Signal Fade

This blog has run its course: Thank you, loyal readers, many of whom still read this site regularly have been following the blog for most of the decade it's operated. Even less-regular readers may have noticed that posts to Wi-Fi Networking News have become fewer and farther between. There are a few reasons, discussed here before. First, Wi-Fi has become embedded in everything, and it generally works. When it does not, the reasons tend to be specific and technical enough that broad advice doesn't help. Second, Wi-Fi is now like oxygen, found everywhere, and often free in the United States. Third, cellular or mobile broadband has become much more important, and while I've covered that issue here, it's never been a perfect fit. (I once had a Cell Net News site, but it didn't generate enough traffic to keep operational, and had too narrow a focus.) Fourth, the many, many gadget and tech sites that fill the zone with coverage of every last little issue deal well enough with much of what I blogged about—short items and links, rather than full-blown articles—that it seemed futile to write 100 words here when 1,000 articles were all over Google News and the rest of the Internet. And, finally, many of the issues I formerly wrote about here, I'm now paid to write about elsewhere, where I receive a bigger readership as well. For instance, I wrote an item about closing up this blog for BoingBoing, which makes sense as it's one of the places I contribute on a routine basis. I also have a regular gig for the Economist, writing technology items each week for the Babbage blog. Ars Technica, Macworld, and TidBITS have also been more targeted and appropriate places for me to write at length about issues that involve wireless and mobile networking. I've loved writing this blog, but has traffic plummeted after 802.11n was finalized and municipal networks started falling apart, it's been difficult to make the time to keep this site useful. I'm bowing to reality: I have too much on my plate, not enough readers (and thus, not enough ad revenue) here, and better fora in which to write more broadly about the topics that interest me. There are so many people to thank over the years for their help with this blog. First and foremost is my good pal Nancy Gohring, who now writes for IDG News Service, who spent a couple of years working as a freelancer for me during our heyday, and has been a supporter of the blog from beginning to end. Also, the many, many community wireless folks with whom I spent inordinate amounts of time speaking and visiting, primarily from 2001 to 2005, when that movement was at its peak. Esme Vos of Muniwireless.com was a key and helpful friend and colleague during the municipal wireless phase, and we exchanged tons of information. Klaus Ernst has been a long-time correspondent and a great friend of the site, filing reports about his first-hand experiences with so many ostensibly launched and working Wi-Fi networks in Manhattan—that never seem to measure up to snuff. I so appreciate the support everyone has given me over the decade in running this site. The blog will stay up forever. I have no plans to pull down archives. But I doubt there will be a new post here unless the market shifts again and there's a need for it. Best to you all, Glenn.

US Airways Sees Low Internet Usage

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Towerstream's Plan for Manhattan-Fi

The wireless backbone provider Towerstream will flip on a dense Manhattan Wi-Fi network: Towerstream built a wireless network in the skyline, paying for prime locations on the top of buildings to point high-speed service at line-of-sight locations where conventional wired or even fiber broadband wasn't available, would take too long, or wasn't competitive or reliable enough. Now it's taking aim at Wi-Fi. But it's not trying to be a metro-scale Wi-Fi operator. That would be foolish. Rather, Towerstream is building out a dense Wi-Fi zone, described by BusinessWeek as seven square miles of Manhattan. The firm is deploying 1,000 routers, and the backhaul is clearly its own building-top network. Being able to leverage its own backhaul is a distinct financial advantage, as it already has a business model that works for the point-to-multi-point service it offers today. This is icing on the cake. Towerstream will sell access to the network to carriers looking to offload mobile 3G and 4G traffic from congested, expensive cellular networks to Wi-Fi. AT&T has built similar zones itself, although I doubt quite as dense or extensive. Towerstream could become a vendor-neutral cost-effective alternative to carriers building these "heat sinks" for high bandwidth usage themselves. Phone users benefit from this offloading as well as carriers. You get a much faster rate of service from a dense, high-speed Wi-Fi network than the comparable 3G or even 4G service, and no carrier in the US bills by the byte for Wi-Fi: if it's included, it's free. Thus, you can use much more data without hitting limits or paying overages. The BusinessWeek article has a serious flaw, however. It misstates the nature and reason for failure of municipally backed Wi-Fi networks. The writer, Peter Burrows, makes a variety of historical errors, including stating, "While most of the failed experiments of yore were based on taxpayer-funded municipal projects, this time there's a clear business need for wireless carriers." In fact, there wound up being built no taxpayer-funded municipal networks. All of the deals involved cities or counties bidding out the right to build a network, with access to public facilities (conduits, towers, building tops, etc.) as part of the carrot. Very little municipal money was spent, while private firms went through tens of millions in never-completed network buildouts. Minneapolis stands as a shining example of the only network that was completed and thrived. (The city purchases services from the network operator, but the network was funded and is run by US Internet.) Burrows also describes the router that Towerstream will use somewhat incompletely. He talks about it being an antenna, for starters, and claiming the units run $800 each. That might be the unit cost, but installation and providing an electrical feed will run the installed price much higher. He notes, though, that Towerstream will pay $50 to $1,000 per month to the owner of the property at which a router is installed. Nice fees if you can get them. There's a great capper to this story: Towerstream's quiet 3-month test of 200 routers in Manhattan: "Last year, Towerstream conducted a three-month test of a 200-device Wi-Fi network in Manhattan. Without any promotion, the network handled 20 million Web sessions by consumers who happened to spot Towerstream when trolling for a Wi-Fi connection." That's the kind of data that might get carriers to sign up.

T-Mobile Adds Free Wi-Fi Calling

After a few years, however, even after making the add-on price as low as $10/mo for a family plan for unlimited calls that started on Wi-Fi (either placed or received on a Wi-Fi network at home or a hotspot), T-Mobile stopped offering the service to new customers. Apparently, it continued to be available as a calling option, with Wi-Fi calls being deducted from general minute pools.

Metro-North Has Secret Wi-Fi Train

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Alaska Airlines Completes Wi-Fi Install

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Free Wi-Fi in New York's DUMBO Neighborhood

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Tempe Wins Suit over Wi-Fi Hardware

Ah, this brings back memories: Cast your mind way way back to 2006, when Tempe, Ariz., was on the cutting edge of municipal wireless systems. The city, which already had its own wireless ring for city backhaul, put out a tender for a firm to provide a combination of public and private services. Neoreach won the bid, and built some of the network out as it shifted through names and subsidiaries, winding up with Gobility as the ultimate owner when the network failed. (Gobility had oceans of issues unrelated to this network.) While the network hasn't been operational even in part since 2007, the gear was left all over town. Two-thirds of the access points were owned by a leasing firm, Commonwealth Capital Corporation (CCC). If the nodes were abandoned, Tempe alleged, then Tempe would be granted ownership. CCC disagreed, because it hoped to sell the system with the nodes still in place. CCC sued to have the nodes returned to it after ridiculous attempts were made by it to sell the network. The case ran from Feb. 2009 to March 2011, when the company dismissed its own lawsuit. Tempe, meanwhile, had sued CCC for the rent due on pole usage for the period when CCC was trying to sell the gear. Tempe prevailed in court for $1.8m and ownership of the hardware. The money assuages the fact that the 4-5-year-old hardware is likely nearly unusable. It should be mostly Strix Systems gear, which appears to still be a going concern, even though its "news spotlight" page refers only to events in 2007. There's likely some backhaul equipment from other makers. This is the last gear hanging that I'm aware of from the olden days of 2006-2008 that isn't in active use, such as the network in Minneapolis.

Taco Bell Refries Wi-FI

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Boingo Adds Gogo Support

The Gogo connection lets you use the same Boingo software, account, and linked credit card to pay for in-flight Internet access at the same retail rate as other passengers. One would hope Boingo could negotiate a better rate by reducing Gogo's marketing burden to bring customers in the future.

False Kid Porno Raid Gets Media Play

A Buffalo, NY, man gets an early morning visit (and alleged contusions) from the ICE: His left his Wi-Fi network open, and extremely poor FBI work (according to this AP report) led to a raid on his home because that's where the IP address led. While it's no crime in the US—it is in some other countries—to leave your network open for anyone to access, this isn't the first time this has happened. I've written up a few previous similar incidents that led to police or federal agents breaking down the doors for criminal acts conducted over the network at the physical address. In most cases, a neighbor is the guilty party. You'd think the FBI would be briefing agents on this issue, so that they don't face multi-million-dollar lawsuits for faulty work that pinpoints the wrong person. The Buffalo man isn't suing, even though his attorney alleges he was thrown down the stairs by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He says they didn't properly identify who they were after breaking down the door and brandishing weapons. (Who knows from ICE?) Even on an open network, it's possible to track identifiers that would allow relatively easy confirmation of which machine was the case, or to stake out the area for a few nights, tracking signals and locations. Then agents could enlist the homeowner with the open network to ensure the Wi-Fi signal remained available and could be used to track at which exact moment that a perpetrator was engaged in an illegal act and then raided at the same time. (We're talking child pornography here, not file swapping.) The AP article says that US-CERT recommends "closing" a Wi-Fi network among other security measures. This option, labeled differently on each maker's router software, disables default beaconing, and thus the network name and availability isn't broadcast. However, whenever the network is use by a party that knows the name and has associated with it (encryption or otherwise), traffic can be snooped and connection information extracted. I don't recommend closing a network as it provides no effective security, and neither does limiting an network to specific MAC addresses (the Wi-Fi adapter's unique hardware number). US-CERT has six recommendations for best home practices on its Securing Wireless Networks page , which include these two. Closing a network is noted as "Protect Your SSID." Really, using a nine-letter/digit WPA password is the simplest way to protect a network in a reliable and secure way no matter what other restrictions are in place. I choose to password protect my network in part because I don't want to be indirectly responsible for anyone's actions on my network (whether in a raid or just because someone commits a nefarious act using my router), and because Comcast caps my use at 250 GB per month.

American Airlines Trials In-Plane Streaming

Finally: I've been asking the question for several years: when will media servers on planes be used to provide in-flight entertainment over Wi-Fi? The answer is now. Aircell told me years ago that they had provisioned the ability to put media servers on planes, and were waiting for pieces to fall into place. Its public trial with American Airlines on a couple of 767-200s will start this summer. It's a logical connection that when you have people on a local, high-speed wireless network that you could deliver content to them for free and for a fee. Given that the majority (sometimes entirety) of people on a flight have some kind of device with a screen, why build in miles of wire and clunky seatback entertainment systems? One of the best, Virgin American's Red, is still slow, hard to navigate, and of poor quality relative to even the worst tablet or netbook. Alaska Airlines never installed such systems for reasons of cost, and rents its digEplayer instead—a portable tablet preloaded and precharged. An airline that moves away from seatback systems and into passenger-provided hardware could also stock tablets for rental, now that there will be ready availability of a variety of sizes and capabilities that handle video playback well, and which cost relatively little compared to custom systems like the digEplayer. This could also eliminate live satellite feeds by providing time-delayed playback on demand. Imagine that when a plane comes to a halt and the doors are opened that a system at each gate starts a high-speed 802.11n transfer of several hours of news and other recent sports, talk shows, and network programs. There's something nice about "live," but there's also the reality of operational cost and antenna drag. Aircell and American haven't announced which programs and movies will be available nor the cost or other particulars.

Ten Years Old Today

Wi-Fi Networking News celebrates its tenth anniversary: Thank you all for sticking with me all of these years! There's less news that relevant as Wi-Fi hit the mainstream, routers are simpler to configure, and the industry matured. I'll keep reporting for as long as there are topics of interest—and you all are still reading.

Eye-Fi's Direct Mode Turns Card into Hotspot for Mobile Transfers

A new mode in Eye-Fi X2 cards let you rely images through a smartphone using a neat trick: I'm a long-time fan of the Eye-Fi digital camera cards that pack a CPU, a Wi-Fi radio, and now up to 8 GB of storage into an SD or SDHC form factor. The Eye-Fi line is regularly updated to add features like transfer of RAW images or video files, or endless storage, in which images already wirelessly transferred to another location can be deleted when storage is needed. (I haven't erased my Eye-Fi camera card since that feature came out. I simply don't need to know what's on the card any more.) Direct Mode is another in that array of improvements, and it requires a little explanation. Eye-Fi may be a bit breezy in describing the feature, which requires you to think a bit differently about how the card works. In regular operation, an Eye-Fi card looks to a camera precisely like any memory card. Whenever the Eye-Fi recognizes a Wi-Fi network it knows about, it connects, and starts to carry out whatever operations were waiting for access, such as uploading files to a computer or sharing service. This works whether the network in question is a home network for which you've stored a password, a public network to which you have access through an Eye-Fi subscription, or a free network tied in via Eye-Fi's relationship with Devicescape's Easy WiFi service. But in Direct Mode, the card will transform from a Wi-Fi client into a Wi-Fi hotspot, but not for just any device to connect. Rather, if you have a smartphone or tablet with the Eye-Fi software running (available for iOS and Android initially), the app connects to the card over Wi-Fi, and images are transferred over. You can use a 3G-equipped device to relay and upload images and movies, or transfer media and then connect via Wi-Fi to a network to upload that data from the app. The mobile app can copy media over the Internet to whatever computer with which you paired the Eye-Fi—the one to which over a local network the card sends files—as well as an online sharing or social-networking site you've picked from Eye-Fi's partners. Direct Mode was announced with more details alongside the release of the Mobile X2 , part of a reshuffling of the Eye-Fi line up, which now comprises Connect X2, Mobile X2, and Pro X2. The Connect has 4 GB and costs $50, while the Mobile has 8 GB and costs $80. That's their only difference. The Pro at $150 and with 8 GB of storage adds RAW file handling, and including a geotagging and a 1-year hotspot subscription. While RAW is restricted to the Pro model, you can add geotagging to Connect or Mobile for $30 (one-time fee), and hotspot access for $30/yr. Direct Mode will be a firmware upgrade for all current and past X2 models in a few weeks, according to Eye-Fi.

AT&T Gives Free Wi-Fi to 20 New York Parks

Wonderful question Dana. When I worked with Wireless Harlem from 2006-2008 we approched DoITT about providing free wireless in Central Harlem and the park closet to 125th Street, Marcus Garvey Park, that serves an extremly diverse community; there was so many telco and Cablevision that supposedly had agreements to bid for the opportunity to provide free wireless to that underserved community and 4 years later what progress has been made. Someone should look into how DoITT awarded AT&T the deal. But then who really looks into city fraud these days..wait..any DoITT employees want to send a "confidential" letter to NYCity Controller John Liu?

Cablevision Bumps Wi-Fi Speed Significantly

The company tells me it has 10,000s of access points in place across its New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut markets, along with 7,000 hotspots in business locations that are Cablevision customers. Over 500,000 Cablevision customers have used the network so far.

Cafe Cuts Power for Pennies

Coffee Culture's cents-less argument: I sympathize with Yvonne Johnston, the owner of Cofee Culture in London, Ontario, Canada. She is tired of table campers who occupy a four-top, blocking other customers, and have the temerity to bring in coffee from another shop and not make a purchase while using the free Wi-Fi.

I sympathize because I've been writing stories about such concerns for at least seven years, if not longer. But her argument is unique. She's telling customers that she can't afford the power, and she tells patrons they can't use the outlets.

She says she knows her hydro (Canadian for power, even when it's nuclear or otherwise) bills keep rising, but I'm afraid she hasn't done the math. A large, modern 90-watt laptop drawing full power consumes 1/10th of a kilowatt-hour (kWh). Toronto Hydro says its time-of-use pricing ranges from 5 to 10 Canadian cents per kWh.

A laptop user whose machine is pulling the full draw for battery charging or active use thus costs her one-half to one Cdn cent per hour of use. Given what I can tell of her shops size, even 12 hours a day with 10 laptops in use should cost her no more than a Looney a day. More likely it's less than 25.

While her electrical argument doesn't hold water (and we shouldn't mix electricity with water), her business one is perfectly sensible. She needs customers who treat her shop like a shop, and not a library. She needs customers more respectful of the notion that taking a table for four and using it for hours on end takes real dollars—many tens of dollars of a day—out of her pocket.

I've heard all manner of approaches to stop table camping. Signs, barista enforcement (employees don't love that much), turning off the Wi-Fi during busy hours or on weekends, and so forth. What it amounts to, unfortunately, is that some subset of people will always do what's convenient to them rather than to the venue in which they plop themselves. They won't be shamed. You have to cut them off.

Starbucks lacks this problem because the vast majority of its customers pass through, and in busy areas it tends to have a greater density of store locations or more seating in stores.

Ms Johnston might revise her sign. Drop the hydro argument. Instead: "We don't allow use of the hydro because we find we cannot keep in business and provide power, too."

Starbucks Pumps Digital Content in Stores

Starbucks Digital Network adds The Economist, ESPN site, Marvel, and Mediabistro: It's an interesting potpourri of additions to the free content you can access on Starbucks in-store Wi-Fi network. Starbucks took its network entirely free without time limits last year, and started up the SDN. I certainly commend them for including The Economist, which has a pricey but reasonable annual fee for digital or print/digital access. (I write regularly for The Economist's Babbage blog, which you can read at no cost anywhere.)

As a comics fan, I may wind up spending too much time reading through the digital library, which the press release says is available without restrictions starting 23 April 2011. 'Nuff said.

Starbucks has quietly amassed a fairly huge array of publications and resources, including the New York Times (via its special eReader edition), WSJ.com, USA Today, and Rodale fitness and health titles.

New Standard Eases Carrier Wi-Fi Access and Roaming

The Wi-Fi Alliance, mobile operators, and hardware makers have agreed on a standard for secure and greatly simplified cell-to-Wi-Fi handoffs and cross-networking roaming: The various parties have worked together to create a certifiable method of allowing handsets to access carrier Wi-Fi networks with much less fuss. The standard will also allow simple roaming across carrier networks without the current necessity of creating an account or entering account details. The whole thing is backed by WPA2 security for the Wi-Fi connection, obviating Firesheep, sidejacking, and other compromises on the wireless connection.

For carriers, this means avoiding re-inventing the wheel for every handset or platform. Carriers can buy and integrate gear from companies that have achieved this certification, and that should take them a long way towards allowing every device a carrier offers with Wi-Fi to be able to offload traffic from mobile broadband to Wi-Fi as efficiently as possible.

The Wi-Fi Alliance cites research group Informa as predicting 4.6 yottabytes (4.6 million terabytes) of data will be consumed on cellular networks in 2012 worldwide. The Wi-Fi Alliance predicts its current count of 750,000 hotspots worldwide (which must be measuring only paid and managed locations) will double by 2014. There are millions of less formal hotspots available which won't be affected by today's announcement.

One of the tidbits in the announcement, not particularly emphasized as a pair, is that certified devices will connect to appropriate networks "in many cases" using cellular credentials like SIM cards, and using WPA2 security. What that says to me in big flashing letters is WPA2 Enterprise with EAP-SIM. That's just how geeky I am about Wi-Fi.

WPA2 Enterprise is a Wi-Fi version of the 802.1X port-based access control that limits access to a network quite effectively until proper credentials are presented. In WPA2 Enterprise, only WPA2 (AES-CCMP) encryption is allowed. EAP is a simple communications language that's used by 802.1X to send messages back and forth. It's not secured by default, and must be, because the messages contain credentials. PEAP, EAP-FAST, and EAP-TLS are all popular corporate methods of securing the handshake for logging in.

EAP-SIM is one of the required methods for any approved Wi-Fi device for several years, and uses the SIM (or, I believe, similar modules on other networks) to provide the identity wrapped in a secure method.

Using EAP-SIM with WPA2 Enterprise would allow a feature phone, smartphone, or other cell-embedded device or modem to create a secure connection across the local Wi-Fi connection without a user being involved in any part of the login procedure.

The financial side of roaming across carrier networks wasn't discussed today. I confirmed with the Wi-Fi Alliance that that's a separate discussion as any kind of mobile and data roaming is today. I fear for that particular area. Cellular carriers outside of the same home country charge unjustifiably high rates for roaming: the carrier allowing a non-native customer to roam marks up its service enormously, and the roaming customer's provider adds on top of that. In the modern world, the cost is fairly tiny on the back-end to allow roaming. It's simply a high-margin profit center, and one that European Union regulators have slashed away at. Regulators in other countries lack the cross-border controls or the regulatory interest to get involved.

My fear therefore is that carriers will act like carriers do, and charge extremely high amounts of money for something that benefits from greater use rather than higher prices. Carriers should be encouraging the roaming use of Wi-Fi, a resource that's much cheaper to operate and has vastly more bandwidth in small areas than a cellular network can more expensively provide.

It will probably be more of the same, no matter how technically elegant.

T-Mobile’s Throttled Limit Didn’t Change from 5 GB

Boingo Wireless Updates Client, Adds Free Networks

Boingo Wireless's new client software identifies and connects to free networks, too: I've been testing for several days Boingo's new Wi-Finder software, a lightweight client for Mac OS X and Windows that identifies and can automatically connect to 325,000 paid locations in Boingo's network or hundreds of thousands free locations. The app is also available with slightly different features for Android and iOS. A subscription is not required, and it's available now at no cost. The software also includes a Wi-Fi search function.

Boingo Wireless now offers three levels of membership with the new client. A free membership allows use of the client to connect to locations that allow access without a fee. The previous pay-as-you-go and subscriber levels remain the same. Pay-as-you-go users need to provide a credit card number, and receive a week of service. The client provides details about cost before a connection is made. For subscribers, the client automatically connects to in-plan hotspots, and provides details about costs associated if you're outside a home network. For subscribers in the Americas to the unlimited plan, fees are only required outside of the Americas.

For free networks, Wi-Finder interprets any splash or terms and services screen and allows a user to accept whatever restrictions are necessary automatically, or manually agree each time. Boingo learns adds new free locations based on subscribers' experiences, thus allowing subsequent visitors to the same connection the chance to autoconnect. I used Wi-Finder on a trip by Amtrak from Seattle to Portland last week, and after "teaching" it by clicking the Agree the first time, the software appeared able to connect on demand thereafter. (Which was useful, as Amtrak's service provider doesn't appear to retain MAC addresses for reauthentication after a device is put to sleep.)

The requirement of a membership confirmed via email for free accounts allows Boingo to meet requirements in many countries for a basic level of accountability and tracking.

From the security standpoint, the client prevents accidental connections to ad hoc networks so that you won't get bit by the "Free Wi-Fi" network phenomenon, in which unconnected Windows XP systems accidentally broadcast that network name.

Boingo is mimicking and expanding on a strategy first developed by Devicescape, which offers Easy WiFi connection software for Mac OS X, Windows, Android, iOS, and Nokia platforms, and is integrated into consumer devices, including the Eye-Fi camera card. Devicescape doesn't have a reseller network, but allows its users to enter credentials at individual networks (like AT&T or BT OpenZone) or aggregators (like Boingo) and automatically log in. Devicescape also manages connections to free networks.

Prices vary with pay as you go for hourly and daily service depending on region, but start at $4.95 for 1 hour or $7.95 for 24 hours in the Americas. Boingo's monthly subscription plans start at $9.95/mo for unlimited service in the Americas and mobile/tablet plans are all $7.95/mo. Prices are higher outside the Americas and may include limits. Many bundled plans (like mobile and laptop) are also available.

Boingo and T-Mobile Expand Roaming Deal

LiveTV Enters Inflight Wi-Fi Market

United Continental plans to put LiveTV's satellite-backed Wi-Fi on 200 planes: United says it's signed a letter of intent with LiveTV to bring Ka-band satellite-backed Wi-Fi service onto over 200 of its 737 and 757 planes starting in 2012. United only offers service now (via Aircell's Gogo) on 14 aircraft.

Why 2012? The satellite that LiveTV will use hasn't been launched yet. From previous experience with the long delays in Inmarsat's 4G BGAN satellite launches, betting on having a bird in orbit is fraught with difficulties.

This all seems a bit odd. Next year is a long way off when competitors like Delta have Wi-Fi today. Relying on an unlaunched satellite is tricky, coupled with a firm that doesn't yet provide Internet service, and with the "over 200" and "starting in 2012" qualifiers. United won't have substantial Internet service on its planes until 2013 or 2014 based on all these factors.

It's a way to issue a press release like something is happening.

The letter of intent part is interesting, too. Alaska had a letter of intent with Row 44, but ultimately opted for Aircell instead. Connexion by Boeing had many letters of intent; few were executed.

JetBlue Sets Mid-2012 for In-Flight Internet

Will Regional Mobile Competition Thrive?

If the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile is improved, does this lead to fiercer regional competition? There are plenty of small regional cellular firms that provide islands of access in specific metropolitan markets, some of them in several. Those, too, have been bought up by the big four in the last few years, but there are still plucky upstarts remaining, like Cricket.

Cricket has incredibly cheap service in its markets; you only pay through the nose when you travel. While many people travel far from home on a regular basis, there's a hefty number that don't need nationwide roaming. There's also Leap, MetroPCS, and US Cellular, to name a few. An AT&T spokesperson wants this conversation to happen, pointing out that 18 of 20 metropolitan markets have five or more cellular options. These aren't MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) who resell network access, but rather competitive network operators who operate their own infrastructure or lease infrastructure from third parties.

The most significant difference between regional and national carriers lies in 3G networks and 4G plans. MetroPCS launched a 4G LTE service early, and the regional firms all have 3G data services and reasonable plans. Cricket's mobile broadband plan is $40, $50, and $60 per month for 2.5 GB, 5 GB, and 7.5 GB of usage, respectively. US Cellular includes 5 GB with its Data Plus offering for smartphones (including Android models). One calling plan is 450 minutes, unlimited texts, GPS navigation, and Data Plus for $70/mo. No national carrier has such a sweet deal.

I wonder if the availability of small and often cheaper competitors will spark more an interest among customers as they find themselves navigating plans from what would be the three remaining national providers. I expect the iPhone, iPad, and specific models of Android and Windows phones drive the national market more than smaller carriers would like.

T-Mobile Plans Prepaid Data Plans

AT&T Acquires T-Mobile for Customers and Spectrum

AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile lets it build a truly national, robust network at the expense of competition: It's a little dirty but barely a secret in modern mobile cell world that AT&T doesn't really have national 2G coverage, much less 3G. AT&T leans on T-Mobile to roam customers in a large number of areas in which AT&T didn't spend money to build out service. This stems from an agreement years ago when AT&T Wireless consolidated on GSM service, and T-Mobile was building out its initial GSM service. In 2004, the companies dissolved a cooperative agreement (when Cingular bought what was then AT&T Wireless), but roaming never disappeared.

This lack of coverage is why AT&T didn't offer feature phone or smartphone service in large parts of the country outside urban areas. While these were mostly rural—such as Montana—you'd also find missing areas in adjacent cities in some markets. Because AT&T, like other carriers, only allows a fraction of one's usage to be on domestic roaming, you had a lot of peeved would-be customers who now own a Verizon iPhone

T-Mobile provided roaming 2G coverage in a lot of those areas, even though AT&T spent billions in 2009 to acquire licenses Verizon Wireless was obliged to sell to clear its deal for Alltel, the number five US carrier at the time. Still, AT&T will benefit from having consistent national service if the T-Mobile merger is approved by regulators. It's not a done deal.

AT&T also gets the depth of T-Mobile's spectrum portfolio in dense markets where AT&T clearly lacks the ability to deliver service to the level needed, such as New York City's boroughs and San Francisco. It won't be trivial to integrate the networks, but many carriers co-locate equipment with tower and building owners. And if they maintain the current deal and roaming is no longer a for-fee arrangement, AT&T can instantly get the benefit.

Both firms aligned across the same technology. Not just GSM, although they're the only two national GSM in the US. But they both chose to push short term on faster HSPA: HSPA 7.2, which challenges EVDO Rev. A by a factor of two or more, and HSPA+ in a 21 Mbps flavor, which can challenge the low-end of Verizon's 4G LTE rollout service—but nationally, not just in the one-third of the country to which Verizon expects to offer LTE by year's end.

However, T-Mobile's path was limited. While it extolled the virtues of HSPA+, which squeezes into 5 MHz channels, it had no real ability to acquire the additional spectrum needed for wider channels to exploit LTE. AT&T and Verizon collectively spent billions to lock down most of the sweet 700 MHz spectrum over which Verizon has already started its LTE deployment, and that AT&T will use starting mid-year for its own efforts.

On the Wi-Fi side, T-Mobile effectively exited the hotspot market in 2008, although most people didn't notice. The firm was able to sign a reciprocal five-year agreement with AT&T for access, which allows T-Mobile customers to use AT&T's network at no additional cost or fuss. That was more important when AT&T's network was largely paid or required hoops to get free service. AT&T's Wi-Fi network now comprises about 21,000 locations, of which about 20,000 are entirely free McDonald's and Starbucks stores. Barnes & Noble is in there somewhere, too. The rest are hotels and a few airports.

The convergence of AT&T and T-Mobile's interests are fairly obvious. Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile don't line up because Verizon already has thorough national coverage with 2G and 3G (provably the best 3G coverage), and uses an incompatible 2G/3G technology in CDMA. While Verizon has a path to GSM in its 4G flavor, it will be using CDMA for 2G and 3G for many years to come.

Sprint Nextel is engaged in pursuing three separate standards. iDEN, used by Nextel, is still in use, despite the firm's best efforts to migrate users to CDMA. Sprint's core 2G/3G network is CDMA. Its 4G plan was to get WiMax deployed early and extensively, which was furthered when it acquired Clearwire with its separate spectrum licenses and operations. That didn't pan out. WiMax needed a much faster deployment, and the money wasn't there to do it. WiMax is an also-ran technology cell mobile; it will have great niche uses and might be the most appropriate technology in some countries. But LTE will rule the Asian, European, and North American markets. Sprint Nextel has also not completed a multi-billion-dollar requirement to migrate public-safety networks to new frequencies in exchange for new spectrum. They are far overdue, and that ugly situation shows no sign of completion to my knowledge.

The real question is whether the Justice Department, FCC, and FTC will allow a merger to take place. There's no benefit to consumers from this merger, reducing competitors from four to three. Sprint Nextel arguably has no good plan for long-term viability, and a deal for Verizon to acquire it might be allowed to avoid bankruptcy, which wouldn't benefit the market (although Sprint could shed massive debt, union contracts, and likely federal obligations which would prove what everyone said when the public-safety spectrum swap was allowed years ago under FCC chair Kevin Martin.)

T-Mobile's plucky upstart nature has gained it over 30m customers, and allowed it to nip at the heels of the big three, likely saving customers billions of dollars a year collectively. The FCC and Congress never intended initially for a few carriers to win. Anti-regulatory and pro-incumbent fervor has led to a situation where there may be only two viable national carriers: AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Verizon Wireless LTE Launches 5 December

Report Indicates Obvious Wi-Fi Conclusions

I do not understand this report: I've read Epitiro's report, which does not disclose any funding source for it, and I'm baffled. The report measures Wi-Fi speeds versus wired LAN speeds for broadband connections. Naturally, Wi-Fi speeds are lower. Wi-Fi has far more overhead than Ethernet, suffers from interference, and drops in speed the further you are from a transmitter. That's been true since 802.11b premiered in 1999.

One of the report's authors is paraphrased by the BBC as concluding, "for those who invest in good quality wi-fi equipment and position it sensibly, the effects of the speed degradation would hardly be noticed." So. Why was this report written again?

I suppose the company, which has broadband providers among its customers, wants to be sure that there's awareness that you can have higher rates of speed from very fast broadband connections by plugging in. However, with 802.11n networks and the much faster flavors of broadband available, it's unlikely most people would notice at all.

The report indicates if you're too far from an access point, you might have trouble with Skype. Well, duh. This is general background Wi-Fi knowledge. Measuring it more precisely doesn't advance the body of information about how Wi-Fi works in a home.

AT&T Wi-Fi Connections Keep High Growth with Free Service

Aircell Discusses Future Speed Bumps

Leading in-flight Internet provider Aircell provides roadmap for future speeds: Aircell currently relies in its commercial aviation deployment on the CDMA standard EVDO Rev. A, nearly identical to the ground cellular tech used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel for their 3G CDMA networks. The flavor Aircell employs works over a narrow set of frequencies that the firm won a license to at auction a few years ago. Aircell can routinely bring a couple of Mbps downstream (from the Internet into the aircraft) per plane, and push hundreds of Kbps back up.

As usage increases, which is the necessity for the capital cost of running such a business, so, too, does the requirement for more bandwidth. Aircell's plan is to migrate to the backwards-compatible EVDO Rev. B, which has substantially greater efficiency for the same spectrum. This will be combined with what Aircell describes as "dual modem" and "directional antenna." Aircell says this will provide four times its current bandwidth. While I don't have guidance from the company, "dual modem" likely refers to using polarization of signals to allow frequency reuse over space. Directional antennas are certainly a refinement on its current air-to-ground antenna approach that reduces the signal loss involved.

In previous conversations with Aircell, the firm discussed its interest in LTE (Long Term Evolution), the fourth-generation standard being employed by Verizon Wireless and AT&T in the US, and many carriers worldwide, to enhance wireless broadband speeds by several factors. EVDO Rev. B is a better short-term choice because of its backwards compatibility. Future EVDO revisions may not be in the cards because of the world's shift from Qualcomm's CDMA roadmap (its in-house 4G standard has been abandoned). But the Rev. B version may have enough efficiency for the available bandwidth that the LTE switch isn't cost effective for the gain.

Aircell also discussed its future satellite backhaul plans. Aircell has spoken in the past about using Ku-band satellites, the sectorized geostationary birds that once powered Connexion, and now provide service to Row 44 and Panasonic—as well as deliver satellite TV to the US among many other uses. Aircell announced plans to use Ka-band satellites, a different frequency range and class, to deliver backhaul to the US in 2013 and worldwide by 2015. Aircell currently cannot offer service on most overwater routes, and would likely also have areas of missing coverage as it expands in the western hemisphere to pass over less-populated regions. In the interim, Aircell will build Ku-band service for airlines flying outside North America.

The reason Aircell discloses this kind of information publicly isn't for the benefits of the industry or passengers (or competitors). It's to make sure the market is absolutely clear on the fact that the only company in the world with a substantial number of planes equipped with in-flight broadband has a clear plan for how it's going to retain its position. Its airline partners have long known about this. This is posturing. And I love it, because it's full of rich, creamy technological goodness.

LTE Is About Capacity, Coverage, and Latency, Not Just Bandwidth

Boeing's Wi-Fi Interference Problem

You'll probably read breathless headlines about this today: Boeing found in testing a particular Honeywell system with its 737NG jets that the LCD screen went blank momentarily when systems were subjected to more Wi-Fi signal output than a plane full of passengers. This kind of testing is typical, and it shouldn't be worrisome. Modern avionic equipment is hardened against EMF radiation from other sources, and one might guess the Honeymoon component in question needs additional design checking.

This won't affect planes in the air, and doesn't repudiate the testing previously done aircraft model by aircraft model for certifying Wi-Fi use.

Specious Reasoning on In-Flight Electronic Interference

Apple to Include Wi-Fi Direct in Next OS Release?

Apple's AirDrop file-transfer feature sounds an awful lot like it relies on Wi-Fi Direct: Wi-Fi Direct hasn't yet found its way into any desktop or mobile operating system as a built-in component. Wi-Fi Direct allows ad hoc-style connections between devices (computers, peripherals, mobiles, and others) using robust WPA2 security. Devices advertise services as part of the SSID broadcast, such as noting that they can be printed to.

AirDrop is a no-fuss way to swap files between two Macs running the Mac OS X Lion release, still in a preview/beta test phase. It notes specifically that it works wirelessly. I suspect Wi-Fi Direct underlies this. Apple already has Bonjour networking built in to all its computers, and relies on this feature being in most major printers. Bonjour announces services when you're connected to a network in a manner conceptually similar to Wi-Fi Direct.

AirDrop doesn’t require setup or special settings. Just click the AirDrop icon in the Finder sidebar, and your Mac automatically discovers other people nearby who are using AirDrop. You’ll even see contact photos for those who are already in your Address Book.

We'll find out eventually. Having Wi-Fi Direct built into an OS would mean opening up that OS to setup-free connections for printing, file transfer, tethering, and other purposes in a way that's much simpler than today's network connection and service configuration pains.

Update: I had a briefing with Apple. It is not Wi-Fi Direct, but it is awfully similar.

Wi-Fi Direct Update

Capitol Corridor Train Finally Gets Its Wi-Fi

A California train line has onboard Wi-Fi funded: I have been writing about the Capitol Corridor line's efforts to get Internet access installed for five years. I wrote about the first RFP in 2006. The authority that runs the line ran tests with some providers, including EarthLink during that ISP's wireless networking days, but was never able to get the right combination of funds, vendor, and technology. But the dream never died.

Why? Because it's a route used heavily by commuters. It connects Sacramento (and parts north) to the Bay Area. The authority estimates 60 percent of riders carry laptops and and half have mobile broadband cards or dongles. (I love that the reporter calls them "air cards," which is both quaint and misguided. Sierra Wireless's modems are called AirCards—brand name—and somehow a decade ago that became the default and weird term for 3G modems.)

Service will be installed during 2011. One rider questions the nearly $4m being spent on the service, wondering if it could have been put to better purposes, such as better wheelchair access. That's a good question, but the point of Internet access is to bring more passengers on board. Train service is subsidized, of course, just like roads and airports, but adding passengers increases costs slightly relative to the additional revenue. If Internet service adds tens of thousands of additional trips per year, this can offset its cost.

The story misses a secondary point: the $4m is nearly the full capital expense for both passenger access and back-end operational uses, which incur separate costs—or simply don't exist, reducing efficiency or safety—today.

Amtrak Cascades Run Gains Free Wi-Fi

NY TImes Wrong about WPA Cracking

This New York Times article has a major inaccuracy related to WPA/WPA2 key cracking: The article is a welcome rundown on the security issues involved in using home and hotspot Wi-Fi networks, along with changes happening at major Web sites in moving to always-encrypted sessions.

The reporter quotes a sysadmin and security videocaster pointing out that essentially all WEP-protected networks are crackable. This is true. WEP is straightforward to crack; it's just a matter of time, and often not very much time.

But the reporter misses the boat when she writes:

A WEP-encrypted password (for wired equivalent privacy) is not as strong as a WPA (or Wi-Fi protected access) password, so it’s best to use a WPA password instead. Even so, hackers can use the same free software programs to get on WPA password-protected networks as well. It just takes much longer (think weeks) and more computer expertise.

That's extremely misleading and mostly inaccurate. The distinction she fails to make, which will confuse all readers, is that there are weak and strong WPA/WPA2 passwords. I've been tracking this subject for years, as regular readers, know, and that distinction is key, if you'll pardon the pun.

If you pick a WPA key of 10 characters are more, preferably not including a word found in dictionaries of dominant Roman-character languages, you are nearly certainly protected against cracking. Pick a short phrase of 8 or fewer characters, no matter how random, and you can be cracked by a determined party, possibly in as few as minutes for a short or dictionary-word key.

WPA/WPA2 can only currently be cracked via brute force. The article should have just said more accurately, "it's best to use a WPA password instead, making sure to create one that's 10 or more characters long." Instead, it's spreading a mistaken impression.

Later in the article, sense reasserts when the writer says to change your SSID (the network name is part of how the key is derived for a WPA/WPA2 Personal), and "choos[e] a lengthy and complicated alphanumeric password." It doesn't have to be very long or very complicated. "Abra23dabra" would be a perfectly fantastic WPA/WPA2 password.

WPA Cracked? Unlikely, Despite Headlines

Boingo Adds New Unlimited Regional Plans

Boingo carves out unlimited usage areas for service outside North America: Boingo once had a laptop Wi-Fi plan with unlimited global use, but that proved too expensive due to the cost of roaming agreements. Its revamped Global offering was set at $59/mo for up to 2,000 minutes. Today, the firm added a Europe Plus offering that provides unlimited usage at 90,000 hotspots in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for €28/mo. Another 170,000 hotspots in its network around the world are charged at €0.10 to €0.15/minute. (The plan is also available for 22.95 and 0.09 to 0.13 per minute for payment in pounds.)

Boingo's North and South American laptop plan is $10/mo for unlimited use, and a UK and Ireland combo is 15/mo for unlimited access. Boingo separately offers mobile services plans for a flat $8/mo for any hotspot in its network.

The company may run into trouble when mobile devices start allowing the simultaneous use of Wi-Fi as a client and a server, which would allow a mobile device to share a Wi-Fi hotspot connection to a laptop over Wi-Fi just as easily as mobile hotspot features in phones today allow a 3G/4G connection to be shared over Wi-Fi.

Virgin Mobile Adds Unlimited 30-Day Usage Plan

Norwegian Air Shuttle Adds In-Flight Internet

Norwegian airline opts for Row 44: Norwegian Air Shuttle is a tiny carrier, and has one plan equipped. Nonetheless, it gets European bragging rights for being the first to offer full in-flight Internet service. The airline chose Row 44, which is a satellite-backed offering, using modern Ku-band equipments.

In trials, the service will be free. The airline will put Row 44's service on 11 planes by mid-year, 21 by the end of 2011, and 41 by the end of 2012. Pricing isn't yet set, nor are routes confirmed.

Alaska Airlines Has Internet Service in Half Its Fleet

Verizon iPhone has GSM/CDMA Chip Inside

The folks at iFixIt found a dual-standard GSM/CDMA chip in the Verizon model of the iPhone 4: In Step 17, the teardown experts note that the Qualcomm MDM6600, which can support GSM standards up to HSPA+ (14.4 Mbps flavor) as well as Qualcomm's traditional CDMA voice and data standards up to EVDO Rev. A (deployed in the US by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel) as well as EVDO Rev. B. There are an enormous number of shared characteristics between the GSM and CDMA standards, and Qualcomm represents a significant minority percentage of all the patents in a pool that's used for UMTS/HSPA.

Apple is spending more to put this dual-mode chip in, of course, than it would for a single-standard chip. But it makes a bloody lot of sense. By having a single chip that can be switched to GSM or CDMA, Apple can switch to a single line of manufacture to supply phones worldwide. They'll save the cost in a higher price for the chip by not having two separate products to make and track. I wouldn't be surprised if we see iPhone 4 models sold for the GSM market that are identical with new antenna locations to the so-called CDMA model.

Does this mean that Apple will offer a world phone for CDMA and GSM markets? Note that the Verizon version of the phone has no SIM slot nor built-in SIM card, so it can't be used on a GSM network in its current form even with a firmware update. Will an iPhone 5 be switchable? It's hard to tell. I imagine Verizon Wireless would prefer the CDMA lock in, but Verizon Wireless is minority-owned by Vodafone, a worldwide GSM provider, which would almost certainly like to sell a single model worldwide that could be easily switched to work in the US or in any of its non-US markets. There's a Droid that does that already.

Next iPhone May Be GSM/CDMA Hybrid

Aircell Raises $35m More; IPO in Future?

The major operator of in-flight Internet gets more cash on hand: I've raised concerns about the uptake rate needed by Aircell's Gogo Inflight Internet service to produce the revenue required to return a profit. But it's also been clear that not enough detail has ever been exposed to know Aircell's cost sharing with airlines, nor its ongoing costs.

Whatever those may be—and I don't suggest the firm was in a cash crunch—Aircell has $35m more in its pocket to keep operations running for whatever period of time that will cover. Certainly, Aircell needs capital to build out in Canada and (eventually) Mexico and the Caribbean.

Aircell's CEO spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle, which said he "declined to offer financial details, but said that the company has made major financial improvements and is on the 'path to profitability.'"

I just used Gogo on my trip mid-day down to the Macworld 2011 conference 10 days ago, and it was invaluable as always. I finished projects, kept up on email, and arrived without having anything on my plate to deal with.

Updated: A Bloomberg report on Monday suggests an initial public offering is planned, and says Aircell has raised $600m to date, a staggering sum, but not surprising for building a nationwide cellular network (albeit pointing up), ground station operations, and equipping planes at as much as $100,000 a pop.

Facebook for Free on a Flight in February

Motorola's Android Tablet Locks Wi-Fi until 3G Service Purchased

Wi-Fi requires cell data sign-up: Engadget has a Best Buy ad for the Motorola Xoom that states you can't use the built-in Wi-Fi without having at least a one-month mobile broadband subscription. Well, ain't that a kick in the pants. This is in addition to the $800 price for the feature-heavy Xoom, which comes with front and rear cameras, 1080p playback, 3G service (with a 4G LTE upgrade promise), and Adobe Flash support.

But, really: You have to activate Verizon Wireless service, even if you then cancel it, to unlock Wi-Fi? Big misstep. It's along the lines of that common scene in a car dealership when you're about to sign the papers, and the sales regretfully informs you that his manager won't sell the car without the underbody rust inhibitor treatment.

(That's from before the auto sales collapse, for you youngsters.)

Skyhook Sues Google over Patents and Pressure

Logan Use Sky High after Switching to Free

The Boston Globe reports fourfold increase in Boston-Logan Wi-Fi use: The airport dropped fees for Wi-Fi last year, and saw a 412 percent increase in 2010 use over that in 2009: 1.4m sessions instead of 350,000.

Remember Massport's stupid multi-year battle, a large waste of public funds, against allowing airline lounges to offer free Wi-Fi? Seems even sillier four years after the FCC smacked down the airport authority over its dubious claims.

SFO Gets Free Wi-Fi Early

Amtrak Cascades Run Gains Free Wi-Fi

The Vancouver, BC to Eugene, Oregon runs gains free Wi-Fi: How do you get people to choose the train over a plane or car? You make it comfortable, fast, reliable, and useful. Amtrak has long advertised the notion of getting work done, and on some of the Cascades run (from Vancouver through Seattle and Portland down to Eugene) you can get a business-class seat with a power outlet. Now, a Wi-Fi plan long in the testing is available and at no cost.

Amtrak provides Wi-Fi service on the Northeast Acela run, and many regional train operations also offer Internet access. Over 800,000 passengers rode part or all of the Cascades line during 2010, the high-water mark for ridership. I have a trip planned to Portland in February, and might opt for train over car because of the Wi-Fi.

Service is free for now, and may remain free; it depends on usage and other factors. Internet service is typically installed to provide operational service for the train line, as well as passenger access, but it's unclear on whether this is just an amenity.

Washington, DC, Puts Free Wi-Fi on Mall

Facebook for Free on a Flight in February

Ford sponsors free Facebook on Gogo Inflict Internet in February: All of the airlines offering Aircell's Gogo service are part of the promotion, which puts Facebook outside the paywall. Google has sponsored free service at various times at airports and on planes to promote its offerings.

Aircell should love this deal, because it will expose potentially millions of casual travelers to a service that they might otherwise see as expensive, impossible, or uninteresting. Because in-flight Internet had a big flame-out with Connexion by Boeing (which worked just fine but didn't make its numbers), many people may carry the notion that mile-high Wi-Fi doesn't work and isn't worth messing with.

By providing Facebook access, the "number one website visited by travelers using Gogo," Aircell says, Gogo trains people to want the service in the future. I expect this pumps numbers way up in subsequent months, especially for mobile access.

JetBlue Sets Mid-2012 for In-Flight Internet

AT&T Announce Portable Hotspot Plan

AT&T starts offering portable hotspot feature 13 February: Joining other carriers, AT&T will let you turn your smartphone into a cellular router, sharing a mobile broadband connection with "multiple" devices. While this is likely to be added to the iPhone because Verizon Wireless is launching its version of that device with portable hotspot, the only phone mentioned at launch is the HTC Inspire 4G.

AT&T is folding this into the tethering plan it already offers, but with a twist. AT&T requires its higher-volume data plan, which includes 2 GB for $25/mo ($10/additional GB), to use tethering or its hotspot offering. Tethering and mobile hotspot adds $20 per month, but now brings another 2 GB of usage, for a total pooled 4 GB per month.

Before this added bandwidth, there was a general irritation that AT&T was charging $20/mo for no additional benefit except flipping a switch. Since service is already metered (for anyone signing up or changing a smartphone plan since June 2010), this was egregious profit taking.

The revision at least creates an association between usage and the added service, and puts the cost more in line with MiFi service plans from Virgin Mobile and Verizon Wireless.

Virgin Mobile Throttles Unlimited Service

Wi-Fi Direct Update

Stephen Lawson at IDG News Service rounds up the status of Wi-Fi Direct: I've thought Wi-Fi Direct is quite promising since its introduction, and Lawson explains where all the support for the standard is to be found, along with why it's hardly available. Wi-Fi Direct is a simple way to create a kind of ad hoc, WPA2-secured network between two devices. It will likely be used for file transfer between mobiles and for printing when you don't have access to the network to which the printer is attached.

Lawson doesn't mention it, but I keep coming back to operating system support. No mobile OS offers Wi-Fi Direct yet, which keeps the most promising market from using the service. Mac OS X and Windows 7 also don't include support. To use Wi-Fi Direct, you need a device that advertises itself in the right fashion and can create the secure connection, and a client that can connect to it.

Wi-Fi Direct hasn't failed, to be sure, but we're still waiting for real signs of life.

The closest example I use routinely now is AirPrint, built into the iOS 4.2 release for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Apple's solution is extremely limited in this release, allowing straightforward printing from any of its mobile devices to certain models of HP printer. The original AirPrint announcement said it would work with any Bonjour-capable device (that's the standard Apple developed and uses for service announcements on a network). One suspects we'll find that in the upcoming 4.3 release.

In the meantime, I use Printopia, a $10 utility that makes any Bonjour printer appears as if it's a qualified HP device. It also lets you "print" to PDF to the computer on which it's running, and print a PDF directly to Dropbox.

With AirPrint, I select the action button in any program that supports the standard set of forwarding commands, like send via email, and choose the Print option. I'm given the choice to select among printers (real and virtual), and then the item is sent without fuss.

That's what Wi-Fi Direct should work like, with little additional fuss, and I'll be happy when that notion is realized in hardware and software.

Wi-Fi Direct Certification Starts

O2 Switches to Free Hotspots in UK, Plans Massive Expansion

Mobile operator O2 will no longer restrict access to its UK hotspots, and plans to make a vast network: O2 has included free access at about 450 locations with some of its mobile subscription plans. Now, it's opening up its network, using advertising to subsidize it. The Register reports that free use will require giving up your phone number, too, in order to receive a text message with an activation code.

O2 said it would build out nearly double the number of locations operated by current partners, The Cloud and BT OpenZone, which is 7,500. I find it hard to imagine that it can easily find 13,000 venues (the number the Register reported) in which to offer service.

Meanwhile, rumors abound that The Cloud will be bought by the satellite television operator BSkyB to extend its reach. BSkyB uses terrestrial DSL alongside its satellite offerings. Adding Wi-Fi allows it to compete with BT, which operates the OpenZone hotspot network.

AT&T Wi-Fi Connections Keep High Growth with Free Service

Virgin Mobile Throttles Unlimited Service

It was too good to last: Virgin Mobile's remarkable $40 MiFi plan with unlimited service will no longer be so remarkable. That $40 bought you unlimited data on Sprint's core (non-roaming) 3G network. Service lasted 30 days, an neither a contract nor cancellation fees were involved. The revised terms, for new plans activated starting 15 February, will throttle your usage after you pass 5 GB within the 30-day period. (The MiFi is a portable cellular router that shares a mobile broadband connection with up to five devices via Wi-Fi. The plan requires separate purchase of a MiFi from Virgin Mobile for $150.)

Just as T-Mobile implemented with their 5 GB, no overage charge plan several months ago, Virgin Mobile will restrict throughput to a low level (probably 50 to 100 Kbps, based on other carriers' actions worldwide) for the remainder of the period. You can immediately purchase another $40 plan, however, to reset the clock.

I assume Virgin Mobile came to the same conclusion that other carriers did. It's likely that up to the 97th percentile of users consumes under 5 GB, that two percent eat 5 to 20 GB per month, and 1 percent consumes tens or even hundreds of GBs. While Virgin Mobile could cancel such accounts, it's not a reliable way of restricting usage and causes hard feelings. Virgin Mobile also certainly did not want to put in overage charges because it's a fully prepaid plan.

Because Virgin Mobile was the lowest cost, I'm also assuming heavy-data users, being mauled with overage fees from Verizon Wireless or Sprint/Clearwire (on the 3G side of the 3G/4G hybrids they offer now), migrated to Virgin Mobile.

Virgin could change the plan's name to "5 GB or 30 days, whichever comes first," which would be like AT&T's iPad plans. But it's perhaps a little kinder than that, offering the throttled rate so you're not suddenly cut off or having to pay the meter right away.

T-Mobile Plans Prepaid Data Plans

WPA Cracked? Unlikely, Despite Headlines

A German security researcher snagged some great headlines today, but I suspect the impact is modest: Reuters ran a story today about Thomas Roth's claim that he can hack into WPA-protected networks by crunching passwords in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) on-demand computing service. I have a query into Roth, but haven't heard back yet. The report says he'll release software after a Black Hat conference presentation later this month. I expect he's developed an approach that uses Amazon's preconfigured instances to produce vastly faster dictionary attacks than are commonly available. (Amazon allows users to tap into the graphics process or GPU, which can offer order of magnitude improvements in certain kinds of mathematical operations, including some forms of password cracking.)

The concept isn't new. In December 2009, "Moxie Marlinspike" launched WPA Cracker, a fee-based dictionary and brute-force cracking service; see my write up at the time. Elcomsoft offers commercial desktop distributed password cracking for preshared WPA keys—along with a host of other types of passwords—with GPU support, too. I interviewed Elcomsoft's chief a few months ago for the Economist, and he provided me piles of information about how difficult it is even with his software to crack well-designed password systems.

WPA/WPA2's weakness is in passphrase choice, something that's been known for years. Researcher Robert Moskowitz gave me permission way back in 2003 to publish a paper on this issue. It remains the most popular article in every year since. Because of how the passphrase conversion routine takes the text you enter for a WPA/WPA2 Preshared Key (PSK) "password" and turns it into a long hexadecimal key, it's susceptible to cracking—but only when the starting passphrase is very short or comprised of only words found in dictionaries (along with common substitutions, like zero for the letter o). The passphrase is combined with the network name (SSID), which has allowed various groups to create large, precomputed cracks of common words (so-called rainbow tables) using default SSID names. (Moskowitz had wanted every access point to ship with a uniquely created name to increase entropy. Apple does this.)

Based on Reuters description, we may have lost a character with Roth's method. That is, a formerly secure eight-character randomly created passphrase, a mix of letters, numbers, and punctuation, may now need to be nine characters for the next several years to assure unbreakability. I'm looking forward to more news.

That WPA/Amazon Crack Story

Boingo Wireless Files for Public Offering

Boingo Wireless gives us a peek under the kimono: It's rare to get hard, audited, under-threat-of-government-rules numbers in the Wi-Fi hotspot industry. Now we have some. Boingo fired up its operations in 2001, and has taken over nine years to reach profitability under accounting (GAAP) rules. The firm has nearly $35m on hand, which means that on a non-GAAP basis, they've been putting money into the bank for years.

The firm took in $46m in revenue in the first nine months of 2009 ($66m for the year), and $59m in the first nine months of 2010. In 2010 up to 30 September, Boingo made $5.3m after tax and before accounting munges. Boingo's closest public competitor, iPass, saw $171m in revenue but a $13m loss in 2009; iPass's revenue has declined slightly in each of the last several quarters, grossing $117m in the first nine months of 2010, losing $3m on that. iPass offers a suite of roaming and remote-office services, as well as hotspot aggregation.

But what I'm most interested in, of course, is subscribers and sessions. Page 31 has the detail. The company has 191,000 monthly subscribers, nearly 10 percent of which cancel a subscription each month. Boingo charges $10/mo in the US for laptops and $8/mo for mobile. The international subscription is much higher, but there's no breakout between US and international accounts. A 24-hour pass is $8.

The filing reports 5.8 million sessions from Jan. to Sept. 2010 (all subsequent numbers I rely on use that period of time). The revenue from subscribers was $17m, making the average monthly subscription fee $7.50 ($17m/191K subscribers). That seems off and must be due to 30-day trial subscriptions and other promotions. It also indicates a low percentage of international subscribers, which would skew the number much higher.

Revenue from single-use sessions is $13m, which would indicate well over 150,000 yearly single purchases, most of which I'd suspect are in airports. Boingo operates paid Wi-Fi and most of the largest airports that charge for service; the company also gets fees for managing Wi-Fi at some airports.

The wholesale number is fairly staggering at $25m. This comes from outfits that resell Boingo's service under their own name (so-called "white label" service), and mobile carriers like Verizon. Boingo, without mentioning Verizon, attributes $3m in this period from "a mid-2009" acquired wholesale customers. Verizon is providing a reasonable, but not substantial amount of wholesale revenue.

The figures show for-fee Wi-Fi to be much more robust than I'd suspected. Many other firms have come and gone trying to make money selling Wi-Fi as aggregators, airport operators, and other incarnations. Wayport was bought by AT&T, and the majority of AT&T's Wi-Fi is now at venues that charge nothing for the privilege.

The challenge for Boingo is to continue this expansion. Mobile service must be a large component of its growth based on average subscription price, and the clear necessity for mobile users to have easy mobile access. AT&T certainly gave Boingo a gift by switching from unlimited 3G plans for new subscribers as of last June to metered service plans. At $25/mo for 2GB with a smartphone or slate, and $10/GB for overage, an $8/mo hotspot plans sounds positively cheap as a cost-conservation measure.

Boingo will trade under WIFI on NASDAQ, a move that strikes me as slightly odd since the firm doesn't own the trademark to that. Perhaps stock tickers are exempt from that issue.

Disclaimer: None of the analysis in this post is intended as advice on whether or when to purchase or sell Boingo stock. I am not a stock analyst nor trader. I own no shares in Boingo and have no intent to buy shares.

Boingo and T-Mobile Expand Roaming Deal

T-Mobile Moves to 42 Mbps HSPA+

T-Mobile said today it would upgrade its HSPA+ network to 42 Mbps in 2011: Everyone keeps upping the ante. T-Mobile wants to persuade customers that it has the fastest network out there, and doubling its raw speed for HSPA+ from 21 Mbps to 42 Mbps is a good way to do it. T-Mobile invested in bringing high-rate backhaul to its 3G network (which it wants to call 4G; whatever), and this is how it pays off.

AT&T yesterday said it has HSPA+ everywhere, but its backhaul won't be fully in place at those sites even this year: only 2/3rds of HSPA+ sites will have capable bandwidth in 12 months' time, according to yesterday's AT&T press release.

T-Mobile has never given guidance on the percentage of its HSPA/HSPA+ network that has the necessary backhaul, although it's consistency talked about its intent to build that infrastructure as it developed its green-field 3G network a couple of years ago. (Update: Analyst Charles Golvin of Forrester Research wrote in to say that T-Mobile provided such information in a briefing yesterday: 70 percent of T-Mobile's sites have Ethernet. Ethernet doesn't imply a specific speed, but my understanding is that it's all being installed as gigabit Ethernet. Since a single site can have multiple HSPA+ channels in use, more than 100 Mbps is necessary.)

T-Mobile's upgrades are a defensive move against LTE in 700 MHz. T-Mobile has a relatively small spectrum portfolio in the US, and LTE networks in this country will launch with much wider channels, allowing greater capacity and higher speeds. The 700 MHz frequency range also allows better in-building and in-home penetration than T-Mobile's mobile data frequency allocations.

Put simply: T-Mobile is installing the most advanced current-generation, off-the-shelf equipment that it can to compete with next-generation networks that are barely off the ground (Verizon) or not at all, and will take until 2013 to have a complete footprint. T-Mobile has that edge. But the AT&T and Verizon LTE networks will have substantive advantages over HSPA+ because T-Mobile will need to install equipment at a much higher density than either competitor to achieve the same coverage and capacity.

T-Mobile also still only reaches 200m people with its current mobile data network. AT&T reaches about 50m more, and Verizon has over 95 percent national coverage with its older 3G technology.

AT&T Issues 4G Plans, 3G Status Update

That WPA/Amazon Crack Story

It's remarkable how a little information can span the globe so quickly: The Reuters story on 7 January about a new WPA crack overstated the case, as I remarked in "WPA Cracked? Unlikely, Despite Headlines." I tried to get some clarification from Thomas Roth, the researcher cited in the story, who will present details at an upcoming Black Hat conference. He responded to my first request confirming that it was just an enhanced brute-force attack, but not to my second, asking how many characters in a random WPA/WPA2 passphrase could his method crack in the time he cited. (Subsequent attempts to get a response haven't been answered.)

Roth did give more detail to New Scientists, however: his 20-minute Amazon.com cloud computing hosted crack broke a six-character password, which he hasn't revealed. (A short passphrase is unlikely to be random.) Roth says that he has sped up the operation since by a factor of 2.5x.

This is impressive, but shouldn't cause anyone to quiver in their boots about a "WPA crack." It's been known for some time that short WPA/WPA2 passphrases, which are converted through an algorithm into a long TKIP or AES-CCMP key, are weak, but the algorithm isn't vulnerable to a way to speed up brute forcing. Each additional character you add to a WPA passphrase dramatically increases computational difficulty.

At present, I wouldn't risk a passphrase shorter than nine characters randomly derived with a mixed of numbers, punctuation, and upper and lower case. That might hold against cracking (unless quantum computation becomes practical) for decades to come.

Can WPA Protect against Firesheep on Same Network?

Next iPhone May Be GSM/CDMA Hybrid

Apple reported to put GSM/CDMA chip from Qualcomm into next iPhone: It's hard to take rumors too seriously months ahead of the typical June introduction of the next iPhone model, but this is a credible notion. Qualcomm has offered a GSM/CDMA hybrid chip to allow worldwide (and intra-country) roaming for some time. There are few world phones with both GSM and CDMA. Apple could have a big hit by using a combined offering, even as it reduces its costs of maintaining two separate production lines.

Apple's first CDMA will be out 3 February to existing Verizon Wireless customers who signed up to pre-order. Customers new to the carrier can get phones starting 10 February. While worldwide CDMA subscriptions are below a billion, and a relatively modest percentage have 3G access, it's not a market to ignore. Other phone platforms, like Android with Verizon, will fill those niches.

Juxtaposition: Qualcomm, Atheros, Verizon, Apple

Specious Reasoning on In-Flight Electronic Interference

Personal electronics might cause interference with airplane avionics, but there's seemingly no proof: For unknown reasons, the New York Times trots out a story that could have been written at nearly any point in the last five years about the potential for personal electronics to interact with avionics (airplane electronics and control systems) to deleterious effect.

I've followed this story for years, and there's no new information in this piece. Over a decade, the only association of passenger gear and cockpit trouble is from "at least 10" reports by pilots in the United States, all of which are anecdotal, and, ostensibly, none of which have proven repeatable. If they were repeatable, we'd have different restrictions and rules, instead of ever-fewer ones.

The article notes the study done with the permission of the FAA and airlines that showed there was always at least one cell phone on during a flight, if not more than one. Today, one would guess that dozens of electronics are actively seeking and producing signals in a standby mode.

Occam's Razor would suggest that avionic disruption would be commonplace with the sheer quantity and variety of devices across every plane model currently in operation. This has not occurred. The article doesn't discuss that disconnect between concern, repeatability, and reality.

Lufthansa Brings Back In-Flight Internet

Qualcomm Buys Atheros

Giant mobile chip maker buys wireless networking behemoth: It's a mark of how long I've been covering the industry that I remember when Atheros was a plucky startup, defending its alternative encoding proposal for 802.11g by citing distances the standard could reach in the warehouse the company owned (and used for testing). Ah, it's come a long way to this deal in which Qualcomm has had a $3.1b tender accepted.

Qualcomm makes most of its money from mobile chips and associated patent licenses. The firm's big trouble aren't its finances, but the fact that it doesn't have a terrific path towards future growth of its core technologies. Qualcomm developed, licenses, and sells chips and systems for CDMA, the technology Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel (on Sprint's network) employ in the US. CDMA is in use by hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide. But GSM is in use by billions.

Worse, Sprint and Verizon both chose paths other than Qualcomm's 4G vision: Sprint acquired a majority interest in Clearwire, which uses WiMax, while Verizon opted for LTE, the dominant GSM-evolved 4G flavor that will be deployed worldwide. Clearwire may eventually swap to LTE as well.

Qualcomm recently sold the spectrum it acquired for a kind of mobile television broadcast system called FLO that never took off. I was always dubious about broadcasting when the future was clearly narrowcasting. Qualcomm bet against the ability to delivery unique streaming video on demand in large quantities. The jury is still out on that over 3G networks; 4G has to be designed to make this practical. (Qualcomm received over three times its purchase price for the FLO spectrum from AT&T—$1.9b—which will use it for LTE, but still took a loss when FLO development and deployment is factored in.)

Qualcomm's purchase of Atheros makes perfect sense, as it gives the company an instant strong position in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other related technologies, as well as relationships with most of the major networking vendors and computing manufacturers, including Apple. (Apple uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips from a few vendors, but I believe Atheros and Broadcom remain dominant.)

However, it's worth recalling that Qualcomm also bought Airgo (in 2006), the pioneer in multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) antenna system technology when Airgo was at the height of its success in the industry. Airgo disappeared without a trace as a unique technology line, although its clear the patents were sucked into the corporate maw, and some MIMO techniques found themselves built into other products.

Juxtaposition: Qualcomm, Atheros, Verizon, Apple

Juxtaposition: Qualcomm, Atheros, Verizon, Apple

Could Qualcomm be angling for more Apple business with Atheros purchase? A not-so-idle thought popped into my head. Apple has sold over 100m iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, iPods touch), and sells 10ms of Macs each year. It sells unknown millions of base stations. Apple has routinely purchased wireless networking chips from Atheros and Broadcom, although it appears that iOS devices are all Broadcom-based.

With a move into CDMA technology, if Apple releases a Verizon Wireless iPhone, Qualcomm may have preemptively offered a one-stop shop for chips. It's also possible Apple's design specs already require Qualcomm and Atheros chips, and Qualcomm stepped in to take advantage of the likely tens of millions of ViPhones that will be sold this year.

Qualcomm isn't the only firm that could provide CDMA chips for a Verizon iPhone, but with its CDMA and GPS portfolio coupled with Atheros Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS product lines, it could be well positioned.

(I have never doubted Apple continuously updates an engineering model of a CDMA iPhone to show Verizon and possibly Sprint. Whether the company has a production-ready model in place, and is gearing up for a launch is unknown. I suspect that the only reason Verizon doesn't have an iPhone is that Verizon won't agree to Apple's requirements. There's no technology limit here at all.)

Verizon’s iPhone Full of Tradeoffs, Good and Bad

AT&T Issues 4G Plans, 3G Status Update

AT&T offers specifics on its HSPA+ upgrade and LTE deployment: At CES today, AT&T released its timeline for rolling out 4G LTE mobile service, which launches in mid-2011. Verizon Wireless gets bragging rights with several markets lit up in late 2010. However, with few devices, and an odd pricing model for such a fast service, Verizon has very little lead over AT&T.

AT&T and Verizon will likely both complete national urban rollouts by 2013, the stated date by both firms now for that goal. Their various FCC licenses require either geographic or population based completion at four and eight year targets, which will drive LTE service into less-populated areas and small-to-medium-sized towns.

AT&T's current HSPA/HSPA+ network is also measurably faster than Verizon's, which cannot increase its 3G speed at all. AT&T, like T-Mobile, is taking advantage of baby steps with HSPA (to 7.2 Mbps) and HSPA+ (to 21 Mpbs) to have an interim advantage, as well as a better hybrid 3G/4G roaming experience. Verizon is stuck at EVDO Rev. A, about 3.1 Mbps downstream. (All those rates are raw, and Verizon's coverage area remains superior to AT&T's; HSPA+ doesn't offer an advantage if you can't actually pick up a signal.)

Of course, it wouldn't be a telecom announcement without having to pick apart some news. AT&T says that it has HSPA+ available to "virtually 100 percent of its mobile broadband network" but then notes it requires "Ethernet or fiber backhaul." It predicts 2/3rds of its HSPA+ footprint will have such "expanded backhaul" by the end of 2011.

Which means that at the beginning of 2011, substantially less than 2/3rds of AT&T HSPA+ network cannot deliver true HSPA+ speeds, being constrained by the backhaul. If it were more than half, you can believe AT&T would have stated that in the press release.

Verizon Wireless LTE Launches 5 December

Verizon's iPhone Full of Tradeoffs, Good and Bad

So Verizon has an iPhone: Empires (of technology) have risen and fallen since Apple introduced its iPhone in 2007, and the question constantly on everyone's lips: When will Verizon get a model that works on its network? The answer: 3 February for existing customers and 10 February for new ones.

The CDMA-based iPhone has piles of tradeoffs, but these aren't necessarily worse than using a GSM iPhone on AT&T or other networks around the world.

The Downside

The ViPhone doesn't have LTE. No phone has LTE. We're not going to see LTE-based phones with decent battery life and size for several months, and the early ones will be monsters of compromise. There is no agreed-upon voice standard for LTE networks yet, which means Verizon will make compromises in whatever voice option it picks (initially) before later upgrading to something more universally supported. I don't expect an LTE iPhone until 2012, because coverage and other tradeoffs won't make it desirable until then.

You can't talk and use 3G data at the same time. Verizon opted for EVDO (Evolution Data Only), which tells a story with its name. Voice is handled separately and can't be used simultaneously. Wi-Fi and voice can be used at the same time.

It's Verizon Wireless, for cripe's sake. Verizon has a history of offering less-than-forthcoming information about its service plans, and is in the middle of settling a dispute in which it denied for years charging people $1.99 and other fees for inadvertent usage of mobile data without a plan (when pressing a conveniently located button that's on every featurephone). People don't like any carrier, but Verizon didn't make itself any friends with this.

We don't know pricing plans yet. Verizon's 3G service plans aren't bad, but they aren't enormously better than AT&T's unless you use a ton of data each month.

Worldwide roaming isn't an option. Despite being 45-percent owned by GSM carrier Vodafone, the ViPhone won't work on most networks worldwide because it's CDMA only. It's odd that with Vodafone selling many millions of iPhones into other markets, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, and Apple wouldn't have teamed up to offer both. There are chips, from Qualcomm notably, that allow GSM/CDMA switchover. You won't be able to use your ViPhone in Canada or Mexico, notably, and you can't swap out a SIM in GSM markets for another carrier, something that carriers allow or make easy in some markets, or that you can jailbreak to allow. (Update: Canada and Mexico do have CDMA operators, and Verizon supports roaming. Coverage in Mexico is quite limited for voice and data; in Canada, there's broader availability, but 3G data isn't everywhere.)

AT&T has a path to faster service, with HSPA+ (21 Mbps) overlaying HSPA 7.2 (7.2 Mpbs) as the year goes on. Verizon is stuck at 3.1 Mbps EVDO Rev. A until it has a sufficient LTE footprint to jump its customers to that. (AT&T and Verizon will both require new hardware for faster networks, though. An iPhone 4 will not, to my knowledge, be firmware upgradable to HSPA+.)

The Upside

If you live in an area with poor AT&T coverage and great Verizon coverage, which likely amounts to tens of millions of people's homes and workplaces around the US, then you are suddenly able to own an iPhone of your very own. AT&T's coverage can be sketchy in many parts of the country, notably exurbs and large parts of New England.

Verizon and Apple are offering a mobile hotspot feature (pricing not yet known), which lets the iPhone be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot, just like a MiFi, or Android 2.2 phone, or several other smartphones. This lets up to five devices connect. GSM networks and the GSM iPhone could support this feature, too. Apple has been keeping this in its back pocket, perhaps to save for Verizon. (I don't believe AT&T, unique among the carriers, has any phone with a mobile hotspot feature enabled, nor does it offer a MiFi or similar router to the general public.)

Heavy data users will have an unlimited plan restored to them if Verizon offers its $30/mo unlimited data plan to new iPhone users. AT&T removed that plan for new subscribers in June, and has a 2 GB/mo plan for $25, with $10/GB overage fees (charged by the whole GB for any fraction).

The Upshot

Verizon will sell many millions of its CDMA iPhone to existing customers (upgrading from featurephones and sidegrading from other smartphones) and new customers (who have never owned a smartphone or are fleeing AT&T, cancellation fees be damned).

Verizon has the best and most solid 3G network in the US, proven time and again by independent third parties. AT&T has continually improved its network coverage and speed, and has great plans for 2011.

Can we have some competition now, please?

LTE Is About Capacity, Coverage, and Latency, Not Just Bandwidth

NY Times Biffs It on Wi-Fi Conference Overload

The New York Times doesn't get to the heart of conference Wi-Fi problems: I can't tell you how frustrated I am about this rather facile article on problems with thousands of people all trying to connect at once to a Wi-Fi network (or networks) at dense public venues, such as keynote addresses at technology conferences. As someone who has spent a decade writing in depth about Wi-Fi, often for mainstream audiences, the Times piece disappoints me as it spreads myths and doesn't cast new light. It also ignores a couple key factors important in 2010. (Let's not even get into the fact that the picture with this article makes Steve Jobs look as if he's about to have an emetic event onstage.)

We have to go nine paragraphs into the article before we get to the "nut" paragraph, the one that states the reason it's being written at all. First, we wade through anecdotes of specific conferences, and quotes from tech smarty guy Jason Calacanis, who does not advertise himself as a Wi-Fi guru:

The problem is that Wi-Fi was never intended for large halls and thousands of people, many of them bristling with an arsenal of laptops, iPhones and iPads.

That's not quite true, although it's not completely incorrect. Even the first Wi-Fi flavor, 802.11b, was designed to be aggregated into "infrastructure" networks in which many access points with the same network name (Extended Service Set) could be roamed among by client devices. The 802.11g spec clearly recognized that wireless networks could be used by dense crowds. And 802.11n, one could argue, specifically deals with heavy usage by allowing multiple antennas to "beamform" or steer signals directly to clients, and "hear" more clearly by using multiple antennas to sift through competing signals.

(More technically, 802.11g split a network signal into many subchannels, any of which can be garbled and the rest get through; 802.11n multiplies the number of unique data streams that can be sent at once, as well as taking advantage of 802.11g's subchannel approach.)

Two grafs later, the reporter shifts to backhaul and wiring, noting that infrastructure in hotels may contribute. Then, in the next paragraph, finally gets to the heart of the problem:

Companies that install Wi-Fi networks sometimes have only a day to set up their equipment in a hall and then test it. They must plan not only for the number of attendees, but also the size and shape of the room, along with how Wi-Fi signals reflect from walls and are absorbed by the audience.

This is true. Not all companies that install conference Wi-Fi know how to build such networks well, but many do; they are hampered by constraints of time, equipment, and venue issues. However, many firms repeatedly install Wi-Fi networks in the same locations, so you would think that they would be able to learn from this, either in setting expectations or improving networks. (Please also read MuniWireless's post from a year ago on this topic, which includes an interview with Tim Požar about conference Wi-Fi. Tim was the troubleshooter brought in by TechCrunch in the 2008 conference Wi-Fail cited in the NY Times article.)

What's not mentioned until the penultimate paragraph (and then in a backhanded way) is the rise of 5 GHz networking. It's a gaping hole in this article, even though it's on the edge of being too techie to mention—except that the writer goes into a parenthetical about 2.4 GHz. Most laptops and some mobile devices can use 802.11n over 5 GHz. In the United States, there are 23 clear 802.11n 5 GHz 20 MHz-wide channels, 8 to 12 of which are commonly available in base station hardware. (The other 11 can be used, but require signal sensing that monitors for relatively unlikely military use in the vicinity. This sensing recognizes a lot of false positives, which makes the channels less usable.)

If you're one of tens of millions of people with a dual-band 802.11n router, you're using 5 GHz in your home or office. You might know (or have found out) that 5 GHz signals, because they are higher up the spectrum, don't travel as far. They attenuate more rapidly, which means that the signals becomes lost in noise faster than 2.4 GHz. In a convention hall, however, with line of sight to most access points, distance is less of an issue. 802.11n also contends well with signal bouncing, allowing it to work better than earlier Wi-Fi flavors using a unique path through space.

Thus, any conference Wi-Fi service firm that's not sticking in a sizable proportion of 5 GHz capable base stations, preset to nonoverlapping channels across the keynote auditorium or conference hall, is starting out at a deficit. Client devices that can use 5 GHz will preferentially switch to it if there's a strong enough signal. (Base stations currently don't have a spec that lets them tell clients to switch channels.)

There will be plenty of congestion in 2.4 GHz's three mostly nonoverlapping channels, because most smartphones can only use that band. (I'm not sure if any smartphone has 5 GHz built in yet, only tablets and slates, like the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Apple iPad.) Older laptops will also use that band. And the MiFi, which is also mentioned in passing despite being another key potential problem in convention keynote Wi-Fi mishigas.

The MiFi—for those who haven't heard of it—is a cellular router, the most popular on the market, that connects both to a cellular network for Internet access and operates as a Wi-Fi router. This allows a MiFi owner to connect from any device with Wi-Fi. It's a neat bypass. Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon also offer certain phone models that can act as portable hotspots in the same fashion.

All of these cell routers and mobile hotspot phones use 2.4 GHz, and create unique networks. The more unique Wi-Fi networks in the same area, the more trouble, because Wi-Fi uses different strategies to avoid conflicting with networks on the same and adjacent channels. This reduces overall throughput.

But it shouldn't be that big an effect, even with the hundreds in use at tech events, like the ones this year that Apple and Google had trouble with. The MiFi uses relatively low power, the backhaul is relatively low-bandwidth compared to the 802.11g standard (about 1 to 2 Mbps of cell backhaul compared to 20 to 25 Mbps of real Wi-Fi throughput), and the 802.11 specs actually do a fairly smart job of sorting things out.

One final problem: DHCP. This sounds even more obscure, and I was reminded of this re-reading the MuniWireless article from last year. As Tim Požar noted, some wireless service providers don't configure the server that hands out temporary IP addresses to wireless devices correctly. I've seen this many, any times. Some outfits rely on the Wi-Fi access points, a terrible idea; most of those can hand out a maximum of 253 addresses, if that many. An access point might be able to handle several hundred connections, but simply can't give out addresses.

In a correctly configured network, access points pass through DHCP assignment from a central server, but those servers can be misconfigured to limit to 253 addresses or fewer, too. A simple change could allow over 16,000 addresses from one server. (Technically, you'd modify the subnet mask to increase the pool from a /24 to a /16 on a private address range, as one strategy.)

What's most likely the problem is tech companies and conferences cheaping out. I don't mean spending very little, but less than what would solve the problem. I'm sure the firms that unwire events come in with bids that are as cheap as they can make them to be the low bidder, or have the conference organizer or sponsoring company ask, "How can we knock this price down?"

With the level of Wi-Fi use we're seeing, it's not impossible to build a good network for thousands of people in a small space. It may just cost more than anyone wants to spend. The line item in the budget for Wi-Fi needs to be connected up with the expected return on good publicity.

Numbers Guy Digs into Wi-Fi Kills Tree Reports