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picoChip, KT to develop WiBro/WiMAX femtocell
Important news on the WiMAX front, and as is often the case, U.K.-based picoChip is involved. The company has just signed a partnership agreement with Korea Telecom (KT) to develop WiBro/WiMAX APs (also called femtocells or home-basestations). Each of the two companies brings a lot to the table: KT has launched commercial WiBro service, while picoChip's multi-core DSP is the industry standard architecture for WiMAX infrastructure; the DSP is also widely used for WCDMA …
Trend: WiFi in white space
We know what the problems are: Anyone can put up a WiFi network because they operate in unlicensed spectrum, but the downside is that the signal is relatively weak to avoid interference with devices such as cordless phones, and must resort to elaborate multipaths scheme to overcome everyday obstacles such as office furniture. Some have suggested using lower frequency, because lower-frequency signal travels better, but desirable bands in the low frequencies are not readily …
MetroWiFi, AT&T join to offer muni-Wifi
Politics make for strange bedfellows, but so also, it seems, does muni-WiFi. CNet News.com reports that Sunnyvale, CA-based start-up MetroFi, one of the three leading muni-WiFi operators, is partnering with the venerable AT&T to bid on the 65-square-mile Riverside, CA network. Note that the Riverside bid talks about offering only 512 Kbps downstream at no cost, compared with all the other MetroFi's bids and operations, which offer customers 1 Mbps downstream. That higher rate …
Vendor-independent migration to switched WLAN
Who says you cannot teach an old do new tricks? If you could, this would be important, especially when the old dog cost a lot of money. Businesses would be delighted to know that Aruba and Airwave have teamed up to offer businesses with unmanaged legacy WLAN infrastructure a way to move to a centralized, switch-managed WLAN.
When WLAN came on the scene, the emphasis was on distributed, stand-alone, thick APs. There is a limit to what this type of architecture can deliver, and the …
WiFi-equipped washing machine
This may well be the digital age's response to the Rube Goldberg machine: The Atlanta-based Internet Home Alliance is showing a WiFi-equipped washing machine. Needless to say, the name "washing machine" is too 20th-century. The new machine is called Laundry Time System. The system is outfit with WiFi and it allows users to control the machine--temperature, cycle, laundry type, etc.--remotely, using email, instant messaging or cell phone.
The system can automatically alert you …
SPOTLIGHT: Thin is in--but which thin?
There is a general move away from fat, intelligent, stand-alone APs in WLAN design toward a centrally switched architecture (see story #4 above). There are several reasons for this change of direction: Security became an issue, as was the need to allow for cross-subnet roaming. There were other issues having to do with scalability and control. Yes, you could buy gateways from Blusocket or Cisco to help manage the distributed network, but more and more businesses realized that a better …
ALSO NOTED: Verizon upgrades network; A WiFi Skype phone; and much more...
> Verizon will upgrade its wireless network infrastructure to EV-DO Revision A which will boost the (theoretical) upload speeds to 1.8 Mbps and download speeds to 3.1 Mbps. Report
> Skype has teamed with several hardware vendors--Belkin, Edge-Core, Netgear, and SMC--to bring a WiFi Skype phone to its customers. Report
> Toronto had an …