Gerry Blackwell

Glynn Taylor of Washington, D.C.-based WiFiConsulting first conceived the idea for HotspotVPN, his firm’s pioneering public virtual private network (VPN) service, at a conference in 2002. Taylor came across a couple of cowboys using sniffer software on a laptop to intercept traffic passing over the conference WLAN. In one private IM session the two were […]

Devices and services that allow seamless hand-off of calls from any network to any other network—Wi-Fi at home, cellular, commercial hotspots, enterprise WLANs—may not be widely available for some years. But the idea clearly has appeal, and service providers and handset manufacturers are already taking the first steps to making it happen. In a recent […]

Ah, the joys and sorrows of a small, independent Wi-Fi entrepreneur! Meet Craig Plunkett, a networking jack-of-all-trades with three modestly successful Wi-Fi enterprises underway in the New York area, and a Don Quixote-like quest to bring Wi-Fi to New York commuter trains. It’s a quest that has so far met with nothing but frustration, but […]

A new category of Wi-Fi media device is emerging. Call it Wi-Fi hi-fi. One of the first products appeared last summer—the Sonos Digital Music System from Sonos, a start-up in Santa Barbara, Calif. We finally had a chance to review the Sonos products recently. (In the meantime, SkipJam, another start-up, has begun rolling out a […]

Dartmouth College, a 200-year-old Ivy League university in Hanover, N.H., has become the poster child for Wi-Fi on campus, largely thanks to the vision of one man, the school’s director of technical services, Brad Noblet. Back in 2001, Noblet led Dartmouth to become one of the first colleges to implement a campus-wide 802.11b network. That […]

Model: WZR-RS-G54 Price: $199 street When hotshot road warriors from big companies travel on business, they’re able to use any Internet connection to log in to their office LAN through a virtual private network (VPN), an encryption-protected tunnel through the Internet to their office. The VPN link lets them gain access to all the data […]

Government has long been a quagmire for Wi-Fi. Many government departments and agencies do use Wi-Fi, but many more don’t, either because it’s against policy, because there is no policy and they’ve heard security horror stories about Wi-Fi, because the policy is poorly understood, or because it’s too difficult to meet policy requirements. Where policies […]

In cities around the world, community spirited techno-geeks have been setting up free Wi-Fi hotspots as part of the freenet movement. All it takes is a Wi-Fi router placed near a window or connected to a rooftop antenna, a cable or DSL modem and some firewall software. Users will always find free hotpsots. Freenet hotspots […]

There are other VoIP providers out there that offer mobile service to customers with WiSIP (Wi-Fi Session Initiation Protocol) phones—BroadVoice comes to mind—but Montreal-based TéliPhone is the only one we know that led with a mobile service. Mobility is the company’s raison d’etre, though it does now offer Vonage-like wireline VoIP services as well. "We […]

Wi-Fi on trains seems like such a natural. You have a captive audience of passengers with time on their hands. Many are business people or students toting laptops or PDAs to and from work or school, or on business trips. Of course they want to access the Net. Despite the natural fit, it has taken […]

Given its power utility heritage, you’d think Telecom Ottawa would be more excited about its recent success with indoor broadband over powerline (BPL) technology than with its Wi-Fi initiatives. BPL uses existing electrical wiring in a building to carry broadband signals. Not so, though. Chief operating officer Dave Dobbin is much more interested in talking […]

Hurrah for Slim Devices , maker of the excellent Squeezebox wireless music player. This is the umpteenth product of its kind I’ve reviewed and I was starting to get bored. The $280 Squeezebox revived my interest. For awhile I thought it would even supplant my perennial favorite, the Sound Blaster Wireless Music product from Creative […]