Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way....
FCC planning reverse, forward auctions of Super Wi-Fi in 2016
AUSTIN, Texas – Unused television broadcast spectrum, sometimes referred to as super Wi-Fi, could be used to provide Internet access to otherwise underserved communities, according to panelists at South by Southwest.
Mary Ellen Carroll, a designer,...
Boingo Wi-Fi hot spots to connect 40 million handsets
Wi-Fi and distributed antenna systems provider Boingo signed a deal with a "tier one" American carrier that includes shipment of 40 million handsets enabled with Wi-Fi offload onto Boingo’s network of hot spots.
Boingo apprised investors of...
BARCELONA, Spain – Alcatel-Lucent continues to focus on being a leading provider of high-speed mobile broadband services using small cell technologies across Latin America. In a meeting with journalists at this week’s Mobile World Congress, Osvaldo di Campli, president of the Caribbean and Latin America...
It is shaping up to be a very interesting 2015 in the world of wireless infrastructure. As operators and investors evaluate how to play their cards this year and beyond, there are several key areas that need to be factored in to business management, expansion and...
Heterogeneous networks have been brewing for a few years now, but 2015 will be the year they become mainstream as several core components reach maturity. The starting point came with mobile network operators offloading data to Wi-Fi in order to avoid a capacity crunch...
Hewlett-Packard is buying Wi-Fi access point vendor Aruba Networks for $2.7 billion. The network-equipment giant said the shift to mobile is taxing its enterprise network infrastructure and that the Aruba purchase will help it offer integrated and secure networking solutions to transition legacy systems...
Alcatel-Lucent is demonstrating software at Mobile World Congress that it says can combine standalone cellular and Wi-Fi networks into one unified wireless network. The company calls the solution Wi-Fi boost and is demonstrating it on Qualcomm handsets with specialized operating system software. Qualcomm and...
BYOD: Evolving Best Practices for Validating APs and Controllers
This white paper takes a timely look at the mobile “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) phenomenon and what wireless LAN (WLAN) manufacturers and administrators are doing to mitigate its impact on application performance. Includes insights into...
For mobile operators, Wi-Fi represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Traditionally seen by many as competitive to cellular, Wi-Fi is now recognized as a way to maintain a more consistent user experience by offloading traffic when cellular networks become congested. The challenge for...
Need for #MWC15 Speed
Each year, RCR Wireless News sends members of our team to Barcelona, Spain, to cover the proverbial "Super Bowl" of the mobile industry – GSMA's Mobile World Congress. Last year, our team met with over 125 companies, posted dozens of articles and...
LAA-LTE: Looking beyond coexistence
The first time I heard about LTE in the 5 GHz license-exempt band, my reaction was: “Why do we need it? Wi-Fi works well, it’s cheap, and it’s in every device.”
The growth in cellular data has been stunning, and we are...
Public Wi-Fi being tested in buses and subway cell build-out underway
The city of Los Angeles Department of Transportation is looking to help keep riders connected by deploying cellular and public Wi-Fi solutions in city buses and subway tunnels.
The city is currently testing Wi-Fi deployments on...
P&O Ferries offers satellite/terrestrial Wi-Fi on shuttle boats
U.K.-based P&O Ferries deployed a Wi-Fi solution designed to keep passengers connected as they make the 22-mile crossing of the English Channel from Dover, England, to Calais, France.
The ferry company, which moves more than 9 million passengers...
Ethertronics launched its Active Steering EtherChip EC482 designed for multiple-input/multiple-output 5 GHz and Wi-Fi applications.
According to the company, the chip can be integrated into any antenna system and is designed to provide improvements in range and data throughput for video streaming, as well as interference reduction, connection...
Equipped with a hefty research grant, a professor in the U.K. is taking a novel approach to bringing Wi-Fi coverage to rural Wales: sheep outfitted with collars that transmit an Internet signal.
Professor Gordon Blair from Lancaster University was awarded about $267,000 from the Engineering...
Testing Wi-Fi offers a set of unique challenges in the indoor environment. Azimuth Systems has been working with a large chipset manufacturer on testing new technology that uses Wi-Fi, rather than the Global Positioning System, for locating an end user device.
GPS signals tend not...
DAS will improve data, cellular by 2016
The city of Santa Clara, Calif., is looking to enhance cellular and Wi-Fi services by installing an outdoor distributed antenna system in busy parts of town.
Projected for completion early in 2016, the DAS is owned by the city...
Wi-Fi router comes in three-pack and covers whole home
The new Eero router seeks to create small-scale Wi-Fi mesh networks by foregoing the traditional one-router home setup for a base kit of three routers available on pre-order for $309.
The easy-to-install network is run from a...
Rotten Wi-Fi asks users to run speed tests
Free, public Wi-Fi access is often a big draw for businesses like restaurants and cafes looking to keep customers busy browsing the Web and buying products.
Starbucks is no exception with business travelers often going out of their...
Much has been written in the last week or so about Google's “rumored” upcoming mobile virtual network operator play, including the reasons it will not be successful and the challenges Google will face challenging the incumbent mobile operators. As we read each developing story,...
Hotel fined $600,000 for jamming Wi-Fi hot spots
After being fined $600,000 for jamming a guest’s personal Wi-Fi hot spot, Marriott Hotel Services will not press a petition against the Federal Communications Commission, which took a firm position on the issue.
Following an investigation, the FCC...
Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way....
FCC enforcement advisory follows $600,000 Marriott fine
Hotel operators cannot block guests from using Wi-Fi hot spots rather than the hotel’s network, according to a strongly worded “enforcement advisory” published by the Federal Communications Commission.
The advisory comes following an Oct. 3 FCC order that fined Marriott...
