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Check out Auckland NZ. Reach Wireless using RoamAD(metropolitan wi-fi) and Woosh using IP Wireless. That town is a hotbed of wireless progress. Auckland's Wi-Fi Hotzone. Interesting thing here is that the city gt behind the launch of the network and actively promotes it, but does not own it. See How the city got involved.

Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News [wifinetnews.com] about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:

Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.

Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.

This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.

My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.

The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)

If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.

The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.

Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)

This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.

In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.

It's this fumb

Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News [wifinetnews.com] about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:

Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.

Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.

This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.

My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.

The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)

If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.

The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.

Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)

This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.

In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.

It's this fumb

There have been several orbiting digipeaters using VHF & UHF AX.25 amateur packet radio (including a payload I was involved with, SPRE). TCP/IP is possible over AX.25

There are WiFi range extenders that might be interesting to test at altitutde.

Andrew Orlowski writes in the best tradition of tabloid journalism: entertaining, poorly researched, full of factual errors. I've written my response to his article on Wi-Fi Networking News. Basically, Terry Dickman (not Dickson as Orlowski writes) is just this guy who likes the service. Intel is not funding PointShot or ACE's project.

It's not binary choice; it's a duality. As I write about all the time on my Wi-Fi weblog, a certain category of Wi-Fi hotspot user will wait for reasonable roaming plans and then pay for it (or their business will more likely pay) because it gives them a predictable, consistent, high-speed experience.

Free is great, and free doesn't have to be inconsistent or mom and pop. For instance, look at Austin Wireless City or Marriott's budget hotel chain (free wired or Wi-Fi in all of their mid-level hotels by the end of 2005).

But for business venues and business districts and a consistency in access, people will pay. If every McDonald's has branded Wi-Fi and it's just $20 per month, then certain travelers--perhaps millions--will take advantage of that.

When roaming kicks in full scale, and all US hotspots are covered by a $20 per month fee from Comcast or Qwest or Boingo or other consumer firms reselling access, then for consumers who need it, there's no question. Businesses will pay $200 per month cell bills; a $20 per month surcharge for more productivity through unlimited US roaming won't be a big deal.

Several cometes hosting rebel troops governed by evil and rebelious law were fretted by an unusual hungry BigMac. The 250 hotspots were digested within less than a second. BigMac's first comment: 'This was fun! Where exactly did you say that cluster of beowulfs is located? Buuurghrp.' The BigMac is now heading for McDonald's Plaza in Oak Brook, IL and dying to see Birdie. The extra-terrestial fresh quality of the Cometa, the main ingredient of McDonald's most popular burger, the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Bacon and Eggs and Cometa, is a result of a unique process and BigMac's ability to eat the Cometa directly after catching.

First off, these guys aren't the first: a company called DotSpot (read my article) launched six weeks ago. Second, if you don't want the ads, don't use the free service. Spam is unsolicited commercial whatever that you're the unwilling recipient of. Terms of service are different. If you sign up for a free ISP and then promise to spam you, it's not spam. If they don't disclose they spam, it is spam.

The LEAP problem is pretty egregious because PEAP and EAP-TTLS are in wide use -- both of which encrypt the authentication process protecting against just sucking down a transaction for offline analysis. PEAP was supposedly supported by Microsoft and Cisco, but I don't see how Cisco is supporting it by releasing EAP-FAST, which is an alternate approach that's not as strong as PEAP. (PEAP is also supported by Mac OS X 10.3, just by the way, as well as third parties who made 802.1X authentication software clients.)

But remember that this problem isn't limited to LEAP. As Robert Moskowitz of ICSA Labs wrote last November, poor WPA preshared key passphrase choice can allow WPA keys to be cracked. WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) is a fix to WEP that involves dramatically more complexity and sophistication in deriving per-packet keys.

However, if you choose a dictionary-crackable passphrase of under 20 characters in WPA, you hit the same problem as LEAP: a cracker can trigger a deauthentication, capture the reauthentication in less than a minute, and then crack at their leisure.

WPA-PSK will probably only be used in home and small office networks, where passphrases may be poorly chosen. I have spoken to manufacturers about changing the presentation layer: don't let users pick bad passwords. So far, to no avail. Not even a recommendation from the Wi-Fi Alliance.

Read the rest of this comment...

xjh Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News [wifinetnews.com] about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:

Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.

Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.

This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.

My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.

The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)

If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.

The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.

Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)

This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.

In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.

It's this

Here's what I posted on Wi-Fi Networking News about why Starbucks efforts are misguided:

Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.

Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.

This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.

My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.

The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)

If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.

The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.

Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)

This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.

In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.

It's this fumbling that's I orig

Wifinetnews on Google Labs' experimental Wi-Fi directory. Looks interesting because it derives the list from the web pages scanned.

Very small point, but the text that describes this story is actually from my site, Wi-Fi Networking News. We're not claiming to have written deathless prose, but the text of the submission is from here, where we wrote about this event on Jan. 25.

I'm not asking for traffic, apologies, or whatever, but when you write something and see someone else's name attached to it, it feels strange.

Right on, bgelb! Back when he was claiming the passive repeater impossibility, he promised to provide details. Then his son died of SIDS, and everyone gave him space. It's been two years, and he's still writing every week, and he's never provided more information or answered questions about it. I don't mean to sound callous, but if he can feed the bulldog, he can surely provide some details about his miracle repeater.

I wrote an extensive deconstruction of his WhyFi essay on my Wi-Fi blog -- in short, he gets the terminology and technology wrong, doesn't explain how his free giveaway would be funded or how the infrastructure would work, and suggests essentially tossing Wi-Fi for a non-existent standard he just invented that works more or less the same.

For an alternative viewpoint, check out Wi-Fi Networking News

Glenn Fleishman already has a response, which can be basically summarized as "You and what investors?"
-russ

The lead into this article says the groups behind this standard are the Wi-Fi Alliance, Gric Communications, and the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. The Wi-Fi Alliance has been unable to get traction under its branded Wi-Fi Zones program from venues that would rather just show the network they're part of; GRIC is the increasingly distant number 2 player in corporate aggregated resale (i.e., no hotspots, just reselling hotspots); and the Canadian group has very very few hotspots in Canada. The leading Canadian WISP, FatPort, isn't part of this proposal.

More likely, the GSM Association's roaming standards group that drafted a long document (referenced here in June 2003) on handling WISP roaming for hotspots (with members on the committee from some of the world's largest cell operators) will become the backend.

Or, iPass, GRIC's rival, which will gross about $200 million in 2003 after a very successful public offering this year, will make its clearinghouse standard, which requires standardized authentication, the de facto method of fee settlement and roaming across networks. iPass has 10,000 hotspots under contract now, including T-Mobile, Wayport, and other major networks worldwide.

Will Success Spoil Wi-Fi?

now we are going to hear another wave of uninformed folks complaining about the supposed speed limitation of 24Mbps... heheh

from the same site: also, here's his announcement on 802.11g's ratification today. anyway, great news. :)

now we are going to hear another wave of uninformed folks complaining about the supposed speed limitation of 24Mbps... heheh

from the same site: also, here's his announcement on 802.11g's ratification today. anyway, great news. :)

I wrote a rebuttal to Frankston on my Wi-Fi web log a few days ago (archive link):

Legendary computer guru Bob Frankston says Bluetooth failed: I'd argue that it still could be saved. Bluetooth required many different pieces to be useful, some of which needed massive investment and retooling. For instance, Microsoft only offers limited Bluetooth features (dial-up networking, cable replacement, input device), so Windows users who try to use Bluetooth may require special drivers for individual devices, and have a horrible experience compared to Mac users. Apple has integrated and sophisticated Bluetooth support since Mac OS X 10.2 last August (it just got updated today, too). Apple doesn't yet support printing.

Wi-Fi got the kickstart in that two Wi-Fi devices (an access point and a client) make Wi-Fi worthwhile. Add a second, a third, a 10th client, and it becomes indispensible. Put it in a public place, and you've got a new industry. Microsoft gave Wi-Fi full support in Windows XP; Apple way back in 1999 in Mac OS 8.

Wi-Fi's utility grows as more distinct locations are added -- even if it's just your home, favorite coffeeshop, work. Bluetooth requires many devices, all of which can talk to each other, and OS support, to be minimally useful and doesn't benefit from widespread deployment.

Setting up Wi-Fi can sometimes be complicated, but generally a default DHCP client configuration get you most of the way there, and then you login if it's an account-based service. Bluetooth's configuration can have 30 or 40 steps just to get all the devices talking and in the right mode.

Bluetooth is showing up prebuilt into tens of millions of computing units this year: handhelds, laptops, other devices. The tipping point has arrived, and it will either finally catch fire -- probably only if GPRS service becomes affordable -- or burn out.

Bluetooth's big advantages over Wi-Fi were supposed to be cost for the chips, power consumption, and ease of ad hoc setup. None of those except power appear to be true yet!