Wireless Notes archives
By John Cox, NetworkWorld.com
July 26, 2006
A trial began this week in Independence, Mo., in which prosecutors say a man forced a cell phone down a woman's throat but the defense say says the woman swallowed the device on purpose to hide data on whom she...
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July 21, 2006
Cisco has a helpful online document on radio frequency power values for wireless LAN radios and antennas....
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July 21, 2006
The market researchers at iSuppli dismantled Moto's hot Q phone to assess what's inside....
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July 18, 2006
A recent paper at IEEE Distributed Systems outlines a way to adapt Web services to mobile environments by using mobile agents....
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July 18, 2006
Wireless packs strapped to 50 of the 4-pound cane toads show the amphibian pests are spreading faster through Australia by traveling along roads and highways....
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July 17, 2006
Dell today unveiled an internal wireless LAN adapter, based on Broadcom's draft 802.11n radio chipset....
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July 17, 2006
Motorola recently unveiled the latest version of its Prizm net management application for the Canopy line of fixed, broadband wireless products....
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July 12, 2006
Our revamped and expanded Buyers Guides now include a brand new Guide devoted to security products, with a section for wireless LANs. Just click on the link and scroll down to "wireless LAN security."...
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July 12, 2006
We have a story on the steadily rising demand for wireless skills in enterprise IT....
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July 06, 2006
In a recent security test, 20 thumb-sized USB drives were scattered around a company's offices. Each drive had a disguised program written to collect software written to collect user names, passwords, and systems data. Guess how many were picked up...
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July 06, 2006
Intel has invested $600 million in Craig McCaw's Clearwire wireless broadband venture, which will use WiMAX radios to create a nationwide net of wireless broadband connections....
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July 06, 2006
A Dutch company, Innovalife, offers high-performance latex sheaths that slip over your mobile phone to make them "water dirt mud paint sweat blood snow proof."...
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June 30, 2006
The sheriff's department in Douglas County, Colorado has a new mandate: warning wireless users that their access points or routers are unprotected....
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June 30, 2006
Earthlink and the City of Anaheim, Calif., formally launched what will be a city-wide W-Fi network last week....
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June 22, 2006
Chaska, Minn., has been the poster child for municipal Wi-Fi deployments. Now comes word that until recently, the wireless mesh net was a mess net....
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June 22, 2006
For your summer reading list, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has just released a draft guide on 802.11i-based wireless LAN security....
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June 22, 2006
Two security researchers have discovered a way to exploit buggy code in a range of WLAN device drivers and seize control of a laptop PC....
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June 13, 2006
Can you bring together different kinds of wireless nets in an enterprise infrastructure? Network World's John Gallant explores the subject in one of our Hot Seat video interviews with Cathy Zatloukal of MobileAccess Networks (broadband link recommended)....
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June 12, 2006
International talks over China's homegrown wireless LAN encryption standard, called WAPI, turned bitter when the Chinese delegation withdrew from the talks, charging the IEEE with unfairness....
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June 12, 2006
French cellular carriers are embracing VoIP over Wi-Fi wireless connections, giving those subscribers with cell phones that also have Wi-Fi a less expensive alternative to cellular minutes....
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June 12, 2006
A key issue at last week's recent Globalcomm show was how the increase in wireless access means increased wireless threats, and what network professionals are doing about them. NW's Jim Duffy has the story....
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May 31, 2006
On June 1, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo takes over the top spot at Nokia, as the company enters a time of increasing competition, fast-changing technology, and pressure on revenues and profits....
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May 26, 2006
The city's mass transit agency is teaming with a non-profit agency to test Wi-Fi access points on two buses....
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May 26, 2006
Reaping another municipal network deal, EarthLink this week got a green light from the New Orleans city council to build a Wi-Fi mesh network for the hurricane-battered city....
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May 23, 2006
Teresa Meng, a co-founder of Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros Communications, has sold $17 million worth of the company's stock during the first four months of 2006. Even after taxes, that's a tidy nest egg....
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May 23, 2006
But not just any wireless notebooks: they're Panasonic's ruggedized Toughbooks with a satellite link....
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May 23, 2006
Today's college students are using MP3 players, cell phones and instant messaging to cheat on exams....
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May 22, 2006
Boingo Wireless, the Wi-Fi net aggregator, has released a developers toolkit for connecting client devices to a Wi-Fi network....
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May 22, 2006
German company NCP Engineering has added support for Windows Mobile 5.0 devices to its IPSec mobile VPN product....
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May 22, 2006
A startup is raising funds and seeking FCC approvals for a wireless broadband net that will sell high-speed capacity to service providers and offer free, but slower, access to the general public....
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May 12, 2006
A new study from Spyglass Consulting finds that a growing number of healthcare providers are investing in remote patient monitoring technologies, including wireless....
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May 10, 2006
Kimberly-Clark has now slapped Gen2 RFID tags for the first time on individual cases of its well-known consumer products, which include brands such as Kleenex, Scott tissues and Huggies....
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May 10, 2006
Research in Motion is still the mobile messaging leader for the enterprise market, according to a new analysis from Standard & Poor's....
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May 08, 2006
An innovative vision system coupled with portable computers and a tactical wireless mesh net could help soldiers find their way through battlefield chaos more accurately and safely....
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May 08, 2006
Israeli researchers report that signal strength data, which is automatically collected at cellular towers, can be more accurate than weather radar for calculating rainfall....
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May 08, 2006
Microsoft and Qualcomm have agreed to share with wireless handset and equipment makers more data on how Windows software and Qualcomm's cellular radio chips work with each other....
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May 05, 2006
This time with Visto. And this time, RIM is launching a full-blown counterattack....
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May 02, 2006
More colleges and universities are now requiring incoming students to bring a notebook PC with them, usually with a wireless LAN card....
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May 01, 2006
There are some real innovations for enterprise wireless LANs at this week's annual Interop show....
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April 28, 2006
Qualcomm has signed its first patent deal on technology essential to WiMAX, the wireless broadband radio standard now gaining traction around the world....
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April 28, 2006
Rhode Island is launching a pilot project that could eventually be a $20 million wireless net spanning the entire state....
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April 26, 2006
Ever wonder what happens to all those zillions of old cell phones that people don't use because they bought a cool new one, which will in turn be replaced by a cooler one?...
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April 24, 2006
The free municipal Wi-Fi net in St. Cloud, Fla., is running into some problems, according to a news report....
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April 24, 2006
More medical schools are requiring students to use handheld PDAs to store data and access a range of clinical applications. Users say the devices, often with wireless access, save time and reduce errors....
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April 21, 2006
Weschester County N.Y. has gone ahead with a plan to require wireless business nets, such as public hotspots, to install basic security measures. The measure was first proposed last fall....
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April 21, 2006
In a 2003 paper from an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) conference, the two authors detail a way for a WLAN to client avoid being triangulated and its location tracked....
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April 19, 2006
The Wichita public school system is buying 730 Palm TX handhelds as the client device for its 7th grade technology curriculum....
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April 19, 2006
A Lehigh University researcher has won a grant to create algorithms to compress data transmitted over wireless sensor nets....
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April 06, 2006
A San Francisco panel has selected the Google/Earthlink proposal for a free city-wide Wi-Fi net. The city and the two vendors will start final negotiations on a contract....
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April 06, 2006
The pending 802.11w standard is designed to fill an emerging gap in WLAN security. Check out our Technology Update....
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April 05, 2006
A VoIP carrier called Viper Networks says its vPhone product now works with broadband wireless cards for the Verizon and Sprint cellular nets....
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April 05, 2006
At LinuxWorld this week, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte dismissed criticisms of the project, which intends to distribute cheap wireless computers to third-world students, and said first shipments could begin in early 2007....
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March 31, 2006
A U.K. startup is creating a cloth interface to portable computing devices: it's actually a touch sensor woven in fabric, which can be incorporated into some article of clothing....
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March 30, 2006
Connexion by Boeing, which offers wireless Internet connectivity on board airliners, says passengers really like being able to surf and check e-mail instead of watching inflight movies on crummy screens, and trying to ignore crying babies and the person who...
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March 30, 2006
Intel this week announced the results of a study that found the nation's capital to be the best city for teleworking, a phenomenon the chipmaker says is being fueled by mobile computers and more pervasive wireless networks....
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March 28, 2006
SyncML is a standard for automatically updating data between mobile devices and backend servers. We have a Technology Update this week on SyncML....
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March 28, 2006
A new study claims that portable electronics has greater impact than previously believed on cockpit instruments....
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March 24, 2006
With Research in Motion mired in its high-profile patent battle, Palm beefed up sales and marketing efforts push its Treo handheld as a more fully-featured alternative to RIM's popular BlackBerry device. It seems to be paying off, for now, according...
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March 22, 2006
Our just-concluded IT Roadmap event in Boston featured a thorough overview of wireless broadband trends by consultant Craig Mathias....
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March 22, 2006
A new cycle of more powerful solar storms is due to start this year or next. Their shockwaves could disrupt electronic nets of all kinds, including wireless voice and data nets....
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March 16, 2006
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates this week riduculed the plan for a handcranked, wireless $100 laptop being designed for the world's poorest kids. His comments have ignited a firestorm of criticism on the Web, even though he made essentially the same...
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March 16, 2006
We interview consultant Craig Mathias on the impact of wireless in the enterprise, and how to deal with it. It's part of our March 20 IT Roadmap: Boston....
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March 16, 2006
A British threat management software company says that warnings that RFID chips are vulnerable to malware are theoretical and there is no cause for panic....
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March 16, 2006
Certicom recently posted a 13-page PDF (registration required) on "Securing VoIP Networks: the importance of device security....
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March 16, 2006
Researchers are experimenting with wirelessly administering drugs through implanted devices that contain a postage-stamp sized microchip and scores of tiny addressable reservoirs of medicine....
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March 15, 2006
ABI Research is predicting that the area covered by municipal Wi-Fi nets will jump from a mere 1,500 square miles to nearly 100 times that by 2010. That's an area the size of New Mexico, or if you prefer, Poland....
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March 15, 2006
A group of researchers say they've shown that computer viruses can infect the microchips in radio frequency identification tags....
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March 14, 2006
Wi-Fi Protected Access 2, a wireless LAN security specification from the Wi-Fi Alliance, is now mandatory on all WLAN equipment certified by the Alliance's tests....
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March 14, 2006
Paul Thomas has been named CEO for Network Chemistry, which sells wireless security products for enterprise WLANs and mobile users....
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March 09, 2006
Samsung unveils an "ultramobile" handheld based on Microsoft's Origami operating system, and targeted at business users. And Microsoft and Intel shed some more light on future plans for Origami....
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March 08, 2006
Intel's Sean Maloney this week laid out some details of the company's drive to make computing more mobile. He talked about the next generation of Centrino, which will include 802.11n, and mobile WiMax....
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March 07, 2006
Yes, according to the true believers at Thetabletpc.net....
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March 07, 2006
Is this a good sign or a bad sign?...
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March 07, 2006
NetGear says it will introduce wireless LAN products based on the existing IEEE 802.11n draft specification for 600Mbps by June....
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March 06, 2006
RIM has signed a deal with patent adversary NTP, paying $612.5 million to settle all outstanding patent claims. The long-running federal court case against the Blackberry maker was dismissed Friday after the deal was signed....
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March 06, 2006
This year could see deployment of scores of municipal wireless nets, using a combination of 802.11-based mesh nets combined with WiMax backhaul links....
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March 03, 2006
"I was stuck with a 56k modem for nine years because no other option is available in my town." An epic tale of desperation, determination, digging, 14,000 pounds of concrete, and wireless broadband obsession....
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March 02, 2006
This seems like a strange idea to me. In this BusinessWeek analysis, Rachel Rosmarin picks up suggestions by two key stockholders in Palm,...
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March 02, 2006
Philadelphia Mayor John Street this week signed four agreements between Earthlink and the city-chartered non-profit group Wireless Philadelphia....
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March 02, 2006
The last access points have been placed to completely cover the 40-square-mile area of Tempe, Ariz. The WAZTempe (for Wireless Access Zone) net has about 550 Access/One outdoor mesh access points from Strix Systems. Each device, mounted on...
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March 01, 2006
Wireless security vendor Bluesocket has announced that CEO Ralph Calisti, who joined the company in August of 2004, has "decided to leave…to pursue other interests." Vice President of Engineering James Funucane has been named by the board of directors as...
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February 27, 2006
EVDO cell nets promise anywhere-access at up to 2Mbps. But Wi-Fi proponents argue a wireless LAN mesh is cheaper and can do more. The debate heats up in California....
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February 27, 2006
Microsoft is busy extending its mobile messaging solution beyond handheld clients running Windows Mobile 5.0....
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February 24, 2006
Reuters reports that U.S. District Judge James Spencer stopped short of ordering an immediate shutdown of the BlackBerry e-mail service. But Spencer found RIM to be infringing on the NTP patents and said he would issue a decision on an...
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February 24, 2006
The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Univ. is looking at how the practice of carriers locking your cell phone so it can only use one network is affecting consumers and the public interest....
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February 24, 2006
A federal judge today could set a date for closing down RIM's BlackBerry service in the U.S., and decide how much the company has to fork over to patent holder NTP. Or not....
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February 23, 2006
The president of Lakehead University says the "jury's out" on whether Wi-Fi radio signals are a health threat, especially "in younger people (who have) fast-growing tissues."...
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February 23, 2006
At the recent RSA Conference on security, legendary cryptographer Adi Shamir revealed details on how a cellphone could be used to attack and compromise RFID tags within its range....
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February 21, 2006
Republican Senator George Allen has introduced the Wireless Innovation Act (WINN Act), while Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Senator Ted Stevens, also Republican, introduced the American Broadband for Communities Act (ABC Act)....
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February 21, 2006
The City of Bath in England has announced a multi-million dollar city-wide wireless net project. Normally, that wouldn't be news....
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February 17, 2006
Millimeter wave, or E-band, radio fires a very high-frequency, pencil-like narrow beam between two points. It can carry up to 2.7Gbps, according to the vendors. College campuses are deploying it successfully. http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=17889 And the FCC Web page on the technology...
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February 16, 2006
The consumer focus of much of the mobile industry means wireless products and services fail to meet enterprise requirements, according to Cisco's CIO, who spoke this week at the 3GSM World Congress....
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February 16, 2006
The FCC has taken the final step in adding more spectrum, and therefore more channels, in the 5.4-GHz band, as reported by our "Wireless in the Enterprise" Newsletter Editor, Joannie Wexler. New devices in this band will now have to...
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February 15, 2006
The semiconductor industry analysts at Merrill Lynch have come up with some interesting thoughts in their latest report on the Wi-Fi chip market (12-page .PDF file)....
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February 14, 2006
We reported earlier on the Microsoft news from 3GSM World Congress. Slashdot.org already has a lively thread, laden with comments....
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February 14, 2006
The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network is co-hosting the second annual National Summit for Community Wireless Networks. The Summit will bring together technology geeks, policy wonks, network builders and operators, and enthusiasts March 31-April 2 at Lindenwood University in St. Charles,...
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February 14, 2006
BusinessWeek Online has a rather routine analysis of issues and trends at the 3GSM World Congress this week in Barcelona....
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February 09, 2006
Early this morning, Research in Motion unveiled the first public details of what the BlackBerry maker is calling its "WorkAround Strategy." And some in the Blogosphere are not happy....
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February 09, 2006
The annual DEMO conference, unfolding this week in Arizona, always covers a wide range of emerging products, including wireless and mobile. You can find a bunch of DEMO bloggers for commentary, and our day by day online coverage....
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February 09, 2006
Lucent is incorporating into its IP Multimedia Subsystem for carriers a PCTEL application that lets a handheld device roam seamlessly between cellular and Wi-Fi nets....
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February 07, 2006
Three companies have banded together to create a ready-to-use reference design for a low-cost smartphone that has built-in Wi-Fi and GSM support....
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February 07, 2006
A wireless service provider called Xanadoo has launched a wireless broadband Internet service to blanket Lubbock, Texas. Xanadoo's net is based on the same gear, from Navini Networks, that BellSouth is using in its trial network in Atlanta....
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February 03, 2006
One of Palm's biggest investors is urging the company's board of directors to consider "strategic alternatives," including selling it off. Yay or Nay?...
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February 03, 2006
Who needs the National Security Agency when you can use a Web site to track and record someone's movements based on their cell phone?...
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February 02, 2006
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected a key patent in the ongoing battle between NTP, which holds the patents, and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion....
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February 02, 2006
The City of Cambridge, Mass. and one of its big name property owners, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will partner to deploy a "free" Wi-Fi wireless mesh to the city's 100,000 residents by summer 2007....
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February 02, 2006
The real value of those built-in cellphone and PDA cameras comes not in taking pictures but in scanning information, according a report from ABI Research....
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January 31, 2006
Utimaco is offering some mobile security tips for laptops, PDAs and removable media....
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January 31, 2006
Our review this week of the IT venture fund investments for 2005 shows wireless start-ups were the big winners. But a couple of other reports suggest investors are leery of WiMAX, one of several standards for wireless broadband nets....
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January 30, 2006
Chris Thomas, chief strategist and director of strategic initiatives at Intel, says the chipmaker is seeing double-digit returns on its investment internally on mobile computing. He's in "Network World's Hot Seat with John Gallant," our five-minute video interviews....
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January 30, 2006
Our "Tech Insider" package this week focuses on the rise of 3G cellular data services. Among other topics, Mark Lowenstein looks at 3G trends for notebooks and other client devices....
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January 24, 2006
A key technology in simplifying wireless LAN deployments, and holding down their costs, is power-over-Ethernet, which lets a wireless access point draw power from the switch to which it's attached over an Ethernet cable....
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January 24, 2006
Southwest Airlines now lets you use a handheld to check in wirelessly for your flight....
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January 23, 2006
The U.S. Supreme Court said it will not review the patent infringement dispute between Research in Motion and its adversary NTP....
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January 20, 2006
Cirond CEO Nicholas Miller weighs in on the vulnerability, which he says he was talking about nearly 18 months ago....
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January 20, 2006
Cool Tools Editor Keith Shaw takes the first Windows-powered Palm device for a spin on Verizon's EV-DO cellnet. Check out his video review....
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January 19, 2006
As expected, the IEEE 802.11n Task Group has voted unanimously to accept a proposed compromise specification as the basis for a new high-throughput wireless LAN standard. Incredibly,......
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January 19, 2006
In court arguments against a possible shut down of its Blackberry service, Research in Motion warned that halting service could threaten U.S. public safety and cripple the economy. Meanwhile......
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January 19, 2006
WiMAX silicon start-up Beceem Communications, San Jose, Calif., says it has released the first client-side chipset that supports the recently ratified IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard....
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January 19, 2006
An "anomaly" in Windows XP and Windows 2003 can leave a wireless laptop vulnerable to attack....
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January 18, 2006
Scotland is testing lampposts with solar panels that not only power the light but also a wireless access point, which could use either Wi-Fi or WiMAX radios....
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January 17, 2006
When someone tries to buy quantities of pseudoephedrine, which is used in making illegal amphetamines........
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January 17, 2006
Apparently, there's some dispute over how long the effort to create a 480Mbps short-range wireless standard has to live....
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January 17, 2006
NW's Ron Nutter has some suggestions for diagnosing wireless troubles on your laptop. What's been the most frequent, or the biggest, trouble for you?...
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January 13, 2006
As if there wasn't enough for network professionals to worry about. Ex-Forrester Research analyst John Robb describes a project that modifies a single-use film camera, to create a short range microwave pulse that can fry nearby RFID tags. Robb says...
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January 12, 2006
Manufacturers of radio-operated garage doors are getting swamped with complaints about malfunctions, which are due to spread of a new two-way portable radio system at military posts across the U.S....
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January 11, 2006
Nokia introduced its 802.11-based 770 Internet Tablet last May, and products began shipping last Fall. It looks like a hit.......
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January 11, 2006
The Netgear Skype phone, unveiled last week at the Consumer Electronics Show, is generating a lot of enthusiasm among users of Skype's VoIP service. And some frustration: Netgear isn't saying much about the phone....
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January 09, 2006
Drugmaker Pfizer is pasting onto all bottles of Viagra a product label with an RFID tag, in a bid to foil drug counterfeiters....
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January 09, 2006
When WLAN vendor Vivato shut down operations last month, it threw a monkey wrench into Pittsburgh's plan for a municipal wireless LAN covering parts of the downtown area....
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January 09, 2006
Wireless guru Craig Mathias spotlights an "almost unbelievable" wireless technology: real-time transmission of uncompressed HDTV signals, up to 1.5Gbps over a wireless LAN connection. How? Read on.......
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January 06, 2006
We asked wireless guru Craig Mathias, principle of the Farpoint Group, to share some impressions and thoughts on this year's CES. Here's his first post…...
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January 03, 2006
The federal government is preparing to shift a bunch of its fixed wireless usage to an obscure section of the spectrum, paving the way for cellular carriers to bid for the radio waves being vacated. The UPI story reports the...
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January 03, 2006
The Stompbox project cobbles together some of this and some of that to forge a link between an EV-DO 3G cell net and, via 802.11 wireless LANs, local client computers. In effect, it's a portable access point tethered to a...
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December 27, 2005
The city's recently released request for proposal for a citywide Wi-Fi net has only intensified the controversy over the way Mayor Gavin Newsom has turned a technical issue into a political one....
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December 27, 2005
South Korean prosecutors will start using mobile phone text messages to notify suspects that they've been indicted, according to this Reuters story. Over 75% of the population carry mobile phones, so officials have decided to move from paper notifications to...
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December 23, 2005
David Cowan, a co-founder of wireless e-mail provider Visto, clears up some confusion over Visto's recent licensing deal for NTP patents and its patent infringement suit against Microsoft...
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December 23, 2005
With the advent of wireless access on passenger jets, guess what? You face the possibility of being hacked by the passenger in the seat behind you. Or in front of you. Or next to you....
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December 21, 2005
Research in Motion is turning brinkmanship into an art form. The company is publicly blastingl egal adversary NTP, emphasizing a recent but preliminary Patent Office ruling that found the remainder of NTP's wireless e-mail patents invalid....
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December 21, 2005
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may have spurred progress on creating the federal Integrated Wireless Network, a proposed multi-billion dollar net that would be used by thousands of federal agents and employees in the Homeland Security, Treasury and Justice departments....
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December 21, 2005
Surging Treo smartphone sales have boosted Palm's profits above analysts' expectations....
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December 20, 2005
RIM's co-chief executive Jim Balsillie says the company will soon reveal details of the software that will let the Blackberry service keep running, without violating patents owned by NTP, according to a Reuters interview....
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December 20, 2005
IBM's Developerworks Website as an article on retrofitting Web content to make it accessible to mobile clients connecting wirelessly....
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December 20, 2005
This seems like a good time of the year to revisit "Top Ten 802.11 Myths of 2005", by Matthew Gast, author of "802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition" from O'Reilly Media....
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December 16, 2005
Okay: it hasn't happened...yet. But what is YOUR company going to do if the worst happens -- if RIM and NTP refuse to settle and a federal judge grants an injunction to shut down BlackBerry service in the U.S.?...
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December 16, 2005
"Near field communications," as mentioned in this paen by a Philips Semiconductor executive. What does it mean?...
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December 14, 2005
A security Web site called Black Alchemy has a Linux-based program that generates thousands of fake wireless Access Points....
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December 14, 2005
NTP says it has rejected the latest offer from Research in Motion to settle NTP's patent infringement suit against the maker of the BlackBerry e-mail handhelds, according to this Reuters story....
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December 12, 2005
Handheld computers and wireless nets are making possible "media-rich" classrooms for students K-12, according to this AP story....
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December 09, 2005
A RIM executive has confirmed that the BlackBerry maker has been meeting with a court-appointed mediator and NTP for several days, in an effort to resolve NTP's 4-year-old patent infringement suit, according to this ComputerWorld story....
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December 08, 2005
Are you forging ahead with Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2, also known as IEEE 802.11i) in your enterprise wireless LAN? What's the experience been like? What issues are you running into? If you're not deploying WPA2, then rethink, says our...
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December 08, 2005
The IEEE on Wednesday took the final step http://ieee802.org/16/arc/802-16list2/msg03069.html in approving a standard for mobile wireless broadband metropolitan-area networks. Mercifully, we have two shorthand alternatives: 802.16e-2005, or "mobile WiMax." Mobile WiMax means you're moving around with a computer or phone...
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December 07, 2005
The first cell phone for dogs will be available in early 2006, according to this story: "Hung off Fido's collar, the PetCell is a bone-shaped cell phone that will let dog owners talk to their best friend over a two-way...
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December 07, 2005
SavaJe OS, Java, smartphones, cellular, wireless
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December 06, 2005
We know the Wireless Revolution has truly arrived. More and more Americans are logging wirelessly into the Internet - from their bathrooms....
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December 05, 2005
Wireless Vulnerabilities and Exploits , wireless security
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December 05, 2005
Some New Orleans officals are saying, according to this Washington Post report that BellSouth was so angered by the city's announcement of a wireless net for free Internet access that the telco cancelled its offer of a building to house...
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December 01, 2005
RIM seems to be having some legal issues involving its BlackBerry devices. Let's help them out with the poll below:...
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November 30, 2005
Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans announced yesterday it's phasing in a free, wireless mesh Internet access service. It may be the nation's first municipally owned and operated wireless mesh offering free service. At least temporarily....
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November 29, 2005
Netgear has settled a class-action suit that claimed the wireless LAN vendor exaggerated the true data speeds of its equipment....
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November 29, 2005
AbsoluteValueSystems of Florida offers several products to create Linux-based wireless LANs....
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November 28, 2005
The Antique Wireless Association, founded in 1952, runs a Museum of Electronic Communications in upstate New York....
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November 28, 2005
Strix Systems last week announced a deal to blanket the Republic of Macedonia, all 1,000-plus square miles, with a multi-radio wireless mesh, using Strix's Access/One Outdoor Wireless System....
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November 28, 2005
The Mercury News' Jessie Seyfer has a story about how your Web experience will get better someday, partly through 3G cellular connections, with much higher throughput, and partly through Web browsers and applications that are better designed for midget cell...
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November 28, 2005
The "LA Times" weighed in last week on the question of whether, and how, municipalities should create wireless LAN-based metro nets for Internet access....
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November 23, 2005
We're a bit tardy picking this item up. You may not have wondered what "Wi-Fi" means because you already knew, right? It means "wireless fidelity," of course. Or not....
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November 22, 2005
A story at Slate looks at how 802.11 wireless access in classrooms is distracting students and wonders whether its really worse than the traditional low-tech distractions....
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November 22, 2005
This week we're honoring groundbreaking network projects at 50 companies and organizations. Click to see the 50 grouped by technology, scroll down to find the nine wireless winners. The projects include wireless asset tracking at Beth Israel Deaconess medical center,...
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November 21, 2005
The multi-billion dollar plan by Australian cell carrier Telstra, to go national with a unified IP and 3G GSM net is being attacked by Unwired, a network operator that is the chief Australian champion of WiMAX wireless broadband....
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November 21, 2005
Check out what's news in Network World this week: Cisco's new Aironet 1500 outdoor wireless mesh access point raises some interesting issues for network folks. Tom Henderson tests two radio airwave scanners, from AirMagnet and Network Chemistry. Cisco takes the...
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November 16, 2005
Korea Telecom this week started the trial run of its WiBro personal wireless broadband service, the first to be based on the soon to be finalized IEEE 802.16e standard, also known as WiMAX....
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November 15, 2005
MIT has an experimental, homegrown 802.11b/g wireless mesh network, called Roofnet, currently with about 20 nodes active in and around the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus (see their map). It's a project of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which is...
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November 14, 2005
Ubuntu H2 is a Linux desktop distribution. But Tom's Hardware has a mobile take on this: store the Ubuntu OS and your applications on a USB storage device, take it with you, and plug it into almost any device with...
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November 11, 2005
A dozen WiMAX vendors, and two equipment test companies, were part of the latest WiMAX Plugfest, this time in China on the eve of the WiMAX Forum Plenary Meeting, held in Beijing....
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November 09, 2005
The Michigan Department of Transportation has begun testing a Motorola wireless mesh to reduce accidents and congestion....
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November 08, 2005
Venture capitalists are pouring money into wireless-related private companies, as Network World's Cara Garretson reports this week. The flow of funds indicates some of the products enterprise network professionals will be seeing in the future, with most of the action...
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November 07, 2005
Andy Spano, county executive of Westchester County in New York, has found something else for government to do: securing your wireless connections at Wi-Fi hotspots....
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November 04, 2005
You can you can make your voice heard, enter into a conversation, share a thought or a question or a conviction just by clicking on a link, like my e-mail address here - john_cox@nww.com. That's one of the most striking...
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November 03, 2005
As we reported in March, Airespace (now part of Cisco) had been developing a 802.11-based outdoor wireless mesh access point. The installation manual for the new and as yet unannounced Aironet 1500 product has been posted on Ciscos's Web site....
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November 02, 2005
Socket Communications has released a new version of its GPS Nav Kit, a toolkit for adding GPS navigation features to a mobile device, including those running Windows Mobile 5.0....
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November 01, 2005
This was a new thought to me, anyway, in today's column by David Hayes, senior technology writer for The Kansas City Star - cellular wireless is no longer about the handset, and even less about the radio net; it's about...
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October 31, 2005
The latest Linux kernel, 2.6.14, now includes the open source Linux Wireless Extensions API, which will simplify writing applications that can run on wireless Linux devices....
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October 28, 2005
The October 25 editorial accuses the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Boston's Logan International Airport,, of an "audacious assertion of power" in moving to shut down wireless LANs run by its airport tenants, such as airlines....
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October 28, 2005
You can get a glimpse of what your own WiMAX wireless broadband router might look here by checking out Aperto Networks' newly announced PacketWave subscriber stations (photo) and Soma Networks' Somaport 300....
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October 27, 2005
About 3000 people, and most of them seem to be squads of marketers from a vast array of vendors, are meeting today and tomorrow in Boston to whip up excitement about WiMAX, a standard for broadband wireless, in both licensed...
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October 26, 2005
The editorial writers at the city's newspaper of record are now on the record as concluding that the Wireless Philadelphia project is an unqualified Good Thing. But the editorial wasn't very inquiring....
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October 25, 2005
A pilot project at the UCLA Medical Center lets doctors with smartphones and PocketPCs wirelessly access patient medical data, according to a report. The system, dubbed Global Care Quest system (GCQ), works not only over the hospitals internal wireless LAN...
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October 20, 2005
This week is the annual EDUCAUSE conference, a major gathering for IT professionals in higher education....
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October 13, 2005
The starting point for Andy Seybold's latest commentary is San Francisco's decision to create an 802.11-based municipal wireless net, and Google's offer to build it, and offer free service at a minimum 300K bit/sec rate all over the city....
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October 10, 2005
A non-profit group, acting on behalf of elected Philadelphia officials, is negotiating the final contract with Earthlink to create a 1M bit/sec wireless mesh over the city's 135 square miles....
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October 05, 2005
A company called AdtekMedia has the bright idea of using wireless LAN connections to beam TV commercials, movie trailers and other drek to flat plasma screens, 17-30 inches wide....
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September 12, 2005
Wireless LANs and WiMAX radio links are starting to go up as part of the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts....
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September 12, 2005
Wireless LAN and WiMAX markets face years of healthy growth according to a new study from Tempe, Ariz.-based Forward Concepts....
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August 29, 2005
Marlborough-based 3Com is throwing more resources behind its wireless LAN marketing and product management efforts....
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August 29, 2005
You might think with all the announcements about WiMAX (or 802.16) licensed and unlicensed wireless broadband products that there would actually be WiMAX products available....
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August 29, 2005
Chipmaker Broadcom recently patted itself on the back by sending out champagne bottles made of dark chocolate, in honor of shipping its 50 millionth 54g wireless LAN chipset....
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July 25, 2005
Enpocket, which sells "mobile community applications," claims its latest quarterly survey shows that people think mobile phones are really important. Kind of....
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July 25, 2005
Market watcher Infonetics predicts strong growth in 802.11 (Wi-Fi) voice handsets....
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July 07, 2005
A "St. Petersburg Times" story on stealing Wi-Fi opens and closes by focusing on a rare incident: the arrest of a man caught in the act of allegedly [we have to use that word] stealing someone else's Wi-Fi connection to...
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July 06, 2005
Come up to speed on metro wireless nets via a recorded online Webinar featuring Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com....
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June 27, 2005
A group promoting fuel cell technology for mobile PCs has issued a document for battery makers to use in designing fuel cells....
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June 22, 2005
The city of Orlando has pulled the plug on a 17-month wireless project that let downtown users access the Internet at no charge....
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June 09, 2005
While members of the IEEE 802.11n task group continue their squabbles over a high-throughput wireless LAN standard, with a minimum of 100M bit/sec, a Germany-based research consortium, with the acronym WIGWAM, is looking ahead to 1G bit /sec wireless nets....
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June 09, 2005
5G Wireless is testing a wireless LAN antenna array that borrows from cellular base station antenna designs....
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May 30, 2005
Silicon Valley has coughed up another start-up, Funambol (pronounced "foo-nahm-ball"), which offers an open source-based software package for synchronizing and provisioning mobile applications and managing the devices on which they run....
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May 30, 2005
That's the implication of a new In-Stat study, which to be fair focused on the latest experiment in wringing cellular minutes from subscribers -- the Multimedia Phone....
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May 30, 2005
Sister site Techworld.com has a dispiriting interview with Bob Heile, chair of the IEEE 802.15.3a group, which is trying to craft a standard for ultra-wideband radio nets....
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May 06, 2005
The scare over a potential epidemic of cellphone viruses is overblown, says In-Stat's Alan Nogee in a lucid and succinct analysis....
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April 21, 2005
A study commissioned by the City of Philadelphia has concluded that residential and business users will need more than a WLAN card plugged into their PC to access the proposed citywide wireless net, originally estimated to cost $10 million....
April 14, 2005
The Army's Stryker Brigade will shortly be deploying land mines that can be selectively detonated over a wireless connection, from a soldier armed with a laptop computer, according to an Associated Press story....
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