Google Gives Free Holiday Wi-Fi at Airports; Niagara!

Google is underwriting free Wi-Fi and a contest at 47 airports: The deal runs from 10 November to 15 January, and combines fee-free Internet access with matching donations made via Google Checkout (up to $250,000) and a photo contest. Several of the airports listed already offer free Wi-Fi (like Las Vegas and Sacramento), but the other deals apply.

Meanwhile, Niagara Falls's new airport has free Wi-Fi; it opens 11 December. However, there's a hitch: there will be almost no regular flights. Go figure.

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Bing Offers Sponsored Wi-Fi after Searching

Bing is underwriting free Wi-Fi at some hotspots if you perform a single Bing search: Microsoft's new search engine has gotten positive reviews--I quite like it, though I haven't become a regular user yet--and the company has teamed up with JiWire to push brand awareness through sponsored hotspot access. The program started in September, and incorporates thousands of hotspots--though JiWire is providing details about which one. JiWire says that 30 to 40 percent of visitors take Microsoft up on the offer.

[My usual disclosure: I own a vanishingly small number of shares in JiWire, a privately held company, from my time as an employee and consultant.]

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Is Verizon Being Unfair to AT&T in 3G Map Comparisons?

AT&T is suing Verizon over a snarky campaign that compares Verizon's 3G coverage to AT&T's: Is this unfair? It's maybe impolite, but it doesn't appear unfair or incorrect. Is it actionable? AT&T says the ads will make customers believe AT&T has no coverage whatsoever, not just no 3G data coverage, in the white areas in the AT&T map displayed. And the map is from a few months ago, while AT&T has built out a bit more blue in that time. (AT&T isn't complaining about the accuracy of the map's depiction of 3G.)

Fundamentally, though, we're seeing a battle between the last advantages of the Qualcomm EVDO standard compared to the GSM evolved HSPA family of standards. When Verizon installed 3G, the company did it in a big way, upgrading a large majority of its 2G 1xRTT nodes to EVDO Rev. 0, and later pushing those to Rev. A for the current footprint and speed. Sprint did likewise.

Verizon had to, because AT&T and T-Mobile had intermediate 2.5G and 3G steps that would have left Sprint and Verizon at a competitive disadvantage. AT&T and T-Mobile pushed out EDGE, which is several times faster than 1xRTT (which runs at fast dial-up modem speeds), and did so relatively inexpensively. AT&T Wireless and Cingular, at the time separate entities, had distinct plans to test and deploy UMTS, the 384 Kbps low-end 3G standard on the road to HSPA. (GSM 3G HSPA standards are broken down into downlink and uplink and there are flavors and steps there, but it's nice to just say HSPA to encompass the realm.)

For AT&T, EDGE was good enough outside metro areas, because it competed effectively with 1xRTT before Verizon and Sprint had a full EVDO footprint (even with Rev. 0). The company then essentially stalled because of first the Cingular/AT&T Wireless merger, and then the 60-40 ownership split between what was then SBC and BellSouth. The two companies didn't see eye-to-eye on spending on 3G. AT&T's 3G plans really only took off after the BellSouth merger, which also gave it 100-percent control of the cellular division. Any rational wireless firm would have spent billions during the good times to get a competitive 3G footprint with the CDMA competitors.

If Verizon and Sprint had limited 3G upgrades just to major metropolitan areas, they would have been way behind the ball--and AT&T would be running ads now laughing at the companies' sub-EDGE speeds in the country, and slower than HSPA rates in the city. (T-Mobile dropped out of this speed war for a few years while it acquired 3G spectrum and deployed its HSPA offering. The firm intends to have the fastest 3G network while 4G networks are being built with a test of 21 Mbps HSPA already underway.)

Verizon has to be aggressive right now, because it's switching to LTE for its 4G network, a GSM-evolved standard. It will be years before it has a national footprint for 4G using LTE (over 700 MHz spectrum). During that time AT&T will have bumped its 3G network nationally to 7.2 Mbps HSPA, and potentially even going to 14.4 Mbps HSPA (that requires more hardware upgrades, so hard to tell), and also pushing out LTE over 700 MHz.

In a couple years, AT&T will have the bragging rights on speeds, will start having a better 3G and 4G map to compare with Verizon, and Verizon will seem like the sucker. At least briefly.

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MSNBC Examines Free In-Flight Wi-Fi

The Well-Mannered Traveler, Harriet Baskas, gives an overview and some insight into in-flight Internet: Baskas provides a comprehensive listing of what airlines have free deals, and which flights (if particular ones are involved) are covered. This includes AirTran's Baltimore-to-Boston route, which the airline told Baskas was a competitive advantage. I suspect that Acela is a competitor on that route, among other airlines. (Acela will gain Wi-Fi in about six months.)

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Atheros Offers Family of Three-Stream Chips

Atheros announced its 2010 family of three-stream, high-data-rate and rate-over-range chips: The AR9300 XSPAN line up has a three-stream, 3x3 format for up to 450 Mbps raw (300 Mbps TCP/IP) 802.11n traffic. But speed is critical only at close distances: the chips have been designed to keep data rates high as devices move further and further from an access point.

Pen Li, senior product marketing manager at Atheros, explained that the company's goal with what it's calling SST3 technology is to "maintain signal reliability across the entire link." To that end, it's employing four features.

At short ranges, maximum likelihood demodulation (MLD) employs a massive amount of calculation to figure out the best of a matrix of potential encoding systems to use. Li said this could effectively increase antenna gain by 6 dB over the current technique. "Up to this point, the industry has been using this sub-optimal scheme called zero forcing." That was because the necessary CPU cycles weren't available in earlier generations. Atheros says this extends higher rates (up to 200 Mbps of TCP/IP throughput) 100 percent further than current tech.

At medium distances, where maximum speeds can't be maintained, higher rates can still be ensured with transmit beamforming, a well-known technique of varying signal strength to steer a beam to a receiver based on its understood location. However, Li says Atheros takes this a step further by beamforming on each subcarrier of an OFDM signal. (OFDM breaks a channel into many subchannels each of which sends data much more slowly than a monolithic channel would. This allows better signal reconstruction, and allows subchannels to be interferred with without degrading other subchannels. It's fundamental to 802.11g, 802.11n, and, in a slightly modified form, WiMax.)

This transmit beamforming boost keeps rates higher--at around the 100 Mbps TCP/IP data rate--50 percent further.

For the longest distances, Atheros will use maximal ratio combining (MRC), which uses some magic to pull signals from different paths, relying on a certain amount of redundancy, to push range by 20 percent further than current systems. MRC in a more limited form was used in Atheros's SST technology. With a 3x3 antenna matrix, it can be used to greater advantage.

Across all three methods, Atheros will use low density parity check (LDPC), a binary forward error correction with very low overhead to reduce error rates. Forward error correction encodes additional data to allow a receiver to fix errant bits without asking for a packet retransmission.

Atheros is pusing this chip line-up as its flagship brand, with suggestions for applications for home and mobile computing (better range), media (set-top boxes, gaming, multiple HD streams), and business (better performance in dense environments or less expensive deployments with fewer APs).

The chips are slated to be sampled in the first quarter of 2010. Atheros didn't offer guidance about when its OEM partners would have products available based on the designs, but it's likely by the end of 2010 at least consumer devices would appear.

While three-stream devices are already on the market, there's only one piece of client hardware for laptops, meaning that only range and reliability can be improved with a three-stream device, not throughput.

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Gogo Offers $25 30-Day Airline Wi-Fi Pass for Three Airlines

Gogo keeps pushing deals for in-flight Internet during the holidays: A tweet from the Aircell service says that you can purchase a 30-day pass for access for $24.95 for AirTran, American, or Delta airlines on your next flight through 31 December 2009. This is usually priced at $50.

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Starbucks Makes It Easier, Different to Get Free Wi-Fi

Starbucks is revising its stored-value affinity card programs, making it easier by some measures to get free Wi-Fi: I've noted before that Starbucks doesn't offer free Wi-Fi in the sense that an indie coffeeshop with an open access point does, nor like airports that provide Wi-Fi at no cost. Rather, Starbucks ties two consecutive hours per day of no-cost Wi-Fi to purchases made using a stored-value card. The firm announced changes last week to its affinity program that require some teasing out of the details; the Web site appears to have been updated today.

Under the current system, Starbucks has two tracks: a free card that stores value for purchases, and a membership card, that can optionally hold a dollar charge. The plain stored-value card exists mostly for convenience and usage tracking by Starbucks, but includes a few extras, one of which is the daily dose of Wi-Fi. To earn that benefit for 30 days, you either make a purchase with the card or add value (min. $5).

Starbucks's soon-to-be-defunct membership program costs $25/yr, includes a 10-percent discount, some free and discounted beverages, and has the precisely identical terms for accessing Wi-Fi.

Starbucks is merging the two programs into one that will have no fees and no discount, but which offers a free drink on your birthday as well as a free drink for every 15 transactions after your first 30 transactions. You can use multiple cards, but they must be registered to an account you set up, and then one or another used for each transaction to accrue and claim benefits.

In this new system, called My Starbucks Rewards, you get the birthday drink just by registering. After five transactions, you're boosted into the Green Level--green being Starbucks' corporate color--and you qualify for the daily Wi-Fi allotment with no further purchases.

In fact, the FAQ says that you remain active at the green level for two years following your last transaction. So those that want the two-hours-a-day Wi-Fi without purchasing drinks need only prime the pump lightly. (The FAQ is insanely complicated. One would think the marketing department might have drilled this down into several bullet points, and then given the gory details later.)

Green Level patrons also get free brewed coffee refills, extras like syrup and soy milk, and advance marketing materials about new stuff. They also get gentle pats on the head. Good customer, good customer.

After 30 transactions, you get bumped into the Gold Level, at which plateau Howard Schultz personally thinks about you in his office for five seconds on your birthday. Also, you get a personalized gold card that says, "Hey, I spend a lot of money in this place." And that free drink every 15 transactions. And coupons. And a pony*. (*Pony not included.)

This program requires that you register a card, which is optional for stored-value usage, but obviously key to Starbucks understanding everything you do and when. Starbucks is foregoing the revenue from its hundreds of thousands of current paying gold card users in exchange for a vast increase in data collection.

Existing registered regular stored-value card users and Gold Card members are transitioned automatically into Green Level and Gold Level programs, respectively. Register before 26 December if you haven't already to preserve the benefits. This also offers a five-purchase bypass. Buy a Starbucks Card with $5 on it, register it, and you need make no additional purchases to get to the Green Level.

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