just happens to be a Wi-Fi/cellular phone from Motorola (the multi-mode Motorola A910, at right). “It’s a great example of how Wi-Fi is moving from massive success in notebooks — with […]

Despite the industry barreling ahead with the release of Draft-N products based on the 1.0 draft of 802.11n, the high-speed Wi-Fi standard isn’t likely to get another vote until January 2007, rather than next month as many had hoped. That means there won’t be a 2.0 draft for at least six months. Network World reports […]

JiWire’s SpotLock is going away, and in its place comes a Hotspot Helper. The suite of software for Windows 2000/XP includes Wi-Fi Security for hosted virtual private network (VPN) connections, Wi-Fi Mailer which allows users to send SMTP e-mail traffic through a relay even on networks that don’t usually allow SMTP traffic (limited to 200 […]

Researchers who discovered an exploit in the Wi-Fi device drivers of the Apple MacBook as well as various Windows XP Wi-Fi adapters this week provided a demonstration of how a malicious user can take over a laptop. The exploit, dubbed the Wi-Fi Drive-By when first announced a couple of months ago, involves an unwanted wireless […]

The city of Boston, Massachusetts is the latest metropolis to make plans for a citywide Wi-Fi network. The city will start a non-profit organization to deploy, own and run the network. The network will span 49 square miles, with service to 590,000 residents, if and when completed. No timetable has been set yet. The majority […]

“It’s a bridge, and by definition it links two discrete networks,” says Mitch Gonzales, president of Cheetah Wireless Technologies, Inc. (CWTI). His company has deployed Tropos equipment in trials in downtown Las Vegas as well as Encinitas and Pomona in California, among other cities. List price on the equipment is $129, but Gonzales says he’s […]

EarthLink’s rebirth from dial-up ISP to provider of metro-scale Wi-Fi has included two key partners the entire time: Tropos Networks for mesh gear to handle client connections and Motorola as both the system integrator and provider of equipment for backhaul to the mesh. But where the Motorola Canopy provides the street-level backhaul connections, the high […]

Despite the fact that the enterprise wireless LAN market is moving inexorably toward centralized management with “thin” access points (APs) at the network edge, there’s plenty — that is, millions — of so-called thick/fat APs out there. Companies embracing WLAN controllers/switches can’t change that overnight, much to the disappointment of some vendors. And if you […]

Tropos Networks — the headline-grabbing mesh networking equipment maker with 300 deployments and counting — knows that the biggest complaint it gets from customers is that client devices (laptops, PDAs and more) just can’t connect to the mesh network. “Even if throughput is low, it’s often linked to poor connectivity,” says Ellen Kirk, the company’s […]

Military families have enough to worry about without thinking about their Internet access, right? That’s the feeling of Lincoln Military Housing (LMH, a division of Lincoln Property Company), which operates many communities for all branches of the United States armed forces. Near San Diego, families of Navy personnel living at the Naval Training Center (NTC) […]

High-speed wireless broadband provider Clearwire already had $360 million in its coffers, enough to get its pre-WiMax services deployed in several cities. Today, it added another $900 million in venture capital funds, including $600 million alone from Intel Capital. The rest is coming from Motorola Ventures. In addition, the company sold its NextNet Wireless subsidiary […]

The two companies vying for vendors and carrier dollars to test Wi-Fi wares continue to issue new software suites to check different facets of WLANs. VeriWave, maker of the WaveTest 90 and WaveTest 20 traffic generators, is selling a VoIP QoS Service Assurance Test. The goal is to peg the service level a WLAN can support, measured […]