Category: Computers

80211Planet – News: To Market, To Market, with 802.11a Products

NETGEAR Inc. today announced it is shipping an 802.11a pc card and access point, and expects to have a cable/dsl router and wireless pci adapter available in the second quarter of the year. The products are built around the Atheros AR5000 chip set and conform to the 802.11a specification.

This isn’t going anywhere.

Light Reading – The Global Site For Optical Networking

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With the Enron Corp. (NYSE: ENE – message board) scandal slapped on the front page of most major newspapers every day, the bankruptcy of Global Crossing Ltd. (NYSE: GX – message board), a large next-generation carrier, has ignited emotions in the telecom industry (see Global Crossing Falls Overboard ).

Just days after the filing was announced, attendees at the Comnet tradeshow in Washington expressed disgust but a lack of surprise at the news.

“It’s another Enron,” says Alex Jordan who was at the show representing his company, Advanced Research Diagnostic Systems. “They’re a fraud. They were spending money like drunken sailors without any purchase orders. It was mismanagement — period.”

My question is how many stock-market analysts GC had in its pocket, and how that number compares to Enron’s.

This is a good example of why journalism majors shouldn’t review technology, from yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News:

Sonicblue is also promising to launch a free service called “iChannel” by summer that will offer Replay TV 4000 owners a menu of TV programs available for download through the Net.

This all sounds wonderful in theory — we could break the chains put on us by broadcasters and cable networks, sharing programs with one another and finding previously unknown gems online.

But the reality is another future imperfect slap in the face. Today’s high-speed home Internet connections aren’t nearly fast enough for video, especially because almost all providers put a cap on “upload” speeds — the rate at which data moves from your house to the Internet — of a paltry 128 kilobits per second, little more than twice the speed of clunky dial-up phone lines.

Langberg makes multiple errors. First, the 128 Kb cap is only on AT&ampT Cable Internet – DSL from Pac Bell caps uploads at a more reasonable 384 Kb. Second, and more significant, the upload cap doesn’t limit the speed at which a movie can be downloaded from a web site setup to serve video-on-demand. Here, the relevant metric is the download cap, around 1.5Mbs for both DSL and cable. With MPEG4 compression, you will be able to download movies across broadband connections at close to real-time; that is, 2 hours, more or less, for a 2 hour movie.

But this is Silicon Valley, where everybody who understands technology does it for a living, and doesn’t write about it in the newspaper.

Federal regulators to target e-mail that cons consumers

Deceptive junk e-mail is the latest target for federal regulators seeking to purge the Internet of fraud.

The Federal Trade Commission will announce in the next couple of weeks its first effort to prosecute con artists who specifically use e-mail spam to dupe consumers, said Howard Beales, the agency’s director of consumer protection.

“We are interested in a systematic attack on deceptive spam,” Beales said Thursday in an interview. “It’s clear that there’s enough fraudulent and deceptive spam out there that if we got rid of it, a lot of people would be happier, but I don’t think we’ll be in any danger of running out of potential cases.”

Forward spam to the FTC at: [email protected].

A public service announcement from bennett.com.

80211Planet – News: Industry First 802.11g Chip Set Announced

Intersil Corporation today announced the industry’s first chip set designed to support the IEEE 802.11g draft standard. The Intersil PRISM GT chip set, operating in the 2.4 Ghz band, will enable data transmission speeds of up to 54 Mbps with backwards compatibility to 802.11b infrastructures. This news comes roughly two and a half months after the IEEE 802.11g Task Group finally agreed on terms for the hotly debated wireless standard.

Atheros is the company that bet their future on the inability of IEEE 802.11 to agree on a further development of WiFo into higher speeds and alternate spectra. They lost.

New Scientist
A new way of making silicon explode could mean anyone trying to use a stolen laptop or mobile will be confronted by this message: “This machine is stolen and will self-destruct in ten seconds … “.

Until now scientists have only managed to make silicon go bang by mixing it with either liquid oxygen or nitric acid. But Michael Sailor and his colleagues at the University of California in San Diego have found a way to blow up silicon chips using an electrical signal.

We just recently cancelled our AT&T Cable Internet deal and went to DSL with a cool ISP, Sonic.net. Here’s another reason not to patronize AT&T: they want to charge you for something you can do for free today 80211Planet – News: AT&T Broadband Offers Home Nets

The networking is to be installed by the user. In addition to paying $45.95 per month for the basic broadband access and cable modem rental, users must pay $4.95 per month for each additional network node.

The extra nodes are currently free, of course, as long as they’re behind your NAT box. There’s one born every minute, apparently.

Light Reading – The Global Site For Optical Networking

Recent personnel shifts at stealthy router startup Procket Networks Inc. signal that a change in product strategy could be close at hand.

Two days ago, sources say, the company canned roughly 20 staffers, most believed to be engineers, along with up to 30 contract workers. While Procket admits that some employees were let go, it would not give exact numbers. A company spokesperson was also careful not to call the incident a layoff.

“It’s not true; we didn’t have a layoff,” says Suzanne Panopolos, director of marketing for Procket. “We’ve done a workforce realignment. Some people’s skill set didn’t match our plan, and they were managed out. But I wouldn’t call it a layoff. In fact, we are still hiring.”

The realignment and personnel shifts lend credence to the rumor that Procket is shifting its product strategy. Instead of building a core router, the company is now building an edge router, say several venture capital and financial sources.

I interviewed at Procket a few months ago, and I wasn’t impressed.

Now that NSI doesn’t have a monopoly on domain registration, discount brokers are on the scene offering domain names for as little as $5 for a UK domain, or $9 for a American one (ending in .com, .org, .net). 123-reg and Domains for $10 offer basic registration services, and actual DNS management (the thing that directs web surfers and e-mail to tour server) is avaible anywhere from free to whatever you want to pay for it. ZoneEdit and My Domain offer it for free. Are any of these guys going to stay in business?