Are These WiFi Concessions Necessary?
Deals like the Philadelphia tie-in with Earthlink, and San Francisco's pending WiFi concession, leave me asking a tough question. Are these deals really necessary? My friend Glenn Fleishman points out...
View ArticleOff Line
Regular readers of this space may wonder where I've gone. There's a story there. It starts Friday evening, when a sudden lightning strike knocked me offline. Turned out that my phone service was...
View ArticleIs That HotSpot Registered?
Guy Kewney reports that Westchester County in New York is seeking to force all "public" WiFi hotspots to register in the name of security. The intent is to force those who operate hotspots in...
View ArticleIntel WiMax Strategy Fizzling
Intel's strategy of delivering a fixed 802.16 WiMax standard, then moving immediately to a mobile version, is fizzling. There's not enough equipment for the fixed, because everyone is waiting for the...
View ArticleGive Me Hotzones or Give Me Death
There's a lot of hyperbole there. (Patrick Henry, right, was nothing if not hyperbolic.) But the fact is that the tools and technologies needed to create a "hot zone" -- an area that can get 802.11...
View ArticleUniversal Mobile Phones Coming Soon
There are cell phones, there are WiFi phones, there are cordless phones, and there are VOIP phones. But never the twain shall meet. Now a universal wireless phone has come a big step closer, with news...
View ArticleGood News From New Orleans
New Orleans has become the first U.S. city to escape the Bell Gulag.(That's the Novodevichy Tower in Russia to the left. Figured you were tired of Bell logos.) It is doing this by building a WiFi...
View ArticleWhat The World of Always On Needs Now
The International Telecommunications Union has released a full report on what I've been calling The World of Always On, which they call The Internet of Things. The report correctly identifies the...
View ArticleBig Boost to Medical Always On
The Always On medical market won a big endorsement today from a San Francisco research house, FocalPoint Group, which advised hospitals that the technology is ready to lower costs and improve care. The...
View ArticleMobile WiMax (Finally) Approved
The IEEE has finally approved a mobile version of the WiMax standard, 802.16. Intel has been a big booster of WiMax, but its insistence on moving quickly to a mobile WiMax standard after the fixed...
View ArticleOm mane padme WRONG
I always wanted to write that headline, and finally got the chance today. Om in this case is Om Malik, whose broadband blog has become one of my regular stops in daily newsgathering. Om's view? Speed...
View ArticleDiminishing Returns on Spectrum
The U.S. government approved yet-another auction of spectrum last week. (The picture is of bids in an Australian spectrum auction.) But there's a problem. The big hoarders of spectrum -- phone...
View ArticleIs Otellini Changing Intel Quickly Enough?
When Paul Otellini was named the CEO of Intel last year, he promised major changes. As the first non-engineer to rise to the top at the chipmaker, he said he would push platforms, and communications,...
View ArticleThe Phony Fon "Scandal"
By ignoring what blogging is about, The Wall Street Journal has created a scandal out of whole cloth. Here's the conflation, in a nutshell. Journalists can blog, and blogs can be journalism. Thus many...
View ArticleNo Such Thing as Free WiFi
Earthlink is busy turning all those dreams of free municipal WiFi into broken promises. Both the municipal deal they signed in Philly and the one they’ve joined in San Francisco (with Google) carry...
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