Cisco's dual-band access point to ship in August: Cisco wil offer a dual-band 802.11a/802.11b access point in August. Many folks in the industry suggest the card side is more likely to catch on for dual bands. The access points stay put; it's the laptops that roam.

4:02:40 PM    comment   

Nokia and IBM partner to build out public WLANs: Nokia has been working in a variety of ways for years to figure out how to tap what will become a lucrative service/hardware market for public space wireless LANs. An IBM manager spoke at the 802.11 Planet conference last November on how much work IBM Global Services was performing for installing these kinds of networks. A perfect match.

4:01:02 PM    comment   

Mike Langberg of the San Jose Mercury News Critiques the State of Bluetooth: this article comes a few months too early, and his conclusion is correct: not ready for consumers yet. Until OS level inclusion of standard Bluetooth stacks happens, Bluetooth is still in preview, despite manufacturer claims. A few comments on the article, though.

The technical rules for how this works are set by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group... The IEEE 802.15.1 task group now enjoys a relationship with the Bluetooth SIG that should allow future releases to be harmonized, taking the full control out of the SIG. This is a benefit to the SIG, too, as it changes Bluetooth from a set of company partnerships to an industry standard.

Setting up a wireless computer network with Bluetooth would cost two or three times as much as Wi-Fi. I understand the basis of comparison, but it's critical to know that you can't set up a computer network with Bluetooth. It's not designed to be a network component, but rather an ad hoc member of a small group (at most) of devices.

I did succeed in moving files back and forth between the two computers via Bluetooth, but the pace was sluggish. This is good to know. One of Bluetooth's purposes will be a universal connection tool between systems that can't necessarily talk to each other. Even if you've got a Wi-Fi card in your laptop and your colleague you want to exchange files with does as well, you may be unable to. The ad hoc, computer-to-computer mode of 802.11b was just added to Wi-Fi's certification program last year. If you've got a Mac and someone else has a Linksys card, you're probably out of luck.

Nor is it absolutely certain that large numbers of Bluetooth devices operating within the same home or office will avoid getting in each other's way, or won't suffer from interference by other 2.4-gigahertz devices. New versions of Bluetooth (probably starting after 1.1) should support the 802.15.2 task group's co-existence plan, which will allow Bluetooth devices to duck Wi-Fi broadcasts.
3:44:06 PM    comment