Eric Griffith

Model: HS10 Price: $49.95 Pros: Tells all about nearby networks. Cons No backlight, too bulky for a keychain, can’t detect certain APs. When it comes to detecting wireless 802.11b/g networks without a computer, the Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter is the real deal. Up to now, signal locators have consisted of units that, when you push […]

Rumors continue to circulate that networking giant Cisco Systems might acquire one of the WLAN central switch vendors… or not. For example, Unstrung.com reports that the rumors of a $425 million bid to get Airespace might be nothing more than the start of a bidding war to get companies like Nortel Networks and Alcatel fired […]

Microsoft and Intel each have technologies that work with Digital Rights Management (DRM) on home networks. Consumer networking leaders D-Link and Linksys, never ones to get along, have picked sides. At least for now. Linksys— a division of Cisco —is going with Intel’s DTCP-IP (Digital Transmission Content Protection over IP), a protocol backed also by […]

Fabless chip designer Athena Semiconductor is hoping to make a splash in the world of Wi-Fi chips soon. It’s likely to make it using TRINI—a new chipset design that puts three Wi-Fi radio frequency (RF) transceivers supporting Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO, pronounced my-moe) on a single integrated circuit. The company, which has offices in […]

Wayport of Austin, Texas has had an amazing year. At this time in 2004, the company was operating about 1,000 public access Wi-Fi hotspots in hotels, airports and other locations frequented by business travelers. Now the company says it is running 6,300 locations nationwide—and is adding as many as 150 new venues each week. Wayport […]

Conexant Systems of Red Bank, N.J., is facing several different class action lawsuits, all announced Friday, stemming from issues the plaintiffs have with how the company handled its merger with GlobespanVirata earlier this year. That merger led to Conexant taking control of the PRISM line of Wi-Fi chipsets that were the top sellers in the […]

802.15.4 is one of the many personal area network (PAN) standards around like Bluetooth and ultrawideband (UWB). Like most IEEE 802 standards, the wireless industry knew what the IEEE was doing (or didn’t do in the case of UWB) was not enough. Thus was born the ZigBee Alliance, a consortium of well over 100 companies […]

Barcoding, Inc., has done so well in the wireless data-collection business—many installations of which include WLANs— that it has started a new division just to install and audit wireless networks. The six-year-old Baltimore-based company started small with just three employees, and has steadily grown to about 55 staffers around the U.S. It is now pulling […]

Chipmaker Atheros Communications is now sampling the AR5006AP-G, silicon the company calls an “access point on a chip.” The single-chip product integrates everything needed not just for wireless (baseband, MAC and radio) but it also includes the network processor that can run the functions needed in infrastructure equipment. Sheung Li, product line manager at Atheros, […]

In a new survey of pre-qualified IT administrators done with the purpose of figuring out WLAN equipment requirements in businesses today, In-Stat-MDR found some unsurprising results—that Wi-Fi networks are becoming an integral part of business networks—and one apparent surprise: a majority of IT people admit to using equipment from consumer/SOHO vendors in their networks. “You […]

$500 —plus some access points and a broadband connection— can instantly turn your venue into a moneymaking hotspot. That’s the message from D-Link Systems and Pronto Networks in their teaming up to put Pronto’s OSS provisioning behind D-Link’s DSA-3100 Airspot Gateway. Jasbir Singh, president and CEO of Pronto, says his company’s primary business targets carriers […]

AirTight Networks of Mountain View, Calif. (formly Wibhu Technologies) says its latest version of the SpectraGuard Wi-Fi “firewall,” version 2.0, can see all forms of security issues from intruders to misconfigured APs to unwanted ad-hoc networks. Company CEO David King says the product has abilities like those from many other vendors, such as AirDefense and […]