Eric Griffith

According to TheMarker.com, a Web site covering the tech industry in Israel, Intel Corp. has purchased Israeli company Envara for $40 million. Envara is a fab-less WLAN semiconductor company, meaning they design but don’t build chips for use in Wi-Fi products. The company also has offices in Palo Alto, California. Envara was founded in 2000 […]

The last couple of weeks have seen another avalanche of announcements about higher-speed Wi-Fi. Chipmakers are usually the impetus for making such claims. Agere said last week that it could achieve speeds of 150 megabits per second (Mbps) with a new chipset. Today, Broadcom touted its Afterburner technology, saying it performs with 40 percent greater […]

Usually when you’re at a hotspot, you can rest assured that the high-speed connection going from the access point out to the Internet is a T1 line, DSL, or at least a cable modem (dialup, not so much). Hughes Network Systems (HNS) of Germantown, Maryland — makers of the satellite systems for DirecTV and the […]

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Pronto Networks, which makes operational support systems (OSS) for network operators, particularly for hotspot and other wireless providers, is behind the power of a new product branded and sold by Sun Microsystems . The product is called iForce Wi-Fi Hotspot Appliance and was unveiled this week at the CTIA Wireless 2004 show in […]

Dallas based Texas Instruments (TI) took the wraps off a new 802.11g/b and dual-band 802.11a/g/b solution today that it hopes will make a splash in the up-and-coming market of phone handsets and PDAs using Wi-Fi. The two chip solution they’re announcing today — specifically combining TI’s NETW1250 single-chip MAC/baseband processor with new TNETW3422M 2.4GHz radio […]

When it comes to mesh networks (the concept), MeshNetworks (the company) says people don’t want new products — they want currently available wireless products to form the self-healing, self-configuring topologies. The Maitland, Fla.-based company has been relatively quiet over the last year, since it started selling its MeshLAN products. Rick Rotondo, vice president of technical […]

When Meru Networks launched last year, it made a lot of noise about how it would support voice over wireless LAN (VoWLAN) like no other. Now it’s attempting to put its money where its announcements are. The company said today that it is licensing drivers for use by Wi-Fi handset manufacturers that, when used in […]

Last year Extreme Networks unveiled a strategy called “Unified Access” (UA) geared toward making network configurations easier even when adding new technologies. For example, instead of introducing voice or wireless as an overlay to the existing wired infrastructure, they plan it as an adaptable part of the network. To that end the company is launching […]

Agere Systems of Allentown, Pa., is the latest of the Wi-Fi chipset vendors to announce plans for a speed boost that goes beyond the current 802.11 specifications. Agere’s WaveLAN dual-band (802.11a/b/g) chips will receive this unnamed “turbo mode” via a software overlay. The technology is based on future standards for Quality of Service (QoS) and […]

Thanks to Intel’s $300 million dollar advertising campaign trumpeting the Centrino brand name over the last year, buyers of laptops are now expecting Wi-Fi connectivity to be part of the hardware. The major beneficiary of this is, of course, Intel. According to Allied Business Intelligence (ABI), a research firm located in Oyster Bay, N.Y., for […]

Despite being a huge market, Intel Corp. said this week that it won’t ship any Wi-Fi chips to China after May of this year. This is in response to a new law in the People’s Republic of China that all Wi-Fi/802.11-based products in the country conform to a proprietary security standard. China’s Wired Authentication and […]

You haven’t heard of Wireless Performance Prediction (WPP), the latest Study Group in the IEEE’s 802.11 Working Group? Join the club. It’s not a secret, but it’s hardly a household word even in Wi-Fi circles. Azimuth Systems of Acton, Mass., is the company that’s pushing for the establishment of WPP as an 802.11 Task Group, […]