Eric Griffith

Earlier this week, many Wi-Fi silicon makers announced plans to put their 802.11 support into ever smaller products. Conexant of Newport Beach, California, which inherited the Wi-Fi chip business started by Intersil, is working with consumer electronics giant Sharp. Together, the two companies say they have created the “world’s smallest and lowest standby power wireless […]

Tropos Networks of Sunnyvale, California is in the cat-bird seat as the primary provider of equipment for mesh installations planned by EarthLink in cities like Philadelphia. Some question the viability of Tropos hardware because it uses a single Wi-Fi radio — but it keeps the company’s costs low, and that keeps the equipment attractive. Tropos’ claims […]

Call that laptop or PDA what you want — the client, the supplicant, the endpoint — the fact is, it could be a big threat to a corporate network. That’s especially true of mobile hardware which goes off campus and is used in the field, even at home, then comes back. That’s why network security […]

When your future phone is expected to support Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth and maybe more (ZigBee? Broadcast TV?), how are you going to fit it all inside? The chips and radios get smaller, but usually each frequency band needs its own antenna — so your handheld might swiftly become the size of your laptop. Not the […]

Yesterday, we reported on the patent that AirTight Networks was awarded covering the use of intrusion prevention systems (IPS) on wireless LANs. Competitor AirDefense said in a statement that it filed patents covering the same technology over two years before AirTight. And because of the way in which AirTight pushed through the patent process with […]

Anyone with a Blackberry is probably well aware of how patents can impact the lives of… anyone.  For a corporation, a patent awarded by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) can mean a lot of things toward its intellectual property (IP) rights: the ability to demand licenses, horse-trading with other vendors, having a leg […]

The port city of Chittagong is known as the commercial capital of the underdeveloped South Asian country of Bangladesh. And it is on the road to wireless. Local telco Nextel Telecom has partnered with New York-based Accatel on the deployment of a mesh network that will be built using mesh equipment from Strix Systems. The […]

Late Tuesday, a short statement was released by the PR agency for EarthLink that the ISP has jointly submitted to the request for proposals (RFP) from the city of San Francisco for building a citywide wireless municipal network — with Google. The statement, from Donald Berryman, Executive Vice President of EarthLink and President of the […]

Texas Instruments defines its DaVinci technology as “a collection of DSP-based system solution components tailored for efficient and compelling digital video.” Which is great, if consumer electronics (CE) products using it can easily connect to a source for that video. TI’s plan to help with that is to make it easier for manufacturers to stick in […]

The fastest way to make sure your wireless LAN (WLAN) is protected is to let the network protect itself. That’s why companies like Extreme Networks and Xirrus are partnering with providers of intrusion detection and prevention systems to embed security functions rather than force customers to install an overlay sensor network. Xirrus, makers of the […]

Mesh isn’t just for Wi-Fi. At least, that’s what BelAir Networks seems to be saying with its latest equipment upgrades. The Kanata, Ontario-based company today began to offer cellular network support — both by linking products to cellular carriers’ base stations and through direct integration of cellular GSM/GPRS base stations into the multi-radio BelAir 200 […]

Next week at the 3GSM World Congress 2006 in Spain, wireless will be on display in all its forms. Perhaps most unique will be seeing it in media players. Sure, there have been many living room media players before with Wi-Fi built in, and even a couple of portable MP3 players with Wi-Fi, but San […]