Hey, didja hear the one about the two pilots who fell asleep? No, not really, they were simply engrossed in the intricacies of a new crew-scheduling program that they were running, in violation of both company policy and basic common sense, on their personal notebook PCs, while otherwise charged with, um, operating a commercial flight filled with real livc passengers! I assume this is the kind of app that requires access to a database, and that this particular aircraft was equipped with Wi-Fi. Read more
As one who spends a lot of time testing wireless and mobile devices (I've been knee deep in a particularly entertaining aspect of this lately, reviewing products for the annual Network World Holiday Gift Guide - stay tuned), I've realized the importance of having a fairly broad arsenal of tools for generating and evaluating workloads on the system under test. Read more
So Comcast has given me a year of Starz to compensate me for the fact that they couldn't do a deal with the NFL channel. Hah! Joke's on them! The only football I watch is the Super Bowl, and then only for the commercials (really), but I do enjoy a movie now and then. The fact that Starz seems to have mostly crappy films on heavy rotation is of no consequence; after all, it's free! Read more
Motorola's Enterprise Mobility Solutions business unit, whom I noted recently for completing an interesting OEM deal with Brocade (which, as you will remember, now includes Foundry Networks), has done it again, this time with a similar deal with Extreme Networks Read more
Microsoft's admission that they had initially lost a ton of their user's data came as no surprise to me. Regular readers of my postings know that I think the company is somewhere between incompetent and evil, with little regard for quality, service, or even their customers. They're a sales and profit machine still living the monopolist's good life, at least for a few more years. Read more
As part of my presentation on the .11n road show that I'm now in the middle of, I'm talking about a key theme motivating advances in WLAN (and really, overall network) management - that an emphasis on what it costs to purchase and install a wireless LAN detracts from where the focus should really be, and that is on total cost of ownership (TCO). Read more
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently posted new rules for bloggers regarding the endorsement of products - a step I personally applaud. In the good old days, writers, reporters, analysts, and publishers of all forms had editors to keep everyone accurate and honest. But the Web is the Wild West; protections against lies, conflicts of interest, and fraud (as opposed to honest mistakes, which will always be with us) are rare, as, sadly, all too often, are business ethics. Read more
I've been invited by Meru Networks to spend a little time at series of roadshows they're sponsoring talking about my perspective on the whole area of WLANs, Wi-Fi, and 802.11n. I've only got 45 minutes, but, as I guess as everyone knows by now, I'm more enthusiastic than ever about the technology and I hope to communicate what's of importance to enterprises now and in the near future when it comes to wireless LANs. Read more
I recently had the opportunity to examine the coexistence opportunity enabled by .11n, to wit, the possibility of supporting a .11g client and a .11n client in the same channel on the same AP simultaneously. I've always thought this is a bad idea, largely based on experience with trying to do the same thing with .11g and .11b. Both clients are slowed to a very significant degree. Read more
A press release yesterday from Trapeze Networks caught my eye. Basically, they're announcing a renewed marketing thrust into one of the two (the other is education) "low-hanging fruit" markets for enterprise-class WLANs, featuring an emphasis on reliability, channel programs (making their dealers productive in healthcare), and a new Medical Customer Advisory Council - all of these good ideas. Read more
So I was having a conversation with a client recently, and the subject of how to value (and promote) the concept and reality of mobile unified communications came up. Now, to me, this is the very future of enterprise communications systems, along with the integration of social networks as closed user groups. Think of a Facebook or MySpace kind of environment, but only open to authorized individuals, and supporting any kind of network-based communications. Read more
I spent yesterday at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston, which is both nerd heaven and a great place for design engineers to get up to speed on the latest developments in components. Read more
I guess everyone's heard by now that the 802.11n standard, now formally known as 802.11n-2009, received final approval by the IEEE Standards Board on 11 September. So the phone's been ringing off the hook for the past two weeks looking for meaning in this milestone, and you might be surprised to hear me say that there isn't as much here as there otherwise seems to be. Why, you ask? Because, as I've said before, we don't actually buy 802.11 anything - we buy Wi-Fi. Read more
I was recently mildly surprised to see a TV ad proclaiming that "BlackBerry Loves U2", but with little additional explanation other than a reference to a Web site with similarly little value other than to tease a "U2 Mobile Album" which hasn't yet been released. Why is the king of corporate mobility hyping a rock band via the vaporware route? Read more
I generally don't comment on rumors, but, well, let's face it, Apple is the most important company in consumer electronics today, and my phone's been ringing continually lately with press, analysts, clients, and assorted others looking for insight on what Apple is doing with regard to a tablet PC or similar product. Officially, I have no idea what Apple is doing here. Read more
Yesterday's announcement from Motorola's AirDefense unit of a new and novel (hey's they already have a patent!) approach to WLAN vulnerability testing caught my eye for a number of reasons. First, this is another big leap forward for the centralization of network management and especially troubleshooting functionality. Read more
The announcement today by Mobile Unified Communications (MUC) leader DiVitas Networks and Samsung Electronics, who themselves play a pretty leading role in handsets, that the Samsung Mobile Innovator's Software Developer Kit (SDK) version 1.2.0 will have hooks for DiVitas' products reinforces the importance of application developers in successful mobile enterprise deployments. Read more
I'm not sure we should be thinking of handsets as little PCs and trying to get a zillion applications running on them, but, OK, if we're going to run apps on our handsets, then what's the right model for distributing those apps? Apple has shown that the vertically-integrated hardware/software/services model has real legs, and other app stores from handset vendors, carriers, and OS developers are appearing. Read more
PC cases come in many form factors, but they're all basically boxes that lack personality. This doesn't have to be the case (pun intended), as my Carpet Cleaner PC very well proves. Yes, this is a working Ubuntu PC built out of an old Bissell Carpet Machine. Read more
We recently did a study of the cost-effectiveness of wide-area ("outdoor") wireless access vs. wire. OK, sure, if you've got FIOS or cable broadband or maybe a newer implementation of DSL or similar metro-area broadband service, you'll likely opt for wire. My Comcast connection has over the years been surprisingly reliable (five nines, I'm sure), and the performance has improved to where I occasionally see ten megabits or even a bit more on the downlink. But this service does cost about $43/month, and I still have to pay for my mobile broadband service at $40-$60/month. Read more
Mathias is a principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless advisory firm in Ashland, Mass.
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