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Wireless Mania

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tulips-for-sale dept.

burnsy and others sent in links to stories about 802.11b that are cropping up everywhere. The New York Times has one. (Well, two, actually.) Salon has one. InternetNews has a piece about Boingo, a new wireless start-up, that's also covered in this Forbes article. (The NYT article above also mentions Sputnik.) Both Boingo and Sputnik are trying to leverage the existing community wireless networks to speed their network build-outs. MIT's Tech Review has an interesting piece about a wireless start-up that has already tried and failed. Fixed wireless is also booming, according to an industry study.

6 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Wireless is great! by Xafloc · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wireless is just fantastic. I love sitting down on the couch, powering up my Dell (no cables attached), and watching as I recieve my DHCP assigned address. Unfortunately, I only get 26% on the quality of my connection. After all, I am connecting to my neighboors D-Link 150 feet away :)

    Seriously, these people have not changed the admin password from "admin" in their Router, and they aren't even using WEP. Of course, I won't be the one to tell them they should :)

    --
    -= Xafloc =-
    alinuxbox.com
    N
  2. Me stupid... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Me stupid! Me love wireless stuff! Me hates security! Me gonna whine alot when me got hacked!
    Me dont't care! Me loves wireless stuff!

  3. This might be very good. by Krapangor · · Score: 3, Funny

    All these electromagnetic waves everywhere might make our brains grow and more intelligent. So we might look in the end like the aliens from "mars attacks".

    And we all know that electromagnetic waves make flowers grow. At least light is electromagnetoc waves and flowers don't grow without light as you might know. So, all electromagnetic waves might be very very good for them.

    --
    Owner of a Mensa membership card.
  4. Future applications by Sapphon · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm wondering about the prospect using Wi-Fi to transmit streaming video or audio, perhaps to a car-mounted computer screen (like the head-rest TVs currently in top-end cars), would that be viable?
    Of course, the staff at Starbucks might get a bit suspicious if you just keep circling the block around their store until you've finished downloading your favourite espisode of Futurama... but you could email them and ask them to bring coffee out to your car *grin*

    --
    Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
  5. WiFI looks great, but... by lfourrier · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... all those community networks seems quite anti-american to me.

    (at least anticorporateamerican ;)

  6. Beanie Hats by mmkhd · · Score: 2, Funny

    I guess this means we can look forward to people carrying large foldable/portable antennae along with their notebooks? Or mounting huge ones on their rooftops?

    The return of the Wi-Fi enabled Beanie Hat (TM)!

    I think these Lucent Range Extenders would look great mounted on a baseball hat...