Wireless Blog

Motorola, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held AirDefense, a leading wireless LAN security provider.

Motorola, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held AirDefense, a leading wireless LAN security provider.

Motorola, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held AirDefense, a leading wireless LAN security provider.

Motorola, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held AirDefense, a leading wireless LAN security provider.

BCE Inc. is set to make deep cuts to its management ranks as it prepares to be taken private by a group led by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.

With open source firmware an ordinary Wi-Fi router can get a new brain. You can create a wireless distribution system (WDS) or a mesh network, run a VPN or VoIP server, manage a hotspot RADIUS server, manage bandwidth use per protocol, control traffic shaping and other features.

DD-WRT (wiki and Wikipedia) is among the most popular, but a variety of free, open source solutions are available. Cheap, $40 to $60 access points, like the Linksys WRT 54GL and Netgear’s WGR614L, are made to be “flashed” with these solutions.

As Tim Higgins of Small Net Builder explains, third-party firmware, like DD-WRT, gives you the ability to add features usually available only in enterprise devices, like VLANs, virtual/multiple SSIDs, VPN server, bridging and Quality-of-Service (QoS) capabilities.

WiFi Planet put together a full compendium of their DD-WRT tutorials. It’s one the most comprehensive.

• DD-WRT Tutorial 1: Static DHCP
• DD-WRT Tutorial 2: Extend Range with WDS
• DD-WRT Tutorial 3: Building a Wireless Bridge
• DD-WRT Tutorial 4: Defining Priorities with QoS
• DD-WRT Tutorial 5: Wireless Repeater
• Create Your Own Hotspot (Using DD-WRT)
• The Open Source WRT54G Story
• Beyond the WRT54G: DD-WRT for Many Flavors of Hardware
• Implementing Inexpensive Multiple SSID Networks: Part II
• Implementing Inexpensive Multiple SSID Networks: Part II
• Linux Wi-Fi: Supercharge a Buffalo
• Linux Wi-Fi: Supercharge a Buffalo (Part 2)
• How to Choose the Best WRT54G Router for You
• Bricked! Or, How to Resurrect a Dead Linksys WRT54G
• Public Wi-Fi: Share, but Wisely
• Protect Yourself from Online Fraud
• Wi-Fi Planet Guide to WPA
• Measure Network Performance: iperf and ntop
• Hotrod Your Linksys WAP with Linux

Small Net Builder has a well-written selection of Wireless How Tos, including How To Build an Open Source Wi-Fi HotSpot with DD-WRT, Tutorials, FAQs, Security How Tos, Wireless Basics and other features.

The latest NETGEAR open source wireless router is the WGR614L ($60). It’s the open wireless router platform of choice for free WiFi organizations like Portland’s Personal Telco Project. It features a 240 MHz MIPS32 CPU core with 16 KB of instruction cache, 16 KB of data cache, 1 KB of pre-fetch cache, and incorporates 4 MB of flash memory and 16 MB of RAM. The WGR614L can support many popular third party firmware applications, including DD-WRT, Tomato, and Sveasoft.

B.A.T.M.A.N. (better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking), is a new routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks developed by Open-Mesh. ROBIN (ROuting Batman Inside) is an Open Source mesh network project, that runs on Meraki, Open-Mesh or La Fonera hardware using the BATMAN routing algorithm. ROBIN spreads a wired internet connection such as a DSL/WiMAX throughout an apartment complex, neighborhood, village or school, and works on a variety of commonly available, low-cost hardware.

Dailywireless has more on ‘Grass Roots Wireless’

D-Link announced today a “green” line of Wi-Fi routers to their Xtreme NT line of wireless routers. According to D-Link, they reduce power consumption by 40 percent without sacrificing performance.

The new routers automatically detect link status and network cable length, then adjusts power accordingly.

They also feature Wi-Fi scheduling that allows customers to easily program when the Wi-Fi radio signals are turned on and off to further save energy consumption. It provides a user-selectable radio shutdown option that’s adjustable by day and start/end times.

D-Link’s new routers include the Xtreme N Gigabit Router (DIR-655), Xtreme N Duo Media Router (DIR-855), and the D-Link Xtreme N Gaming Router (DGL-4500).

They are certified to be safe from hazardous materials and are made of recycled materials that could be disposed of properly. Apart from the Green upgrade, these routers also support IPv6, for a much larger address space in allocating addresses and routing traffic.

The D-Link DIR-655, DIR-855 and DGL-4500 are all available now or at the company’s online store, with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $149.99 for the DIR-655, $359.99 for the DIR-855 and $239.99 for the DGL-4500.

' Meru Networks has introduced RF Barrier , the first IEEE 802.11-based technology for proactively defending wireless networks against eavesdroppers and "parking lot" attackers, who attempt to record and ...

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.
– Howard Beale

People are increasingly using their phones to surf the Web, says the NY Times. Of the 95 million mobile Internet subscribers in the United States, 40 million actively use their phones to go online, twice the number of two years ago, according to Nielsen Mobile.

The mobile web has reached a “critical mass”, reports the BBC.

According to Nielsen Mobile, the US is the most tech savvy nation with nearly 40 million Americans - 16% of all US mobile users - using their handset to browse on the move. The UK and then Italy come a close second and third in the 16 countries surveyed by the analyst firm.

The firm found that 82% of iPhone owners access the mobile internet, “making them five times as likely to do so as the average mobile consumer”. Nielsen Online says the iPhone still trails HTC, RIM and Palm in the smartphone market (likely to change over the next few months), but leads in user satisfaction.

After portal sites and e-mail services, newspaper content — weather, news, politics, city guides, sports and entertainment — is most popular among mobile users.

Verve Wireless believes it can save the dying local newspaper by making it mobile, says The NY Times.

The problem, says Verve, is that local papers do not have the resources, expertise or relationships with cellphone carriers to build mobile sites themselves. Verve does it for them, in exchange for a cut of ad revenue. Verve has developed a number of proprietary applications, including a mobile-ready suite of Vertical Applications, Sponsored Alerts, Classified Advantage and Verve’s Adcel, a local advertising management system.

“Mobile is actually a better way to reach people than print or even Web. It’s versatile, immediate, travels and is just as compelling,” said Mr. Howe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and former owner of 50 local papers.

Publishers can upload local ads to their cellphone sites using Verve’s software or have Verve place national ad campaigns on their sites. Verve can deliver a particular ad to, say, people age 21 to 30 who live downtown and have searched for articles about the bar scene. Philadelphia Magazine, for example, sent readers of its Verve-developed Web site a text message offering $4 grapefruit cocktails and half-price appetizers at a local bar.

Mobile companies hope that this kind of ad customization could persuade advertisers to pay more for ads on cellphones than they do for Web ads. So far, few do. Advertisers will spend only $1.6 billion on mobile ads this year, while spending $26 billion online, predicts eMarketer, a marketing research firm.

Be your own news.

Boulder’s Daily Camera (mobile edition) has a simple, effective layout.

Start with three things:

• TenbyTen. A great user interface. Put pictures on the small screen, mouse over for more info, and click to play.
• SoundSlides. The audio determines the length of flash slide show (examples). Don’t read the small print. Listen and watch. Be Ken Burns.
• Location-based advertising. Open source projects like Funambol deliver the goods.

How hard could it be? Stream events live and network correspondents. Bingo.

There are lots of innovative News Maps such as Newsmapr, Reuter’s News Maps and 10×10 (above). Mobilize it on a Nokia N810, iPhone, Android, LiMO or Symbian platform. Throw in lots of social networking, customization and user interactivity.

Related DailyWireless Newspaper articles include; Location Apps: Here. Now., Open Warfare at OsCon, Qik Goes Live — Everywhere, Interactive Journalism Awards, Newspaper Circulation Down, CNN’s News Bureau in a Bus, Washington Post Tech Videos, Nokia N810, Gannett Mobilizes News, Web 2.0 News Maps, E-Books Now, Open Ads, Wireless News Stand, Calacanis on Newspapers, Advertising: The Right Online/Print Mix, One Laptop: 2.0, River of News, BBCiPlayer on iPhone, Camphones For Journalists, Freeview Goes HD, and BBC: Free WiFi on The Cloud.

Apple is trying to put the MobileMe fiasco behind it -- and the company is sharing a more-than-usual amount of information in the process.

MobileMe is a service that delivers push e-mail, push contacts and push calendars into the "cloud" of native applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, Macs and PCs. The service also provides a suite of ad-free Web applications that aim to deliver a desktop-like experience through any modern browser.

Well, that is, when it works.

MobileMe was supposed to help Apple compete with the BlackBerry. But MobileMe saw major outages and even lost customer e-mails, leaving many consumers angry. Apple posted its latest update on Sunday, indicating that restoring full e-mail access to the remaining one percent of MobileMe users who need it is the company's first priority.

"We turned on Web access to their current e-mail [Saturday] and the feedback has been cautiously positive. Since then, we've restored full e-mail history -- minus the approximately 10 percent of mail received between July 16 and July 18, which may have been lost -- and the ability to access e-mail from a Mac, PC and iPhone, to over 40 percent of these users, and expect the remainder to be restored in the next few days," the company wrote on its MobileMe Status blog.

The Root of the Problem

What caused the outage? One issue Apple encountered was a mail outage affecting one percent of MobileMe members. On July 18, a serious problem with one of Apple's mail servers blocked those members' access to their MobileMe mail accounts.

"The day we launched MobileMe, we had a lot more traffic to our servers than we anticipated, with the result that access to the Web versions of the MobileMe applications -- Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, iDisk -- was temporarily unavailable," the company said in its...