Jeff Vance

The Hotspot Road Trip stalled just over the border into Iowa, due to what was eventually diagnosed as a batch of bad gasoline. (With oil reserves low, there have been reports of dirty gasoline fouling engines from Florida to Pennsylvania.) After my 1969 Catalina was afflicted, the car started sputtering as if about to die […]

On my last day in Chicago, I visited a hotspot not listed in any of the Wi-Fi databases, the Heartland Cafe. I learned about the Heartland the night before after visiting another unlisted hotspot in the Bad Dog Tavern. The Bad Dog, technically, qualifies more as an unsecured WLAN, although the staff seems to peg […]

My first stop on the hotspot road trip brings me to Chicago, where it’s easier to find a hotspot than a parking space. After circling the blocks around Millennium Park looking for street parking (old city habits die hard), I finally give up and pull into a garage. Millennium Park strikes me as an appropriate […]

Despite the fact that the biggest obstacle to WLAN deployments in the enterprise — security — is actively being addressed by new protocols like WPA, enterprises are still wary of Wi-Fi. According to IDC, a market research firm, the consumer market continues to be the driving force behind Wi-Fi. IDC argues that although Wi-Fi is […]

Having just spent a month driving across the United States, I can attest to the fact that the Wi-Fi hotspot space is booming. I found T-Mobile hotspots in several Starbucks locations. In business-class hotels, I ran into Wayport and Boingo networks, and I even came across hotspots in a Circle K convenience store in Tempe, […]

Despite a sluggish economy, the Wi-Fi equipment space is booming. Market-research firm Synergy Research Group notes that 2002 was the best year to date for Wi-Fi with over $1.8 billion worth of Wi-Fi equipment shipped — an estimated 15.8 million devices. With the space expected to expand in coming years, a gold-rush mentality has taken […]