Gerry Blackwell

It was late in the 2002 Major League Baseball playoffs when management at Edison International Field, home of the then-soon-to-be World Series champion Anaheim Angels, realized they had a situation on their hands. With the Angels looking like they might actually be headed to the final, the IT department was faced with a scary prospect. […]

You have to take Chirinjeev Kathuria seriously when he starts talking about Agatal, the start-up Wi-Fi service provider he aims to build into "the Sprint of the Wi-Fi world." His plans may sound grandiose at times, but the man has credentials. Kathuria co-founded and/or built Koshika Telecom Ltd., a digital cellular carrier in India; X-Stream […]

Most schools that deploy or consider deploying wireless LAN technology, do it to extend high-speed Internet access to classrooms. Schools in New York City, though, are taking a slightly different approach. The New York City Department of Education (NYCDE) began its wireless initiative, part of the much larger Project Connect, last year. By September 2002 […]

Jetstream Wireless, a new entrant in the Wi-Fi hotspot lottery, is nothing if not ambitious. "Our goal," says company president Arun Sondhi, "is to be among the top five hotspot players in North America by the second quarter of 2003." Well, let’s see, we already have iPass, GRIC, Wayport, T-Mobile, Boingo, Airpath… Jetstream, based just […]

Free stuff? Did somebody say free stuff? The somewhat misleadingly named Institute for WLAN Professionals (iWLANpro) may not be exactly what it appears, but you can’t argue with the "tuition fees" — membership is free to any so-called WLAN professionals. Although it only announced itself a few weeks ago at the Networld + Interop show […]

Trivia question. Who built the first Internet firewall and when? The surprising answer to the second part of the question is 1992. Firewalls today are ubiquitous. Then, with the Net just coming out of its university-government incubator phase, they didn’t exist because there was no perceived need for them. The answer to the first part […]

In our continuing search for signs of network intelligence in the wireless LAN industry, we went to Akron, Ohio, home of NeTeam Corp., a ten-year-old WLAN consulting firm with a solid pedigree. Why Akron, the rust-belt town south of Cleveland? Because that’s where co-founder and chief technology officer Jim Portaro and some of his colleagues […]

With the launch of its new Wavelength Design Solutions business unit, San Jose, CA-based radio frequency (RF) electronics distributor Avnet RF & Microwave gave notice recently that the 802.11 market is about to enter a new phase. Up to this time, wireless local networking has been about connecting computers — and maybe PDAs. Computers are […]

A Glut of 5.8 GHz Gear Wayport Working Hard New Kid on the WISP Block A Glut of 5.8 GHz Gear A pair of vendors introduced new 5.8 Ghz radio products of interest to wireless Internet Sservice Providers (WISPs) recently. Advanced Radio Cells Inc. (ARCi) of Campbell, Calif. announced availability of a new 5GHz omni-directional […]

Home entertainment networking using 802.11 sounds like it can’t miss, but according to some of the people we’ve talked with, it will be a few years before it’s a mass-market proposition. The technology isn’t quite ready and key players such as set-top box makers and digital cable and satellite service providers won’t be believers until […]

The idea of home entertainment networking using 802.11 wireless LAN technology sounds great. It might even be great — once it arrives. You could watch Sex In The City on one TV while the kids watch a second program piped in over the same satellite or cable service in another room — transmitted from the […]

Everybody, it seems, is roughly in agreement about what the multimedia networked home of the future should look like. And most are agreed that 802.11 wireless LAN technology can play a pivotal role in making it happen. So why does the horizon for home entertainment networking look so far away? Michael Greeson, senior analyst and […]