Wireless Ghana

Aircell has unwired its 1,000th aircraft: It's a Delta DC9 flying out of Detroit; lucky passengers will get free Wi-Fi access. Aircell says one-third of mainline aircraft flying each day in the US have its service onboard, for nearly 4,000 flights each day. Aircell's contracts should push it to 2,000 craft in 2011. The question is, however, whether Gogo Inflight Internet will grow large enough to be profitable, for airlines to continue to want it, and for Aircell to thrive. It's impossible to know. None of the parties involved release enough numbers to perform a real analysis, and my estimates based on the limited data released indicate that the revenue is good but not great. Aircell's service becomes most useful when it's predictably available for the routine flights of regular businesspeople. Then a fixed monthly subscription will make sense, companies will cover it for increased productivity--and there will be one more inescapable workplace in which you will toil. Excuse me: save time in the air. Copyright ©2010 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.

Virgin Mobile has upped the ante on cellular data: Despite being owned by Sprint Nextel, Virgin Mobile is challenging all four major US carriers with an as-you-need-it, no-contract $40 unlimited 3G data plan. The plan lasts for 30 days. Virgin previously had four levels of service topping out at 5 GB for $60 used within 30 days. The new tiers are $10 for 100 MB over 10 days or $40 for unlimited data during a 30-day period. Because Virgin Mobile also offers the MiFi cellular router for a low price ($150, no commitment), it now has a killer offering. Use a MiFi with an unlimited plan and avoid the overage fees or throttling from every other competitor. This also guts tethering plans. I'm an AT&T customer with an iPhone 4, and I also own a 3G iPad (with no current active service plan). I typically now travel with the iPad and activate a plan on the road. I had figured on my next trip in which I needed a laptop, I would switch to tethering on my iPhone 4 (from a $15/200 MB plan to a required $25/2 GB plan plus $20 for tethering). That now seems unappealing. Instead, I should pay the $150 for the Virgin Mobile MiFi, and pay $40 whenever I'm traveling. Then my iPhone and laptop can both use Wi-Fi to access Sprint's 3G network, and if I'm traveling with colleagues, I can share access with them as well. Sprint recently dropped its MiFi offering (so far as I can tell) in favor of the Overdrive 3G/4G, which works on its Clearwire division's 4G WiMax network (no limits on use) and the 3G CDMA network with a 5 GB cap. (It's $350 upfront or $100 with a two-year contract at $60/mo.) You can also go to Clearwire and buy a similar product (the Spot 4G+) with a $55/mo service plan for the same terms. Copyright ©2010 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.

Sprint puts 3G in femtocells at last: Sprint had the first entry in the femtocell market, those tiny cell base station that a subscriber installs in the home and plugs into his or her own broadband connection. But Sprint and later Verizon's femtos were 2G (1xRTT) only. For calls, that was no problem, but the data side would run at 2G, or a phone would make a weak 3G connection and reduce the macro cell base station's spectrum efficiency. If you had a CDMA phone with Wi-Fi, of course, your phone would simply use your local network for data. Sprint's new 3G EV-DO device won't be sold or available for sale. Qualifying customers who have reception problems indoors will be offered the device. Sprint's cover is about 75 percent of the US population versus Verizon's over 95 percent. Sprint leans on Verizon's network and pays roaming fees--and cancels customers who roam too much. A 3G femtocell could preserve Sprint customers who normally have good service except at home or in an office. Fierce Wireless reports that there's no special plan or fee for the 3G femtocell. The 2G cell that Sprint offers for sale comes with a $5 monthly usage fee, and an optional $10 unlimited US calling plan for a single line or $20 for a family plan. AT&T released its 3G MicroCell in limited markets for its GSM network earlier in the year. It's $150 upfront and no monthly fee for coverage improvement, or $50 with a rebate if you sign up for a pricey $20-per-line unlimited calling plan. The calling plan is so spendy, that it likely makes more sense to get a better overall plan than the femtocell. Copyright ©2010 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.

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) has launched its free Wi-Fi service: SFO is among the largest airports in the US to have pulled fee service off the terminal menu, replacing it with free. Denver (DEN) was the first large airport to make that choice a few years ago; Seattle's Seatac (SEA) went free earlier this year. Copyright ©2010 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.

Canadian school board will keep Wi-Fi on: Terrific reporting (no byline, or I'd praise the reporter) on a sticky issue. A school board in the central Ontario area of Simcoe County is refusing to turn off Wi-Fi because of scaremongering from parents who allege a direct connection between symptoms of ill health and the presence of signals. Great summary in the second paragraph: "There is no scientific or medical evidence to show children complaining about headaches, dizziness and nausea are being made ill by the Wi-Fi in their classrooms, the Simcoe County District School Board said Monday." The school board said only "about a dozen parents" complained about symptoms out of 50,000 students' families. And, of course, unless you live inside a Faraday Cage, you're exposed to varying amounts of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation constantly from radio stations, cordless phones, police radio, cell towers, and so on. Wi-Fi uses an extremely low signal, and the exposure for a kid over a school day is likely vastly lower than the same exposure to cell base station signal output or from cell phones many of their compatriots carry. I suppose these parents have already made sure none of the homes near them have Wi-Fi base stations, and that they don't use electricity in the home, since electrical cords and devices produce EMF, too. I've said it many times before: focusing on wireless signals as a cause of a constellation of nebulous symptoms doesn't help those suffering. It's a desire to have a single-source solution, like mercury in vaccines leads to autism. As studies now show, removing thimerosal from vaccines hasn't had any impact in any country on autism diagnosis rates, and the original fraud who suggested such has been thoroughly discredited. Copyright ©2010 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.

Devicescape will offer SoftGPS, another way for device makers to obtain coordinates for mobile equipment on the go, GPS or no: I've written before that Devicescape and Skyhook Wireless are two of my favorite companies in the back-end Wi-Fi space because what they do is so clever. Both have been around for years; both are seeing the payoff for consistently working towards intelligible goals. And both rely on their software or data being used by other firms. Of course, they're now in competition for some of the location services dollars. It makes sense. Skyhook Wireless bootstrapped itself into the Wi-Fi positioning business through brute force driving. It still uses driving as a primary component in how it provides fairly precise latitude and longitude based on an analysis of Wi-Fi network IDs and the corresponding signal strength around a device. But Skyhook also gathers data, massive massive amounts of data, from mobile devices, largely smartphones. Each time a smartphone snapshots a network environment and sends that information to Skyhook, the company not only replies with GPS-like data, but it adds the collected information into its databases to refine, update, or expand its knowledge. Devicescape thus finds itself in a similar footing. Without having fleets of wardriving trucks, Devicescape does have its software installed in millions of devices worldwide, and gathers the same kind of snapshots. The company has also collected the information and positions of millions of hotspots. This information put together leads inexorably to the desire to make money off it. You don't collect a billion (or 10 billion?) pieces of such information without wanting it to generate some cash in return. The demand for location services is extremely high now that the pieces are in place by many content providers to deliver general and specialized information relating to where you're precisely standing. That ranges across simple mapping, navigation and directions, advertising, yellow page-like business data, and augmented reality (where information is overlaid on a live video stream of your surroundings, for instance). While the focus has been on smartphones and other cellular devices, that may be misplaced. In most such devices, GPS (and, most of the time, Assisted GPS) provides primary information with Wi-Fi and cellular triangulation a secondary or supplementary factor. But what about the thousands of current and future mobile doodads that won't have a GPS chip, but for which location is a useful component? That's where Devicescape and Skyhook will contend. And Devicescape has an advantage there. Devicescape has relationships with many hotspot networks and the software that allows authentication to free and open networks. That means Devicescape's SoftGPS will likely be able to connect to its back-end servers quite a lot of the time, where Skyhook will be relying on a network connection made by the user, or a 2G or 3G cellular data connection. Both companies can offer "deferred" lookup, too. That's what I get with my Eye-Fi cards, the SD camera cards with Wi-Fi built-in. The Eye-Fi (with the right model or add-on subscription) captures Wi-Fi scans along with photos. When you use its software to transfer photos, a Skyhook lookup happens and adds geotagging (EXIF metadata) to the images. I tend to disagree with my colleague Om Malik, who writes at this GigaOm site that Devicescape "may find itself outgunned" in competition with Google and Skyhook, while contending with Apple and Nokia no longer needing to outsource for such Wi-Fi-based information. (Apple recently stopped using Skyhook in its iOS: neither the iPad nor iOS 4 uses that firm's data.) Rather, the market for location is expanding, and not everyone wants to be in bed with Google, nor will Skyhook have the right mix or technology for each potential customer. And, Om omits the fact that Google has agreed to be or is prohibited from collecting Wi-Fi data from Street View in many countries, although Android-based location collection is likely unimpaired. The addition of Devicescape to the Wi-Fi location market seems like a clear win for everyone but Skyhook, which now has to contend with a potentially strong and savvy competitor that knows plenty about device-level driver and OS integration. For manufacturers, service providers, and customers, there will likely be a faster pace of devices knowing where we are. Copyright ©2010 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.

Wal-Mart's Sam's Club warehouse stores will offer free Wi-Fi at all 500 locations by November: I'm not sure why it's necessary to add Wi-Fi in these stores, because they don't encourage shoppers to linger or waste time. However, the press release suggests coupled with a Sam's Club app that's due out for several mobile platforms that you'll be able to pull up much more product information in the store (as well as price shop). Copyright ©2010 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.

The LA Times files the latest in an endless series of articles about cafés opting out of a Wi-Fi, but with some new insight: Since I filed what I believe is the first in this series of "coffeeshops shut down Wi-Fi" articles in the New York Times back in 2005--"Some Cafe Owners Pull the Plug on Lingering Wi-Fi Users"--I have read hundreds of similar articles, and been quoted in some. Most recently, my friend Cyrus Farivar filed a story for ABC Radio National in Australia about the Actual Café in Oakland, Calif. The owner of the Actual Café was looking for a sense of community, just like the Victrola coffeeshop owners I profiled in 2005, and found laptops interfered with that. The LA Times piece has a similar structure, but a different tack. Many of the articles written to this point have been about time-of-day or day-of-week wireless network bans. But I'm seeing an increasing trend towards "no Wi-Fi" at all, or a full-on computer/device ban. Nick Bilton, who heads The New York Times Bits blog, was told he couldn't use his Kindle to read a book at a coffeeshop in Manhattan a few days ago. Rejecting Wi-Fi or computers has finally migrated from a quirky story to an actual trend. When I wrote the 2005 article, I was trying to state firmly that this wasn't a trend, but it was interesting. In the years since, until perhaps the introduction of the iPad this year, it still seemed like anecdotes. But the anecdotes are now really piling up. Starbucks shift to free Wi-Fi all the time, instead of a more limited and complicated method of obtaining access for two hours at a go, may have become the rallying cry for independent shops or small chains to set themselves apart. You want free Wi-Fi? Go to Starbucks, you sheep. If you want good coffee or tea, a place to think and talk, and community, come to us. (I've cribbed this idea from the LA Times article, and it's a good one.) Of course, this depends on the cafés size, the patrons it attracts, its location, and its owners' or managers' feelings. In Seattle, we have a huge range of opinion and configuration. Some cafés make sure there are outlets everywhere, put in small tables, and encourage long visits. Others block outlets, require or encourage regular purchases, and don't allow or want computer use. The LA Times quotes an owner describing typical camping problem (from Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco): "We just realized it was a mistake. People would just camp out for hours, literally eight hours on one cup of coffee. We only had 75 seats, and those were always full. It killed the vibe, too." But the article also quotes the opposite view, from a Seattle coffeeshop. There's no monolithic problem or answer here. Any time people feel like they can spread over a table for four by themselves for eight hours on a single cup of joe (or bring one themselves; it happens, unbelievably), you're going to have problems. Copyright ©2010 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.

AT&T's Chicago hotzone was launched today, the third in its pilot for offloading 3G data to Wi-Fi for subscribers: AT&T said its Chicago hotzone covers "Wrigleyville," the area around Wrigley Field. AT&T's first hotzone was installed in Times Square (Manhattan), and second in Charlotte, NC. The zones are entirely for its own customers, a way for the company to keep high data rates at a lower cost while conserving 3G spectrum use. Copyright ©2010 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.

A newspaper reports that a strong password prevented a neighbors' entry to a Wi-Fi network: Next time, Ted Murphy should try 123456789, the third most-popular bad password. Copyright ©2010 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.

GigaOm notes that Clearwire's 201 target of 120m people covered in 2010 could be hard to reach given its 51m passed numbers today: Stacey Higginbotham writes that Verizon's expected 2010 launch of a 100m-passed LTE 4G network could put a crimp in Clearwire's plans. However, as she notes, Clearwire's 4G pricing and limits (none on most plans) could provide an advantage over AT&T and Verizon, which place relatively tight limits on mobile broadband today. Copyright ©2010 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.

TechCrunch read Apple's letter to a congressman about the kind of data it collects more carefully than most: The letter says Apple dropped Google (which was, I believe, supplying cellular tower triangulation information) and Skyhook Wireless from iOS 4, which powers the iPhone 4 and 2008 and 2009 models of iPhone and iPod touch. Long-time readers of this site know that Skyhook Wireless has spent many years driving the streets of major cities and aggregating information provided in the form of queries from mobile devices to build a comprehensive and constantly updated Wi-Fi positioning system. While Wi-Fi isn't precise, it's not far off from GPS in urban areas. As more mobile devices gain full-featured GPS chips and functions, Wi-Fi positioning remains important as a component in Assisted GPS (which allows a GPS to get a fix faster) and in providing an initial rapid location assessment, sometimes in a few seconds. But location data is incredibly valuable, and owning the data is perhaps worth the price. Apple has apparently, quietly generated its own Wi-Fi and cell tower databases. It has enough mobile devices in the field with GPS receivers that it can use that information to build a comprehensive picture of most cities, I'd imagine. Every time a device queries location and sends a Wi-Fi and cell environmental scan with or without GPS coordinates, that's more data to crunch. I thought Skyhook Wireless would have a leg up here because of Google's agreement to not scan for Wi-Fi in several countries (or perhaps worldwide) after it's data-collection debacle with Street View. And Apple's not the only fish in the pond. Skyhook has deals with many, many other platforms and providers. Copyright ©2010 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.

At Ars Technica, you can read my long explanation of the group key weakness in WPA/WPA2 Enterprise-protected networks: The information I was given was originally under embargo, but the firm and unrelated researchers released essentially all the data except a video of an exploit in action and some of the mitigation information. Hence, the long Ars Technica piece. Boiled down, I don't think anyone need worry about Hole196, which describes how an insider with an account on a WPA/WPA2 Enterprise network can send group broadcast packets spoofed to appear as if they originate from the access point for clients attached to that access point. It's a hole, all right, but it requires so many particular circumstances to be met, that a spy or thief working for a company (or an outsider having gained credentialed access) would most likely have easier methods to get in--or would be detected by other means. The best lesson I can take away from this hole? Make sure you're running virtual SSIDs if you have that option to separate guests, contractors, and others from employees; or to isolate different kinds of operations within your company. Because each virtual SSID on an access point is treated nearly as a virtual AP, the group key isn't shared across the access point among different virtual SSID. The BSSID, or AP identifer, is unique for each virtual network on each AP. Copyright ©2010 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.

Internet in the air isn't all about commercial aviation: NetJets, a fractional plane ownership business owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, will put Aircell's general aviation Internet product (Aircell High Speed Internet) in 250 of its mid-to-large aircraft. NetJets has a fleet of 800 jets, which are used in increments by "owners," who opt for this rather than the expense of maintaining their own planes. It's hardly a crowd that pinches pennies; dollars, maybe. It's thus a perfect audience for heavy Internet use. Copyright ©2010 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.

AT&T has added a second location in its outdoor hotzone pilot program: Charlotte, NC's downtown is the second area to get an AT&T hotzone designed to offload network traffic from the company's 3G network and boost performance for customers. The first such hotzone was lit up in Times Square in Manhattan; a third zone is coming to Chicago soon. The idea of a hotzone makes perfect sense for a firm that's getting criticism for being unable to meet the data needs of subscribers in some cities and neighborhoods. Wi-Fi cells can be quite small, and have much higher capacity than cell channels, while being enormously cheaper to run, partly because there's no opportunity cost related to expensive cellular spectrum licenses. These AT&T hotzones differ from municipal Wi-Fi efforts started in 2005 and mostly abandoned by 2007. Municipal networks were typically designed to require private investment by firms to provide indoor and outdoor network coverage to 90–95 percent of a city. AT&T hotzones will cover outdoor areas of high traffic, and work only for customers. There's no specific municipal benefit involved, and AT&T will control its deployments entirely. It's a smart move. AT&T could likely spend less a tenth as much in high-traffic areas to add Wi-Fi as to beef up cellular. And there's only so much spectrum available, meaning that in many areas there may be no real way to enhance the 3G data side. This is Wi-Fi as a 3G network heat sink. Copyright ©2010 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.

The telecom behemoth is also gigantic in giving away Wi-Fi to customers: AT&T's quarterly report on Wi-Fi usage finds the firm serving 121m sessions in the first six months of 2010; that compares to 86m sessions in all of 2009. Second quarter 2010 saw 68m sessions used, compared with 15m in the year-ago second quarter. Second quarter was also a 30-percent increase over first quarter. That's great, but you'll note that the names McDonald's and Starbucks aren't mentioned anywhere in the press release. McDonald's and Starbucks represent about 19,000 of AT&T's "more than 20,000" locations. In January, McDonald's opened its Wi-Fi network to everyone at no cost; previously, AT&T customers (wired, DSL, fiber, remote business, and laptop 3G) got access at no cost, and so did roaming network partners. One expects that McDonald's drove part (but not all) of the increase. Likewise, on 1 July 2010, Starbucks shifted from its modestly complicated free two hours' offer, where you needed a Starbucks stored-value card, to unlimited free service for everyone. I expect we'll see a big jolt as a response, because it removes friction for short, casual use, as opposed to longer use in which anyone who figured it out would already have been using Starbucks' Wi-Fi at no cost. You can't disregard other factors, however. AT&T continues to add wireless, laptop 3G, and fiber customers (although I believe DSL and landline markets are static or shrinking). Those users gain free service on subscribing. And existing users rely more on using free service as available. The couple of million iPads that AT&T sold as part of the 3m+ worldwide totally likely are part of that jump in usage. A single iPad user could consume dozens of sessions a day, either on the AT&T free locations (with a Wi-Fi only unit or a 3G iPad without an active 3G subscription), or across AT&T's network with a 3G iPad and an active 3G data plan. (The active data plan gives you access to hotels, airports, and other otherwise for-fee locations, and some roaming locations on reciprocal networks.) Finally, AT&T switch a few weeks ago from unlimited service plans to cheaper, limited plans for new customers or those that opt to switch away from unlimited will likely mean bargain hunters like yours truly will work harder to find free Wi-Fi instead of consuming expensive 3G juice. Copyright ©2010 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.

AirTight Networks' researcher Md Sohail Ahmad will present a WPA2 weakness primarily a problem on 802.1X networks at DEFCON18 next week: The press release from AirTight doesn't give away too many details, but I can read the tea leaves to figure out where the problem lies. There's just enough of a hint. The problem appears restricted to WPA Enterprise (802.1X with TKIP/AES-CCMP) in practical terms, because a malicious user must have legitimate credentials to gain access to the network to exploit the flaw. With WPA/WPA2 Personal (preshared key), everyone on the network ostensibly can sniff for other users' data. But with the 802.1X mechanism used in WPA/WPA2 Enterprise, each user after authentication receives unique keying material that renders his or her data opaque. Or does it? AirTight said in its press release that the problem Ahmad identified is found in the name it gave the exploit "Hole 196": that refers to the last line of page 196 of the revised IEEE 802.11-2007 specification. I digitally flipped through my copy of the spec, and found a note at the bottom of the page in question, in a section on Robust Security Network Association (RSNA) used for the 4-way handshake for authentication dealing with the group temporal key (used to protect broadcast and multicast data). It reads: "NOTE—Pairwise key support with TKIP or CCMP allows a receiving STA to detect MAC address spoofing and data forgery. The RSNA architecture binds the transmit and receive addresses to the pairwise key. If an attacker creates an MPDU with the spoofed TA, then the decapsulation procedure at the receiver will generate an error. GTKs do not have this property." Reading that with the notion in mind that there's an exploit around it points strongly to a way in which a malicious client could exploit this and create spoofed broadcast or multicast packets appearing to come from the TA (transmitting address) of the access point that other clients would receive. Those spoofed packets would have the advantage of coming across the same trusted network, and could contain malicious payloads and attacks. This could be a serious exploit for corporations, government, and academic institutions that use 802.1X, and rely on the intra-network security of having one user unable to sniff the traffic of any other user. No key cracking appears involved at all; it's entirely about the position of the offending client within the network. It seems like the fix for this would require an AP somehow sign a GTK packet so that a station (client and adapter) wouldn't accept GTKs on a network from another station. That seems like more infrastructure and a major change, although it could be incorporated into an EAP method that relies on AP/server-side certificates. I'm sure Cisco, Juniper, and others will be all over this, because it affects their core client base. The risk isn't from outside attack, so it's not an immediate concern that script kiddies will drive up to corporate networks to attack them. Rather, it's part of ongoing mitigation of risks from employees inside a company misusing or stealing data or causing grief. In the short run, using a VPN tunnel within an 802.1X session might allow malicious disruption but not data interception. Unless, perhaps, DNS poisoning and SSL/TLS certificate authority spoofing were involved. Copyright ©2010 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.

As I predicted, Google won't be sucking down Wi-Fi signals in its future Street View efforts in some countries: After the debacle of Google first saying it wasn't collecting data from Wi-Fi networks, only scanning for readily available public information, and then discovering and admitting it had stored information, the company is taking a different tack. It's restarting Street View photography in Ireland, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden, but vehicles won't have Wi-Fi hardware on board, and the software has been vetted by a third-party to ensure there's no component that might have collected Wi-Fi data still installed (even though removing the hardware might be seen as enough). I thought that the likely outcome for Google for its missteps was likely a very tiny amount of money in the forms of fines or voluntary settlement figures, but no criminal charges nor more than a technical slap on the rest--so long as Google agreed to stop scanning Wi-Fi signals, even if it promised to stop collecting data. By being seemingly forced to exit the Wi-Fi positioning business, Skyhook Wireless reaps the biggest rewards, in that it will be the only worldwide provider of such information. However, Google also uses the Android platform to collect Wi-Fi positioning information--something also employed by Skyhook Wireless, as News.com reported a few weeks ago. Every time a mobile devices sends a snapshot of the Wi-Fi environment to a Google or Skyhook server for lookup, that information further refines location data for subsequent users. But mobile-submitted data isn't enough. For one thing, most of this data isn't tagged with reliable GPS coordinates when sent to the server--the intent of sending to the server is to obtain latitude and longitude in the first place. Skyhook and, formerly Google, drives with precision GPS receives and high-gain antennas to seed and re-seed their databases. Meanwhile, in Australia, the country's privacy commissioner has found Google broke the law in sucking down data, even though such data was being publicly disseminated. The Sydney Morning Herald quotes commissioner Karen Curtis saying, "Any collection of personal information would have breached the Australian Privacy Act." But I fear this sends the wrong message. Curtis says, "Australians should reasonably expect that private communications remain private." Not quite. If you're sending information unencrypted when the facility to protect that information is readily (and freely) available in the hardware you purchased, then you are sending private information in a public fashion, and shouldn't enjoy any expectation of privacy. Setting the bar that publicly broadcast information ensures privacy protections seems a bit rich. Nevertheless, Google has apologized to Australians. Expect more apologies to be forthcoming. Copyright ©2010 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.

Alaska Airlines has ramped up rapidly since its agreement with Aircell to use Gogo Inflight Internet: The airline has half its fleet--all 55 737-800s and 10 737-900s--equipped with in-flight Wi-Fi. The remaining 737-900s (2 of them) will be unwired in July, and the 737-400 and 737-700 fleets will gain service by the end of the year. Aircell agreed to put substantial service in the state of Alaska as part of its arrangement with the airline, with a commitment to have it ready by early 2011. Aircell will eventually have a Canadian network, too, run by a Canadian partner that will aid in Alaska coverage. Copyright ©2010 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.

The Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) stops charging for Wi-Fi: The facility offered free Wi-Fi on the weekends and to students at any time since 2007, but now won't charge a lick for service. Is this PHL's way of competing with Baltimore, National, JFK/EWR/LGA? Copyright ©2010 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.