Eric Griffith

How much will it take to get FON’s business off the ground in the United States? No matter what, $21.7 million is a probably a good start. The money has come from Google, eBay’s Skype, Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures.  Some big names from Index, Skype and Cisco have also joined the FON advisory board. […]

Earlier this week, two companies joined forces to make one product to better serve wireless LAN administrators. The new InterpretAir WLAN Survey software from Fluke Networks integrates that company’s analysis equipment with the site survey tool from Ekahau. “They’ve made our site survey tool part of their analysis family,” says Tuomo Rutanen, Vice President of […]

Hotspots aren’t enough as the days of citywide Wi-Fi begin inexorably rolling in. So it’s little surprise that an outfit like The Cloud, the biggest hotspot network provider in Europe, let alone the United Kingdom, is looking to move into the municipal wireless business. In January, the company said it would launch such networks in […]

Westlake Village, California-based Xirrus, maker of the Wireless LAN Array that puts up to 16 access points in one unit to cover an entire floor or building with connectivity, soon won’t be the only one with the Array. The company has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with ADC , a Minneapolis-based company that […]

The third-largest city in the state of Illinois, Rockford, today saw the official launch of its downtown hotzone. The cooperative that runs the network says it is only the first phase of a plan to bring Wi-Fi-based wireless broadband to cities in as many as 10 counties in northern Illinois. ROC-net Services is short for […]

Broadband networks offered or facilitated by municipalities are going to become the norm, not the exception, according to analyst Pam Duffey with visiongain. The London, England-based company’s new report, “Municipal Broadband Networks: Market impact and implications, 2006-2011” talks about the facts — there 400 cities and regions thinking about installing wireless broadband networks across the […]

After writing “actual WiMax products don’t yet exist” as a caveat in so many articles about 802.16 technology, it is hard to believe it’s true: the WiMax Forum announced this week that products actually exist now that have that consortium’s seal of approval for interoperability. The products consist of three base stations (Aperto Networks’ PacketMAX […]

Looks like calling a product “Pre-N” (as in 802.11n) this year won’t be seen as a bad thing. As was expected, yesterday at the IEEE 802.11 Working Group meeting in Kona, Hawaii, the 802.11n Task Group (TGn) approved the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) proposal for the future high-speed wireless standard. The EWC was formed last […]

Here’s the scenario: You have an access point at home with a Service Set Identifier (SSID) still set to the default name, such as “linksys.” Next time you take your Windows XP or 2000-based laptop out of the house, as it boots, it connects to any network with the SSID “linksys” — even an ad-hoc […]

Wireless LAN security is a lot better than it used to be, but that doesn’t stop vendors from trying to make it better. Meru Networks of Sunnyvale, California says upcoming software for its WLAN controllers provides a new layer of protection beyond encryption, firewalls and intrusion protection by going to the signal level. “There’s three […]

It was only in October of last year that the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) was formally announced by a number of Wi-Fi chip companies (though rumors had swirled since the summer). The EWC agenda was simple: create a high-speed 802.11n specification that would win approval sooner rather than later. Maybe they were right. Or, at […]

In the future war for who will run your home, it’s not about who wears the pants, but what technology controls everything you own. The contenders (so far) are Zigbee, which provides a mesh protocol that runs on top of the IEEE’s 802.15.4 wireless specification (in 2.4GHz, just like Wi-Fi); Z-Wave, a proprietary wireless mesh […]