Philadelphia citywide WiFi officially shut down
[Via Philebrity, thanks Andy R.]
Posts with tag WiFi
Hey, do you guys want to hear our AT&T impression? It's pretty awesome. Okay, okay, here it goes: "Great news, we're offering free WiFi to iPhone users! Wait, no we're not. Yes we are! Oh, no, wait, cancel that." Pretty spot-on, right? Sadly, it looks like we might need something else to rag on shortly, since an AT&T spokesman started clearing the air with the New York Times late last week. The bottom line -- for the moment, anyway -- is that AT&T has "long planned" to offer up its WiFi hotspots as a free value-add for the iPhone and all of the other WiFi-equipped devices in its arsenal, but that the brief enabling of the feature thus far and the mention on AT&T's site were results of human error, and the company isn't prepared at this point to commit to an actual launch date or details on how the service will work. Hey, at least we know we're not just suffering from some brutal hallucinations now.
Comcast, Time Warner, and Bright House all threw down in the new Sprint-led Clearwire venture yesterday, but it looks like Cablevision wants in on the fun as well: the company announced today that it's spending $350M on a new wireless broadband network in New York. Unlike the Clearwire partnership, Cablevision is apparently going to use straight-up WiFi for the service, but it's not revealing any details at the moment, saying only that it'll run at 1.5Mbps and eventually handle voice as well. The plan is to get up and running in NYC within two years, and existing customers will be able to log on for free -- and if this really is straight-up WiFi, we'd bet a lot of other people will be joining the fun as well.
Easy come, easy go: looks like that free WiFi for iPhone users could already be turned off, as apparently users are starting to get login screens instead of the free web access they so quickly came to expect. The only real question is whether the whole free iPhone WiFi was simply flipped on early, and will be officially announced at a later time, or AT&T changed its mind about the whole thing. Guess we'll soon see.
Announced way back in 2006, we've yet to see the production launch of Spectec's microSD card with built-in 802.11b/g WiFi. Although late, it's still a boon for those of us running WiFi-less HTC Touch Duals, for example. Unfortunately, without any mentioned storage in the specs, you'll be doing a lot of microSD card swapping (and losing) when it ships in May for sampling and then to consumers in July.
Sure, we've seen the occasional loony look down upon open WiFi access, but Russia is apparently out to really slow down wireless adoption with its latest directive. Reportedly, the Russian Mass Media, Communications and Cultural Protection Service (or Rossvyazokhrankultura for short -- no seriously, we swear) is looking to have every user of a WiFi-enabled device obtain permission and register said device before hopping on the world wide web. Even worse, it seems as if every single wireless transmitter and device must be registered, meaning that technophiles will be filling out heaps of paperwork in order to get their handset, laptop, DS Lite, PC and hacked-up Foleo online (legally) via their home-based access point. We're hearing that registering a single PDA or phone would take around ten days, while signing up a new home network would be even more painstaking. We'll spare you the snide In Soviet Russia... remarks, but feel free to concoct your own below.








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