Monday, April 08, 2002

WiFi alphabet soup: a, b, e, g, h, i If you think you understand WiFi because you know 802.11a, b and g, you need to read Glenn Fleishman's article, "802.11 Task Group Update" on the O'Reilly Network Wireless DevCenter.  Glenn, who writes the best Weblog on a wireless subject (WLANs), just posted a detailed article about the various designations, data rates, frequencies and status of WiFi on the O'Reilly Network Wireless DevCenter.  It's a great reference piece. 6:56:23 PM

Canadian Business writes about WiFi Canadian Business magazine has an article about WiFi, "If you can't beat 'em..."  The article says the University of Toronto in September began requiring freshman in the M.B.A. program to have a WiFi-enabled laptop.  The article quotes a university network manager saying there will be more than 400 WiFi access points within two years and many will be 802.11a.  The U of T WiFi network won't be open to anyone, but the university might look at reciprocal agreements so students may access WiFi at other schools. I'm quoted in the article, too, as saying that cellular operators will ignore WiFi at their peril.  From what I've been hearing, lots of cellular operators are not ignoring WiFi.  They are busy trying to figure out a business model that makes sense.  5:51:50 PM

Disney exec. tests cellular posting; Why WAP is crap Dr. Eric Freeman, a director of engineering in the advanced technology team of the Walt Disney Internet Group, has tested sending a Weblog entry from his cellular phone. Freeman also has a Weblog entry on "The Real Reason WAP is Crap."  The bottom line is different phones support different WAP features.  It drives Disney, and other content developers, crazy because developers have to think about the mechanics of WAP implementation on every phone version.  Freeman says it's going to get worse as cellular operators and handset vendors offer new features to differentiante themselves.  The solution, he says, is a "platform" with "consistent syntax and semantics." My view is that with WAP, Microsoft's flavors of Windows CE for PDAs and so-called smartphones, various flavors of Java and Symbian's EPOC32, the environment for developers is getting much worse rather than better. 5:32:51 PM