Eric Griffith

New for this year from Firetide: better throughput in its new generation of wireless mesh equipment, both indoors and out. These units are “designed for high performance of voice, video and data—the triple play,” according to Sunil Dhar, Firetide’s director of product management. The new hardware is also accompanied by new mesh management software. Firetide’s […]

If the browser wars taught the industry anything, it’s that you can build market share by giving a product away. The trick is finding a way to make money at it in the long run. Finnish company Ekahau, which makes a wireless Real Time Location System (RTLS), is going to give it a try. The […]

Wi-VOD (short for Wireless Voice Over and Data) of Ashland, Va., has equipped a stretch of highway in Arizona with wireless equipment to keep first responders in touch even while they’re moving at speeds as fast as 80 miles per hour (130 kilometers per hour). The stretch of road tested in this first phase is […]

Three disparate companies coming together to make one service for public VoWi-Fi communications: that’s what’s happening in a new trial between hotspot aggregator Boingo Wireless, VoIP service provider Ecuity Advanced Communications, and software-based phone maker Telesym. The unnamed service is almost ready for testing. Ecuity is in the process of selecting people to try it. […]

Starting with the southern California area, Netopia will soon be offering its hosted hotspot solution to restaurants and cafés that want it, through a business partnership with Sysco Food Service, the giant food supply company. Sysco will market the service to its customers. “In the Los Angeles region, we’ve got a test pilot running with […]

Legra Systems was one of the first victims of the ongoing consolidation of wireless LAN switch vendors. When the company folded, its intellectual property (IP) was sold to NextHop of Mountain View, Calif.—which also hired most of the Legra engineering team. The plan now: to sell the improved-upon Legra software to equipment companies that want […]

In August 2004, we reported on the fact that Cheetah Wireless Technologies, Inc. (CWTI) of Las Vegas was going to take Sin City wireless using technology from MeshNetworks —a setup some said might become a model for the entire state of Nevada. Today comes word that CWTI has “standardized” on using mesh equipment from popular […]

Want a bigger WLAN? Symbol’s new switch is all about being bigger. Symbol Technologies started the WLAN switch craze three years ago, and is still the most successful at it compared to the startups that followed (some of which died, while others are being swallowed up). But the company hasn’t wavered much in its position—fully […]

Starting this week, the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) in Illinois is shipping version 0.5.5 of its open-source BSD-licensed operating system software that will turn old, inexpensive PCs into the backbone of a mesh network. All a person has to do is burn the software to a disc, then use it to boot up a […]

Here is the definition of MIMO, according to Airgo Networks: two or more unique radio signals, in the same radio channel, where each signal carries different digital information. According to the chipmaker, whose management pioneered the technology in academic papers several years ago, without adhering to that definition other companies are not actually providing multiple-in/multiple-out […]

It is now the week after the announcement that networking giant Cisco Systems would be acquiring the most successful of the so-called WLAN switch vendors, Airespace. Now the other vendors in the space are announcing new features—and talking about how happy the news has made them. The acquisition “is a great thing for the market […]

In one corner we have the ZigBee Alliance, a group of 100 companies that plans to use the low-power IEEE 802.15.4 specification to run controls throughout homes and buildings. In the other corner were just a collection of proprietary technologies—until today. Zensys, which developed the Z-Wave mesh technology for wireless controls, announced today the formation […]