Welcome to this week’s roundup of HetNet news.
The city of Santa Clara, Calif., turned on free Wi-Fi service last week as part of an electrical grid project. Silicon Valley Power, the city’s municipal electric utility, is providing Wi-Fi access as part of its SVP MeterConnect program. Advanced wireless meters will be installed at residences later this year, and they carry a separate channel for free, public Wi-Fi service.
Ubiquiti launched its UniFi 3.0 platform for gigabit Wi-Fi connectivity. The 802.11ac protocol, or gigabit Wi-Fi, is designed to deliver as much as three times the speed of the 802.11n protocol, and is supposed to be a more robust, reliable and efficient Wi-Fi standard. Ubiquiti has also integrated its “Zero Hands-Off Roaming” technology which can work with any client and makes multiple access points appear as a single access point to enable seamless Wi-Fi roaming.
The UniFi 802.11ac access points are priced at $299, with initial customer shipments expected to being this month. Management software can be downloaded for free beginning April 15, according to Ubiquiti – and it’s also offering a free upgrade program for customers who use competitors’ Aruba Networks and Ruckus Wireless’ access points.
Analyst firm Mobile Experts released a new forecast for the small cell market. Residential femtocells are expected to grow slowly based on shipment figures from 2012, at only 12% per year, with small cells for indoor and outdoor capacity upgrades expected to overtake residential small cells by 2016.
Joe Madden, principal analyst at Mobile Experts, noted that there are already more than 100,000 small cells deployed in Korea and Japan, making the Asia-Pacific market a leader in the small cell space. Other operators are expected to follow similar models as they complete their LTE macro network roll-outs, he added.
Ethertronics has expanded its DAS portfolio with two new products: EtherDAS 1.5 and EtherDAS S, for indoor distributed antenna systems. The company says that the two meet stringent passive intermodulation performance requirements from carriers in order to minimize interference and provide faster uplink and downlink speeds. Both of the EtherDAS products are available in three versions to offer flexibility in installation.
Network security provider Fluke Networks said that few public hotspot users understand exactly what information is exposed when they access public Wi-Fi, and they’re more at risk than they think. In a blog post, the company cited stats from a recent survey that found 79 percent of hotspot survey respondents believed that using free public Wi-Fi could lead to identity theft, but only 27 percent routinely took steps to protect their hotspot traffic. About one-third of survey participants didn’t know that logging into a hotspot with a password didn’t protect their data, and 44% didn’t know there was any way to protect their data when using Wi-Fi. Read the original survey from the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center here.
Secure Wi-Fi provider AirTight Networks said it has the “world’s largest cloud footprint available today,” with tens of thousands of Wi-Fi networks attached to its cloud platform and six data centers worldwide for cloud-based management of distributed Wi-Fi networks.
Marvell Technology Group Ltd. was recognized this week with the outstanding leadership and contribution award from the Wi-Fi Alliance, for the fourth consecutive year, reflecting its participation in technology development and certification through the Wi-Fi Alliance.
Ruckus Wireless announced that it is providing 1,200 Wi-Fi access points for more than 6,000 hotel rooms as part of Sandals Resorts International’s tech upgrades for 23 Caribbean resorts in six countries.
Wireless Expressways Inc., which provides waveguide-based wireless distribution systems for improving in-building Wi-Fi, is one of 22 finalists who will be the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley’s featured exhibitors during this year’s CTIA show in Las Vegas.
Charles Becker, president of WE, said that as Wi-Fi spectrum becomes more crowded, “waveguide-based distribution systems make more sense by controlling the areas that [access point] signals are allowed to illuminate, while rejecting interfering signals from external sources. We believe our approach is a first step in limiting interference among users of popular Wi-Fi bands.”
And if you haven’t already, check out the latest mobile workforce report from iPass. They gathered some very interesting stats on workers’ attitude toward Wi-Fi plans and pricing and challenges in access Wi-Fi – even from places often considered well-covered, such as airports and hotels.
