2 front-runners vie for Houston Wi-Fi project

Houston moves forward with two finalists: The city will consider EarthLink and a firm with local ties, Convergent Broadband. The network would span 600 square miles.

Google Invests in Meraki

Meraki Networks is building a business off of wireless mesh hardware and software based on the MIT's Roofnet project. Google has been very interested in the Mountain View-based startup as a way to extend its WiFi network coverage indoors.

Booming Business of Muni Wi-Fi

Building out municipal Wi-Fi networks has become abooming and attactive business -- both in the US and internationally -- according to VON magazine.

The Cloud seeks to cover Europe with muni WiFi networks

The Cloud, a company that has established WiFi networks in 16 European cities, including the City of London and Amsterdam, says it will seeking to expand its operatons across the continent over the next two years. According to the company, they are in discussions with over 30 cities, including Stuttgart (Germany). They also have received RFPs from cities like Paris and Prague. Obviously, The Cloud is not the only player in the citywide wireless sector in Europe, but it looks like they are trying to emulate EarthLink in stamping themselves as the leading provider.

Alexandria, Virginia chooses EarthLink for municipal wireless network

Alexandria, Virginia chose EarthLink as the winner of the bid to provide the city with a municipal wireless broadband network that covers 16 square miles (41 square kilometers). The network is open to other service providers on a wholesale basis. EarthLink will deploy Tropos mesh nodes, Motorola's MOTOwi4 portfolio of products, including its Canopy high-speed backhaul and Wi-Fi mesh network equipment.

Waiting on mobile WiMAX

Too many missing details put this wireless broadband technology into the wait-and-see category, according to John Cox of Network World.

New and (Soon) Improved

The Wall Street Journal offers a primer on fixed and mobile WiMAX, with quotes from Clearwire and Alvarion, among other players.

Ruckus Beamforming Upgrade

Ruckus will demo a "smart" consumer-level Wi-Fi system based on next-generation 802.11n technology at CES in January. Current products based on draft 802.11n specification allow devices to transmit at speeds greater than 70 Mbps, but they all have problems sustaining the high performance at far distances, challenging locations or in noisy environments. The Ruckus technology is said to reject noise and delivers consistent throughput regardless of location and device placement. "Patent-pending BeamFlex-N is a dynamically-configurable, multi-polarized antenna system capable of forming thousands of unique antenna patterns to reject interference and focus transmit energy in various directions and orientations. BeamFlex-N selects the best antenna configurations for each packet by identifying the optimum path for each transmit radio and steering signals away from obstacles and interference."

Longer Range Municipal WiFi

"InspiAir says their technology can enable full throughput of 11 Mbps over standard 802.11b, and an extended range up to 5 km (Point-to-Multipoint) and 40km (Point-to-Point) using 100 mW radios. But there's not much to go on." Wavion, in constrast, is represented as a company with a shipping product. Mati is mentioned as a pioneer in the field.