Information Portal

Houston flips switch on free downtown Wi-Fi: Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle accidentally discovers the soft launch of the network funded by EarthLink’s $5m default fee. (The fee was paid when they missed a milestone, and the firm later walked away.) The downtown area now has a limited pilot project that’s free; the real effort in Houston is supposed to be at 10 housing projects and in parks where service would be used to bridge the digital divide and improve the quality of life. How, exactly, is part of what’s being tested.

That’s ASCII, not hex: An article on wardriving raises security hackles by repeating some slightly overheated statements about Wi-Fi security. The article opens with a 63-character ASCII WPA passphrase, which is later described as “hex.” (ASCII passphrases in WPA can be up to 63 “printable” characters - ASCII 32 to 127 - while a hex version of a 256-bit TKIP or AES password is 64 hexadecimal digits long.) The article tries to conflate Wi-Fi attacks that led to the largest set of breaches in retail credit-card systems and wardriving, a hobbyist activity that’s never been looked on very favorably by law enforcement. The sense of ennui of wardriving pioneers is pretty clear; when Wi-Fi is everywhere and generally secured, it’s far less interesting. The wardriver in the article convinced the reporter that a maximum-length WPA passphrase stored on a USB drive for automatic use was the best way to go. But, really, 20 characters containing letters and punctuation and no words found in a dictionary along with changing your network’s SSID (network name) provides all the security you’ll ever need for a home or small business. (If you need more, deploy WPA/WPA2 Personal.)

Green Wi-Fi’s Senegal efforts hit snags: The folks at Green Wi-Fi are well motivated, and they’re running up against all forms of security theater and bureaucracy both here and in Senegal, where they have an active project. The San Francisco Chronicle notes the group’s effort to build solar-powered, self-sustaining Internet access via mesh networked nodes. Getting devices out of the country, clearing customs in Senegal, and hooking up their solar system all hit problems they’re working through. As with the One Laptop Per Child program, I see a “build it and they will come” mentality in Green Wi-Fi’s mission statement: the notion that providing computing power and Internet access will result in good things, rather than an effort to figure out what good things need to be achieved, and whether computers and the Internet will assist.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Joe Brancatelli pokes beneath the surface of claims that in-flight Internet is imminent: I’ve covered some of the same ground, but veteran travel writer Brancatelli connected the dots by checking with the FAA to find the status of applications for aircraft certification by Aircell and others.

He’s not very positive about it, because his research shows a mismatch between claims and work. He writes that an unnamed American airline executive is frustrated by the delay in launching the 3-to-6 month pilot on their trans-continental fleet; that Aircell hasn’t submitted paperwork for Virgin’s Airbus models for certification; and that the FAA just received a request to certify Delta’s MD-80 craft, which makes a launch with 75 planes this year on that airline less likely.

Competitor Row 44 doesn’t fare better in his analysis, as they promised spring and summer 2008 tests that still haven’t happened, with Southwest and Alaska Airlines.

I’m a little more positive about the future of in-flight broadband. There’s no particular conspiracy. It’s hard to make it work. Development and testing is tricky due to FAA limits, and getting in-flight handoffs to work for seamless service at 35,000 feet is far more difficult than, say, cellular handoffs in a moving car at 100 feet above sea level. My suspicion is that tuning the service to be entirely reliable at launch is what’s taking so long.

Brancatelli blames the high price of Connexion on its failure, but I don’t think the $27 fee for long-haul flights deterred users. Lufthansa, which deployed all its long-haul fleet, apparently had very good usage. Most other airlines had few craft equipped, which didn’t allow business travelers, able to expense several hours of work for a $27 fee, the reliability of having on-board Internet when they needed it. Connexion also had many reports of spotty service in certain areas.

Connexion’s failure came from deploying technology that was old when it was deployed, which weighed too much, and which was too expensive to install. Connexion’s revenue and expenses were forecast based on having several hundred aircraft with Connexion service–recall that it was supposed to be a domestic U.S. service, too. In the end they had about 100, I believe.

Brancatelli is also modest when he says Boeing “lost” $300m. That’s part of what they wrote down. My sources say they spent more than a billion in R&D, transponder leases, ground station operation, airline incentives, and payoffs at the end.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Meraki reworks product line, drops new sales of community flavor: The cheap mesh router company has mutated slightly once again. The partly-Google-backed firm founded by MIT RoofNet “graduates” built the company on the notion that they could sell $50 routers that could mesh with each other, and use a robust central management system they developed. Over time, the $50 price didn’t hold up for commercial networks of scale. Last October, the company mishandled a change in its business model when they abruptly announced a $100 increase in price for newly purchased nodes under their Meraki Pro level for any network that wanted to control whether or not ads appeared, have user accounts, and charge for service. (They eventually recovered, apologized, and reworked some of the transition details.) The company continued to offer a $50 indoor and $100 outdoor Standard level nodes for networks that required ads and had other limits. As of a few days ago, Standard is dead, and the Meraki mini has been upgraded to the Meraki Indoor ($150). The Indoor has signal strength LEDs on the side for better help in placing units, an internal antenna, and better resilience against power fluctuations. The company explains its move in eliminating Standard by noting that most customers moved to Pro. It’s not precisely the end of idealism (nor did that happen last October), as Meraki is still one of the major commercial mesh vendors, and their products are still vastly easier and a fraction of the cost of higher-end competitors.

New life for dead Tempe network? Another firm has expressed interest in buying the pennies on the dollar assets that remain of the former Kite Networks installation in Tempe from the firm that financed the venture as long as they can negotiate a new, more favorable deal with the city for mounting and removal rights. CTC, Inc., which the East Valley Tribune reports runs networks in the Kansas City, Mo., area, thinks there’s an opportunity. The article notes that reception problems were due in part to the prevalence of stucco in Tempe, common in the southwest. Stucco walls layer plaster or other materials on a wire mesh for strength that turns a house into a bit of an accidental Faraday cage, partially shielding the home from electromagnetic radiation. (Could I go so far to say that Tempe’s network could be a phoenix? Ouch.)

Wake up, you darn computer: Intel’s new Remote Wake motherboards won’t work with Wi-Fi, it’s important to note. The feature, announced today, will let an incoming VoIP call (the articles all say “phone call over the Internet”) to wake a computer, as long as the call comes from a particular source. Of course, the standard SIP protocol for VoIP doesn’t have the kind of security and integrity that would allow this; Intel has to overcome the problem with network address translation that renders most computer unreachable from outside the local network without a separate service like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn; and it will only work for computers connected via Ethernet to a local network, because Wi-Fi is off when a computer sleeps, while Ethernet can remain lightly active. I don’t have the protocol details yet, but there’s long been a Wake on LAN protocol that required support in a router, operating system, and Ethernet card; Intel may be leveraging this.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

Meraki reworks product line, drops new sales of community flavor: The cheap mesh router company has mutated slightly once again. The partly-Google-backed firm founded by MIT RoofNet “graduates” built the company on the notion that they could sell $50 routers that could mesh with each other, and use a robust central management system they developed. Over time, the $50 price didn’t hold up for commercial networks of scale. Last October, the company mishandled a change in its business model when they abruptly announced a $100 increase in price for newly purchased nodes under their Meraki Pro level for any network that wanted to control whether or not ads appeared, have user accounts, and charge for service. (They eventually recovered, apologized, and reworked some of the transition details.) The company continued to offer a $50 indoor and $100 outdoor Standard level nodes for networks that required ads and had other limits. As of a few days ago, Standard is dead, and the Meraki mini has been upgraded to the Meraki Indoor ($150). The Indoor has signal strength LEDs on the side for better help in placing units, an internal antenna, and better resilience against power fluctuations. The company explains its move in eliminating Standard by noting that most customers moved to Pro. It’s not precisely the end of idealism (nor did that happen last October), as Meraki is still one of the major commercial mesh vendors, and their products are still vastly easier and a fraction of the cost of higher-end competitors.

New life for dead Tempe network? Another firm has expressed interest in buying the pennies on the dollar assets that remain of the former Kite Networks installation in Tempe from the firm that financed the venture as long as they can negotiate a new, more favorable deal with the city for mounting and removal rights. CTC, Inc., which the East Valley Tribune reports runs networks in the Kansas City, Mo., area, thinks there’s an opportunity. The article notes that reception problems were due in part to the prevalence of stucco in Tempe, common in the southwest. Stucco walls layer plaster or other materials on a wire mesh for strength that turns a house into a bit of an accidental Faraday cage, partially shielding the home from electromagnetic radiation. (Could I go so far to say that Tempe’s network could be a phoenix? Ouch.)

Wake up, you darn computer: Intel’s new Remote Wake motherboards won’t work with Wi-Fi, it’s important to note. The feature, announced today, will let an incoming VoIP call (the articles all say “phone call over the Internet”) to wake a computer, as long as the call comes from a particular source. Of course, the standard SIP protocol for VoIP doesn’t have the kind of security and integrity that would allow this; Intel has to overcome the problem with network address translation that renders most computer unreachable from outside the local network without a separate service like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn; and it will only work for computers connected via Ethernet to a local network, because Wi-Fi is off when a computer sleeps, while Ethernet can remain lightly active. I don’t have the protocol details yet, but there’s long been a Wake on LAN protocol that required support in a router, operating system, and Ethernet card; Intel may be leveraging this.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

The Star Tribune writes that the Minneapolis USI Wireless network has broken 10,000 users: Steve Alexander, who has closely covered the network for his paper, writes that the network operator told him they’re beyond break even. It’s a fascinating result; the city remains unique for its size in having a functioning, privately operated Wi-Fi network. Alexander shares several comments from readers about the service, mostly but not entirely negative, which makes sense: people are emailing him when they have problems.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.