Joe Brancatelli, veteran business and travel reporter, keeps looking for traces of potential revenue from in-flight Internet access: He's not finding it. He and I chatted today, and based on yesterday's numbers from Aircell, which put them on track to hit 100,000 sessions a week on over 600 equipped aircraft, Joe figures that's a 5 percent uptake: roughly 2 million people fly weekly in his estimation. And, as I noted yesterday, we don't know how many of the nearly 100,000 sessions are paid. Virgin America is all free, sponsored by Google, and each airline has a first-session-free deal in place, too. In the Portfolio.com column I link above, Brancatelli runs through the problem with charging: passengers just don't seem to want to pay. Alaska Airlines is committed to rolling out Wi-Fi with Row 44--just like Southwest--but found that it will have to give the service away. Even $1, in testing, had a big dropoff. (Row 44 has the small problem of needing to raise cash to afford installing its service in the two committed airline; Aircell, Brancatelli reports, is largely funding installation out of its own so-far deep pocket.) Joe told me that he uses Aircell's service whenever he flies on a plane with it, paying whatever rate he has to, and misses it when he's on a flight without it. So he's not skeptical about it working, nor whether it's worthwhile. Rather, he hasn't seen any positive indications yet that business or recreational travelers are leaping at the offering. Meanwhile, Air Canada starts trials on US legs of its flights. Aircell will work with a Canadian partner to build out service over Canada when all the regulatory issues are finalized. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Aircell says that its Gogo service has had 1,000,000 users and now averages 100,000 users per week: I queried the company's PR firm, and had confirmed that this is sessions, not users. Aircell hasn't disclosed total unique users, any revenue figures, paid v. free sessions, airline-by-airline breakdowns, average revenue per paid session, or any numbers that the privately held firm could conceivably use to convince me or anyone in the flight industry that the service should be measured a success. Don't get me wrong. I have no problem with the idea of a ramp-up time for routine travelers to get accustomed to the availability of in-flight Internet. Delta is well along its goal of putting Wi-Fi in its entire mainline fleet, but a traveler can't take any flight (although they can take certain routes) with assurance that Wi-Fi will be available. As with Boeing's Connexion, I've always thought that you can't just make Wi-Fi in planes available; you have to make it predictably and routinely available, after which the real usage patterns emerge. Virgin America and Airtran have full fleet coverage, but the airlines are tiny and small, respectively, and have some loyalty but don't own their passengers in a way that the biggest airlines do. I'd love for in-flight Internet to be a rousing success, because I so like the option to use it, and think it's a great tool for time-shifting work back into travel (instead of on either end), and for entertainment. But I'm not seeing any compelling statistics yet. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Eric Geier, a long-time tech writer and reporter, has launched NoWiresSecurity: Geier, who has been in this business of writing about Wi-Fi and wireless for longer than me, offers AuthenticateMyWiFi, a way to use 802.1X authentication for secure WPA/WPA2 Enterprise logins on a Wi-Fi network without hosting and managing the server yourself. The service is billed on a monthly rate based on the number of user accounts. WPA/WPA2 Enterprise allow a Wi-Fi user to connect using credentials, typically a user name and password, which are passed securely over a network without first providing access to the network's resources. When a back-end authentication server confirms the user's identity, unique key material is creating that protects a user's Wi-Fi link separately from all other users on the network. The ability to issue and revoke accounts, set policies (like: "can only log in between 8 am and 5 pm on weekdays"), and avoid giving out a shared key for all users are all why WPA/WPA2 Enterprise (or the underlying 802.1X standard in various modes) is the gold standard for secured network access. Interestingly, nearly all consumer-grade access points have the necessary support to enable this enterprise mode. If you're running a small network, you can get access to WPA/WPA2 Enterprise by using Windows Server (various versions, prices varies) or Mac OS X Server 10.5 or later ($499 for unlimited users; Intel system required; bundled with some Macs). You could also install Periodik Labs's Elektron server ($950 with a year of maintenance). All those solutions require a little to a lot of IT experience. Many small-to-medium-sized businesses have few IT needs beyond file sharing, but want to have a secure network. Geier's AuthenticateMyWiFi could fit this need. I've written about similar services in the past, such as the similarly named SecureMyWiFi from WiTopia, which the company has stopped offering. (WiTopia decided to focus on hosted VPN services, another category of outsourcing I recommend for small and medium businesses.) AuthenticateMyWiFi provides the range of 802.1X options, such as access policies I described earlier (time of day, accounts that have expiration dates), security controls like IP-restricted logins, and access to usage logs. The service has you set up accounts via a Web site, and then configure one or more access points--as many as you like with the same user fees--to authenticate via its servers. The rates start at $13/mo or $130/yr for up to 10 users, and scale up to $36/mo or $360/yr for 61 to 100 users. The only trouble with hosted authentication is that authentication for users joining the network will fail if your Internet connection is down, the link between you and the hosted service is interrupted, or, of course, the hosted service isn't responsive. (Existing logged in sessions remain active.) Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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The town of Swindon, England, will provide free Wi-Fi to residents: The project is estimated at just £1m to install 1,400 access points around the city, which seems rather inexpensive--could that possibly include installation, backhaul, network operations, and bandwidth? The network is described as a mesh, but it's hard to know what that means these days, as the term is used too loosely. Usage will be limited on the free service, but that hasn't been described in any of the reporting. An hour a day? 100 MB a month? A 20 Mbps (noted as 20 MB in the Guardian story) service will be available as an upgrade, but I don't know of any Wi-Fi network capable of delivering 20 Mbps on a distributed basis. 20 Mbps is tricky enough in the home over any distance. Color me dubious about the particulars. The Web site for the service, dubbed Signal, is unpopulated. International coverage of this story is breathless, quotes from the press release, and doesn't ask anyone from the company or elsewhere about how this could possibly work. At least the firm plans to use WPA encryption, according to its press release. The company also recommends using a "wireless" repeater, which means there's a hidden $50 to $150 cost in obtaining such an item to pull the signal in from outside. The network will apparently be up and running by April 2010, with an initial phase launched in December 2009. Funds will be used from both public and private sources, and a local businessman's firm, Digital City UK, will handle the buildout. The Swindon town council owns 35 percent of the venture. I don't see how the stated goals, costs, deployment, and service is feasible. I'm looking forward to further details. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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UK tries to scare people over unsecured hotspots: This meme is running wild, that child pornography consumers and producers drive around to find unsecured Wi-Fi in order to do their evil. I'm sure it happens (I've linked to reports here before). But is it an epidemic with great flashing exclamation points? Not really. But it's increasingly the case that people are securing their networks, and increasingly sensible to do so. An unsecured network is a vector for infection on your own network if someone happens by, connects, and infects your machines over a "trusted" local net. The future of 802.11: John Cox of Network World runs down all the various improvements we'll see now that 802.11n has been approved--part of the alphabet soup of add-ons and tweaks that will continue to make Wi-Fi more reliable and robust, especially in the enterprise. This includes four-stream 802.11n (600 Mbps raw rate). Yet Another Story about Wi-Fi Manners: This time from Florida Today, explaining how to avoid being a wireless moocher. Boingo Adds Australasia Access: The roaming aggregator will add 4,000 hotspots from Tomizone immediately through Australia, China, India, New Zealand, and Pacific Islands, with another 12,000 coming within months. Skyhook improves S60 location accuracy: Skyhook offers a $2.99 Maps Booster for Nokia S60 handsets via the Ovi Store to speed up the fix and location time by adding its Wi-Fi and other positioning technology into the mix. Bryant Park uses Verizon fiber for backhaul: The long-running Bryant Park Wi-Fi hotzone in New York City adjacent to the main branch of the New York Public Library has upgraded its backhaul to Verizon's FiOS, a 50 Mbps flavor. The network has been active since 2002 with different folks running it at different times. It's currently branded as operated by the Public Internet Project, the site for which hasn't been updated in several years. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Ruckus Wireless launches outdoor infrastructure for wireless broadband: Ruckus must like what Meraki has been up to, as the wireless firm has launched its own ecosystem for inexpensive, Wi-Fi based wireless broadband. The company has some remarkable international commitments to use the technology. From where I sit, Wi-Fi-based broadband is a developing world and also-ran approach where either cellular or WiMax equipment isn't available or is too expensive. Wi-Fi emerged in the mid-oughties (2004-2007) as an option because it was an interim measure: a way to get faster speeds than cellular and often than most of the installed wireline broadband before those technologies had matured. With an LTE and WiMax roadmap in the US and LTE in Europe, along with widely available WiMax gear for the quasi-licensed 3.5 GHz band in the US (for generally secondary markets), and vastly improved cable, DSL, and fiber rates across a good hunk of the installed broadband base, it's hard to see how broadband Wi-Fi carves out a niche where it can be cheaper, better, and ubiquitous. However, there are 5 billion people in markets in which that's not going to be the case, and all research shows that those folks are heavy metered mobile data consumers where they can afford it. Layering broadband Wi-Fi on a best effort ability into areas where there's no reasonable or well-priced second choice could be a winning strategy. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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The story in Colorado is that the Longmont network will keep operating under private ownership: Perhaps those of us who write about Wi-Fi, and especially large-scale networks, have followed Longmont too closely, but the city has a long-running network and hit all the high notes in the municipal wireless symphony. The latest of three providers to operate a Wi-Fi network failed to pay taxes and utility pole leases, and the city put up a ballot measure to try to take over the network. The measure failed in part because the city wasn't allowed to explain fully what it was doing due to Colorado law prohibiting municipal lobbying for this sort of measure. However, there's a happy ending. The county in which Longmont is found auctioned off DHB Networks' gear; it was purchased by the owners of RidgeviewTel and StarNet. RidgeviewTel has been operating the network since DHB's equipment was seized in September by the county. The company sees 1,900 unique devices connected to the network in the afternoon and early evening, which shows the utility of the network for its users. The firm will layer WiMax on top of Wi-Fi in just a few weeks. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Coshocton County, Ohio, shutters a hotzone because of a movie download: The local paper reports that Sony Pictures notified OneCommunity, which operates the county's one-block hotzone, that a movie was downloaded "illegally." The article doesn't provide enough details to know whether this was via BitTorrent, a pirate movie site, or other means. It's possible it was a perfectly legal download that Sony doesn't like, too, such as a transfer of a movie for personal use or a legal movie download that was mischaracterized. In any case, it doesn't seem that Sony nor the MPAA (which is mentioned in the article but didn't apparently contact the county at all) asked for the network to be shut down. Further, there's no legal basis on which to close down a network because of illegal use. The common-carrier and other ISP laws protect such operations, even though if Sony had filed suit the ISP might have had to produce certain logs and other connection records. My friend Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing went with the knee-jerk headline: "MPAA Shuts Down Entire Town's Muni WiFi over a Single Download," when it wasn't a whole town, the MPAA wasn't apparently involved, and the shutdown was by the county, which didn't have to do so. The MPAA told MediaPost that it "didn't ask for the network to be shuttered." What's likely here is that the county overreacted, and decided to limit any potential liability immediately, even though no sanctions or actions were apparently threatened by Sony (or the MPAA). In similar cases, private and governmental bodies have simply said, "Whatever" or turned to groups like the EFF for support. Update: The network was brought back up on Friday. Sony received a number of complaints about its actions, despite not actually having asked the county to turn its network off. Sony reportedly emailed the county, and must have said it wouldn't pursue any action, which led to the county turning the network back on. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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From a carrier with no 3G offerings 18 months ago, T-Mobile has turned the ship fast--and turned the table on its competitors: T-Mobile used today's announcement of a new 3G USB modem to lay out its aggressive plans for 7.2 Mbps HSPA and 21 Mbps HSPA+ deployment nationwide. Starting from no customers in second quarter 2008 and clutching a handful of 3G spectrum, the firm now covers 240 cities and passes 170m people. T-Mobile's Jeremy Korst, director of broadband products and services, said in an interview that the number will hit 200m by the end of 2009, which covers nearly all the major urban areas. By contrast, Clearwire plans coverage of 120m people with its Wimax service by the end of 2010. But perhaps more important is that T-Mobile will have 7.2 HSPA, which runs at a raw downstream data rate of 7.2 Mbps, on all its 3G nodes by year's end. On the upstream side, T-Mobile will gradually upgrade to 2 Mbps starting in early 2010. This contrasts with AT&T's previously announced but much more moderately paced plan that gradually upgrades the current, seemingly overloaded 3.6 HSPA network to 7.2 HSPA through the end of 2011, at which point AT&T will still have only 90-percent 7.2 HSPA on its 3G network. By the end of 2010, only 25 of 30 major markets will have the faster HSPA flavor, the company has said. The bigger news, though, is that T-Mobile is going full-court press on HSPA+, a 21 Mbps flavor already deployed by several carriers worldwide, and which T-Mobile launched for test purposes in Philadelphia in September. The company will start rolling out HSPA+ in 2010 on a "fairly broad-scale" basis, Korst said. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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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. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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This isn't a referendum on cities running Wi-Fi, but shows how freaked out incumbents still get over muni-Fi: Longmont, Colo.'s independent Wi-Fi service provider was struggling, and the city wanted the ability to take over the service should the company fail. However, a variety of Colorado laws required the city to be vague and not spend money saying exactly what it planned to do. Cable operators spent hundreds of thousands to defeat the measure, which implied that the city could run a triple-play system, even over fiber. Now that the election's over, all the details have come out, and the city may take another go at it. About 400 to 600 citizens will lose Internet access. Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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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.) Copyright ©2009 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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