Gerry Blackwell

If you want to read a cool story about night-camouflaged marines wading ashore along Iraq’s tiny stretch of Persian Gulf coast, silently ICQing each other with their PDAs over a portable Wi-Fi network, it’s not going to happen. Not yet anyway. The Office of Naval Research, through something called the Littoral Combat (LC) Future Naval […]

At a time when operators elsewhere may be fearing they’ve made their move too soon, the hotspot market in Canada is just starting to percolate — as we saw in the first two parts of this three — part series. The last few months have seen a rash of service launches and announcements. While entrepreneurial […]

Most of Canada’s hotspot entrepreneurs have been lurking on the sidelines, waiting for the right moment to jump in and dash for the finishing post. That moment has now apparently arrived — as we saw in the first of this multi-part series on the evolving hotspot market in the frozen north. Several significant new players […]

When heavy-hitters IBM , Intel , and AT&T announced last December they were ganging up to attack the red hot hotspot market with their joint venture Cometa Networks, small fry already in that field felt vindicated but also fearful — even if they didn’t admit it. Now the same thing is happening again in a […]

In American hotels that offer guests broadband Internet service, the average usage rate according to most estimates is less than 5 percent. In other words, on any given night, fewer than 5 percent of guests are actually paying for the service — which is not many. Yet demand from hotels for broadband wireless solutions apparently […]

Navini Networks and Pronto Networks have a modest proposal for hotspot network operators. Rather than pay the exorbitant price for DSL or cable first-mile backhaul from individual hotspots, why not go wireless all the way? Navini and Pronto recently announced an initiative to market a joint solution to hotspot network operators, integrating Navini’s second-generation wide […]

Commercial hotspot network operators should be very afraid of what’s happening in Long Beach, CA. Very afraid. The for-pay hotspot operators already know about the threat from freenet activists building ad hoc networks of privately owned and managed Wi-Fi hotspots. Loose-knit groups of network nerds are one thing… Long Beach is quite another. In that […]

It’s doubtful if many start-up Wi-Fi hotspot service providers think of choosing a billing solution as one of the key strategic decisions they have to make. But they should, says Chris Grejtak, senior vice president of marketing at Cupertino, CA-based Portal Software. No surprise, Portal Software makes billing software. Still, the company makes a compelling […]

Some may think of China as a communist backwater full of techno-peasants, but here’s the truth: there are over 200 million mobile wireless subscribers in China. Now the country is going full-speed ahead on providing broadband wireless service in hundreds of Wi-Fi hotzones. China Mobile, one of four former government-owned PTTs (Post, Telephone and Telegraph […]

The unwiring of the American office is moving into a new phase. The first phase was wirelessly enabling computers using Wi-Fi — mostly laptops, later and to a lesser extent desktops. Now all kinds of devices with 802.11b built in are beginning to appear — multimedia projectors, printers, video surveillance cameras, PDAs, phones. New after-market […]

Ryan Jarvis, co-founder and CEO of United Kingdom-based wholesale hotspot service provider Megabeam Networks, is feeling sweetly vindicated these days. First, Forrester Research gave his start-up company its good-business-model seal of approval last month. Then IBM, AT&T and Intel — the latter perhaps not coincidentally also a Megabeam partner — announced Cometa Networks, their North […]

Among all the other tragic impacts of September 11, it was a loud wake-up call for commercial building owners on issues of safety and security. That fact has made it a lot easier for vendors like Richardson, TX-based InnerWireless to market their in-building mobile wireless solutions. "To be honest," says company president and CEO Ed […]