Jardin notes that Virgin is thinking about what gets cached on planes. I would note that the idea of onboard media and caching servers is a great one, because it means that passengers could ostensibly stream or purchase downloadable digital content; and that whenever an airplane lands, its servers could automatically suck in at 802.11n speeds from a gate-mounted access point all the latest data to cache, including video.

On the cost of fuel to carry the Wi-Fi gear--probably a total of 200 pounds of dead weight and drag, based on information that Aircell and others have been giving out--I may have been close tot the mark when I suggested it was $50 for a cross country flight a few days ago.

The excellent Scott McCartney, author of The Middle Seat column in The Wall Street Journal, ran down the numbers on 10-June, and he says LAX-JFK costs about $500 per passenger when all the costs are figured out. But that includes all fuel divided by average passenger count: that is, the weight of the plane, everything in it, and its drag are all contributors.

That means that an added couple of passengers due to the availability of Wi-Fi; their willingness or the overall willingness to pay slightly more for the flight (which would be even fuller if more people want on); and the airlines' cut of a dozen or sessions per flight could clearly outweigh the gas cost.

Zipit gives away text messaging for a year, changes prices, options: The Zipit Wireless Messenger 2 (Z2) was introduced in Dec. 2007 with a number of interesting features for a messaging appliance targeted at teens--and their fretting parents. With no Web portal, the $150 device included unlimited Wi-Fi on Wayport's McDonald's network (now nearly 10,000 locations), and support for popular IM clients. It also included SMS with major cell carries, charging $5 per month for 1,500 incoming and 1,500 outgoing messages. Uptake must have been poor, as the manufacturer announced today that purchases until 31-July-2008 would include a year of free text messages. The company also modified its plan without noting that fact, increasing messages to a "reasonable personal usage" of 5,000 incoming and 5,000 outgoing messages per month. There are no overage charges. The service will now cost $30 per year instead of $5 per month for new purchasers starting 1-August-2008. That's a 50-percent price reduction (over $5 times 12), but it's often much cheaper to bill annually in advance.

Wi-Fi Alliance cited in WSJ as model for multipartner alliance: An interesting analysis in the Wall Street Journal's Business Insight section points to the Wi-Fi Alliance standards based, no-company-on-top approach as one that led it to win out through both technology and organization over other standards that might have taken precedence. I've been stunned over the years how a group that has a board comprised of the most powerful and competitive interests in this market segment, and which has hundreds of much smaller members, has managed to keep alive the notion of interoperability for the greater good of the industry and customers. 802.11n's long delay certainly threatened harmony--especially with some ugly proprietary slap-ons to 802.11g--but the alliance continues to keep the technology in equilibrium, while still allowing individual companies to differentiate their products with little difficulty.

Although several other quick-service restaurants like McDonald's lack any comprehensive Wi-Fi plan--Burger King, Wendy's, and Subway to name three of the largest--Wayport is locked out of working with direct competitors. This opens the potential for another firm to handle a several-thousand-location network. Wayport has worked with both McDonald's corporate-owned stores (about 2/3rds of stores in the U.S.), as well as reaching out to franchisees, who Lowden noted pay a predetermined flat rate for the service via McDonald's. "It's made them incredibly efficient to be able to offer this to their franchisees at one price, instead of variable pricing," he noted. Wayport acts as the layer between various telecom providers, applications and services, and the stores.

Wayport provides several kinds of back-office services, although credit-card processing was the first thing htey rolled out. They've extended to remote video feeds for security, Redbox DVD rental systems that are found in some McDonald's, and kiosks used for job applications. Lowden said Wayport offers things as straightforward but critical as a dial-up fail-safe when a broadband connection drops.

Wayport also manages AT&T's hotspot network, which puts them in the unwiring seat for the 7,000-odd Starbucks stores that will converted from T-Mobile to AT&T service during 2008. Wayport was once the clear leader in the hotspot builder market, with T-Mobile in the second position. Now, Wayport will be operating through a direct contract or management agreement over 18,000 hotspots in the U.S.; T-Mobile will likely be the second biggest with a couple thousand locations (Borders and FedEx/Kinko's tops among them). The No. 3 player is hard to figure. Panera?

I've been predicting for some time that media on the edge--music, videos, movies, and games stored on servers on the local Wi-Fi network--will be the next big development in venue-oriented Wi-Fi, with Starbucks likely far in the lead. Lowden wouldn't comment on any specific plans in the works, of course, but said generally, "Storing and caching all that content on the edge...hasn't been leveraged in the past, but it will be in the future to create a very unique experience." At Barnes & Noble, Wayport caches some multimedia data that's available to customers in the stores.

The advantage for in-store media storage is that you can leverage the speed of the local network, and add additional access points to distribute network load. The choke point is no longer the Internet connection, but local network speed. I expect--though Wayport, AT&T, and Starbucks haven't said it--that Starbucks infrastructure will be all 802.11n for this reason, likely with both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz support for the best throughput in the higher-frequency band for media transactions. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you could only buy movies via 5 GHz.)

Lowden also noted that the proliferation of mobile devices with Wi-Fi built in have led to them reaching out to venues that wouldn't have made sense for them to work with previously, and for unlikely candidates to reach out to them, too. Wayport is now working with a number of healthcare facilities that, while they have their own network infrastructure, wanted to outsource public access Wi-Fi (whether they choose to charge or underwrite it), and certain applications that they're not as experienced with running themselves.

A little history: In 2001 and again in 2004, the heat seemed to be on the public side of Wi-Fi: lots of money to be made, ostensibly, lots of partnerships and venues to be built, and an overcrowded supply of infrastructure builders. The year before, Wayport looked to be an also-ran in the hotspot provider business.

Despite being one of the earliest firms to put Ethernet and then Wi-Fi into hotels, and build out hotspots in airports; and despite their survival of the first hotspot meltdown in 2001 during the dotcom crash and brief venture capital shortage; and despite their early entrance into allowing wholesale pricing for hotspot aggregators; the firm seemed about to be eclipsed by apparently deep-pocketed Cometa (with AT&T, IBM, and Intel in various capital and support roles), Toshiba's mom-and-pop focused turnkey system, and T-Mobile, which had the Starbucks contract. What a difference a year makes.

Cometa, Toshiba, and Wayport contended for the contract to build out back-office and public-access service at McDonald's in the U.S., and Wayport won. Within a few weeks, Toshiba passed its few hundred locations to Cometa, which shut its doors in May 2004. Wayport, meanwhile, had cooked up a strategy for McDonald's that it announced later that month.

Their approach involved a fixed-rate charged for unlimited access by retail network partners for all the locations in their pool. This meant that partners had a fixed cost, instead of a per-session cost, and Wayport could obtain specific revenue even before usage by a partner ramped up. Wayport hasn't discussed the details of this arrangement in depth since, but has partnered with Sony with its Mylo, Nintendo with its DS game player, and ZipIt with its wireless messaging appliance.

The McDonald's deal also apparently gave Wayport a way to extend its work with SBC-later-AT&T; Wayport had earlier in 2004 became the managed-services contractor for SBC to build out The UPS Store/Mailboxes Etc. nationwide. (UPS dropped AT&T as its partner in mid-2007, although that didn't appear to have anything to do with Wayport's role.)

AT&T through Wayport developed its large resold/managed footprint that incorporated resale of Wayport's McDonald's locations with the UPS Store and a few hundred other managed locations, including a handful of airports. The Cingular acquisition of AT&T Wireless put more airports in SBC's hands, too. (SBC was once the 60 percent majority owner of Cingular; when SBC and BellSouth, the other owner, merged that put the newly rebranded AT&T in charge of Cingular which it relabeled as AT&T. Confusing, huh?)

When I talked to Bruzzo, he was clearly focused on how to improve the culture of the stores, with technology being one tool. He talked about connectivity being "a core part of the Starbucks experience" (that's Experience with a [tm]), and that he wanted Starbucks customers to be able to "tell stories" about coffee, music, and other things. That implies a kind of online medium for discussion and interaction that doesn't yet exist, but that is more likely to happen with Bruzzo's expanded role.

Bruzzo had already tipped me to the fact that Starbucks has caching media servers in its stores; that's how the Starbucks iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store combination technology works with iTunes, the iPhone, and the iPod touch in the several markets in which that's offered. (Those plans never advanced much after the initial launch, by the way: Seattle, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area got service, but Chicago and Los Angeles are still listed as "coming soon," and other metropolitan areas are now "by the end of 2008," which would tie in neatly with Starbucks' other plans.)

With caching servers, content is pushed to the edge. Retrieving a 2 GB movie from iTunes thus becomes a matter of a few minutes to a laptop (or even faster if 802.11n networks are being deployed by AT&T), rather than 30 to 120 minutes over a typical home broadband connection. Stop in to Starbucks and fill up--with media. Neat, huh?

Back in February, Bruzzo described how the company has a unique relationship with its customers, who are already bringing their digital lifestyle into the stores, allowing hyper-local conversations to take place. "Starbucks is uniquely positioned to provide that kind of very local opportunity. It's what we do. The beginning of that is what we do today when we curate music, and books." The new AT&T relationship, he said, "gives us a landscape to continue to experiemnt with those kinds of things even at a local level."

As for the kinds of devices used, "We shouldn't be limited in our thoughts about connected devices to just communications devices; they should be PSPs [PlayStation Portables] and cameras." I expect that we will see a lot of change, much of workshopped in Seattle-area stores, in the digital side of Starbucks this year.

I will also repeat my expectation that the launch of a 3G iPhone will involve a Starbucks tie-in, and that the date for the first Starbucks AT&T markets to go live with AT&T in charge will coincide with the release of the 3G iPhone. The timing is too close to be coincidental. (Rumors today are that the 3G iPhone will be announced at the June 9 developers conference that Apple runs. I'll be at that event's keynote.)

Bruzzo has been with the company for not much over a year, coming off a few years as head of communications (talking, not technology) at Amazon. In January 2008, he was boosted to chief technology and chief information officer, as well as being appointed a vice president. That's a pretty fast rise; he must have, you know, a few good ideas. He's behind My Starbucks Idea, the site the company is using to let its customers give it free, valuable advice. One of the fascinating, Cluetrained elements of that site is the transparency: ideas that are submitted can be viewed by other visitors to the site, and voted upon. Suggestion boxes are usually locked tight, whether in the real world or on the Net. Some posts have thousands of votes and hundreds of comments.

Today's announcement also included a note that Starbucks is selling its Hear Music division to its partner in the venture, Concord Music Group. Hear signed Paul McCartney among other musicians; Starbucks will keep working with Concord, so this might not be quite as big a change in direction as a change in its internal focus. This is yet another move of many by company head Howard Schultz, who took charge of the firm again, and started getting rid of top executives, reorganizing divisions, and making announcements about massive changes in the stores, notably replacing its barista-hiding super-automated coffeemakers with shorter, more controllable systems, and tearing out the stinking breakfast sandwich ovens.

I’m sooooo excited about this year’s event. This is the 6th year our company, Carolina Advanced Digital, has hosted the event, along with our partners. What started as a small customer appreciation event has morphed into a full-fledged conference.

Last year we moved the event from a small local country club to the Grandover Resort & Conference Center in Greensboro, NC. My bosses (aka parents) were a bit skeptical at first, but the event turned out great, with over 80 attendees from NC and surrounding states. This year, we’re making another leap of faith by extending the event to 2 full days (yikes!).

At our Hot Topics Conference, we identify what we and our customers think are the current ‘hot” IT and security topics and we plan the event and presentations around that. This year, we have an amazing line up, including technical breakout sessions, a special keynote, directors reception, industry expert panels, half-day technical workshops and (of course) the Golf Tourney.

I’m especially excited about our panels- we have a NAC Industry Panel with Mauricio Sanchez (ProCurve), Lisa Lorenzin (Juniper), Patrick Wheeler (Symantec), moderated by fellow security blogger buddy Alan Shimel of StillSecure. Our other panel is participating in the Hot Topics Roundtable discussion, led by John McCumber with a panel comprised of industry experts, technical gurus and even legal expertise to weigh in on Web 2.0 issues. It’s going to be awesome!

Here’s an overview of our 2008 IT Hot Topics Conference:

Event Dates & Location
IT Hot Topics Conference 2008
Grandover Resort & Conference Center
Greensboro, NC

May 15th & 16th, 2008
Thursday 9:30am - 5:00pm*
Friday 8:30am - 4:00pm
Register Online: http://www.HotTopicsConference.com

What topics are on tap for 2008?

2008 Features
• 12 Breakout Sessions
• Half-day Technical Workshops
• Special CISSP Prep Sessions
• Directors Reception Thursday Night*
• Special Keynote
• NAC Industry Experts Panel
• Hot Topics Roundtable
• Earn CPE Credits at Hot Topics
• Hot Topics Golf Tourney (optional)
• Win a Nintendo Wii Gaming System!

2008 Topics

• Security Visualization
• Web 2.0 in Enterprise
• Application Acceleration
• Network Management & Logging
• Data Leakage Prevention & Encryption
• NAC (Network Access Control)
• Wireless Trends & 802.11n
• Email Security for 2008
• Virtualization

Our 2008 partners include: ProCurve Networking, Juniper, Symantec, Winmagic, Packeteer, SonicWALL, StillSecure, splunk>, NetApp, Littler and ISSA.

You can check out the event website at www.HotTopicsConference.com. Aside from the Golf Tourney, the event is FREE for qualified attendees.

# # #

I started Wi-Fi Networking News under the less euphonious name 802.11b Networking News back in April 2001 after spending months researching what became a front-cover article in Circuits, the then-separate tech section of The New York Times. The first post is still live, as are all the nearly 4,800 others.

(I had help: Nancy Gohring wrote part-time for WNN for a couple years when we had a bit more traffic; she took a full-time job for and still works for IDG News Service, which I am now slightly affiliated with through my new hardware regular blog at PC World.)

The site as it appeared in April 2001

Since starting, I've covered extensively the growth of the hotspot market, the rise and fall and rise again of municipal networks, the change in consumer equipment from expensive and slow to cheap and fast, the growth of the enterprise market, the phoenix-like in-flight calling/broadband market, and, more recently, cellular and WiMax technology.

Enterprise coverage was once a central part of Wi-Fi Networking News, but it became clear a few years ago that as equipment was redesigned to be integral to the enterprise, that my ability cover and test gear was too limited, and the need for true enterprise experience was necessary to write about it. This disappointed a lot of enterprise readers and equipment makers who wanted me to keep writing about corporate hardware.

The focus over the last few years on municipal Wi-Fi was not just necessary--few people besides me were covering it in depth--but also represented the only significant news in the Wi-Fi world outside of the development of 802.11n/Draft N gear. It's only recently that WiMax, cellular data, spectrum auctions, and in-flight broadband have picked back up to become stories that you all want to know about--because they've become real technology you might work with. As the city-wide Wi-Fi arc played itself out, I'm covering it less because there's less of interest; it's going to become routine and the province of city CTOs and CIOs.

While writing this site, I try to have opinions, but not an agenda. I try to keep an open mind, though I do descend into cynicism, often well founded, but perhaps too readily employed. I'll try my best to keep myself honest and cheery in the years to come.

The biggest trends I expect to see develop in 2008 to 2010 are in these key areas:

Appliances. I expected 2007 to be the year that Wi-Fi was in everything: cameras, games, phones, and tchotchkes. Instead, Wi-Fi has only gradually spread, with a few gaming consoles, and many handsets and smartphones gaining or extending their use. It may be that I missed a trend: cameras in phones may become so good by 2009, that we don't need a camera with Wi-Fi at all (Wired reports today on several 5 megapixel cameraphones shown at CTIA this week). It's also likely that if WiMax gets a foothold, we'll get handhelds probably in 2009 that sport high-speed connections for all kinds of high-bandwidth purposes, like live uploading of streaming video.

Video over wireless. I look at this category as not just another instance of broadcast, like Qualcomm's MediaFLO which is really TV to the cell phone; rather, we'll see ways in which Wi-Fi, WiMax, and cellular data are used to push stored and streaming media to all sorts of devices. I look to Starbucks, Apple, and AT&T to lead the way on cached media in stores that can be filled up at local network speeds: download a full-length, HD movie in a few minutes in a Starbucks from the iTunes cache rather than 3 hours at home.

Radio over Wi-Fi. Internet radio via Wi-Fi music players seems like a trend--buying a boombox you can tune in wherever you are, or using a handheld MP3 players--but even with many devices, I don't feel a sense that it's caught on quite yet. If Apple puts Internet radio over Wi-Fi into new iPhone/iPod touch firmware, it'll likely take off; Nokia allows a third-party program for its N series for Internet radio over Wi-Fi already.

Cellular data/mobile broadband. I admit to being wrong about the potential of cell data, due to the overhype from the carriers and the horrible pricing relative to throughput and availability of the 1xRTT and GPRS systems. As cell data networks have matured into true broadband--slow, but broadband--media, the hype has lessened, disclosure has improved (no more "unlimited" usage, eh?), and the value has increased. We'll see more of the same with faster flavors of GSM networking and WiMax's deployment. The networks will become faster and cheaper and less restrictive.

For a good sense of what people are still reading on Wi-Fi Networking News, here are the titles of the top 10 articles since I switched to Google Analytics in Sept. 2006:

• Change Your Linksys WRT54G Admin Password Right Now!
• WPA Cracking Proof of Concept Available
• Weakness in Passphrase Choice in WPA Interface
• Most Wireless Speakers Don't Live Up to Goal
• Best Wi-Fi Signal Finder Yet
• Linksys Latest Models: Your Experience?
• T-Mobile Loses Starbucks; AT&T Becomes Wi-Fi Hotspot Giant
• Editorial: Don't Buy Draft N
• WPA for Free under Windows 2000
• The L in Linksys WRT54GL Stands for Linux

A few observations. Security remains key in people's minds: Security articles from 2004 are still being heavily viewed in 2008. Linksys is definitely high in people's minds for particular problems: Change the default password, buy a Linux (not VxWorks) embedded router, report problems with various models. Oddly, the wireless speakers and wireless printers articles are short stubs that are pure blog: they link to longer articles elsewhere. The Best Wi-Fi Signal Finder Yet story is 4 years old and still gets 1,000 page views a month. The invisible hand--nay, the long tail!--works in archives as it does everywhere.

Will I still be pounding away 7 years from now on this site? That seems about as unlikely as the last 7 years, which means it will probably happen. Traffic has dropped off over the years from the time in which Wi-Fi was a great (and expensive) mystery to today when there's more information and less confusion about it. As long as there are any questions to be answered, I'll keep writing.

The same day Julio's article appeared, his colleague Leslie Brooks Suzukamo filed an article about the challenges of leaves, something that's a big issue in Minneapolis, covered with the leafy menaces: 200,000 of the suckers that Gipper said caused pollution (as an allergy sufferer, I agree with him). Trees leaf out and reduce signal propagation, and that's something that US Internet Wireless has had to deal with. They upped their density of nodes from 26 to 42, which appears to be about the norm for both starting and ending points in muni netwrk planning.

This article goes into a little more depth about the problems with dead areas due to absent or problematic utility poles (it's always about the poles). USIW plans to install some of its own poles to fill in those areas.

Nearby, Steve Alexander notes a pioneering wireless network at the University of Minnesota has become obsolete. The U of M is replacing its 7-year-old 802.11b network with an 802.11n system. As is true in most older networks, they've got a melange of gear that's a headache to keep running and in sync. They'll spend $3.5m to cover about 40 percent of the campus with N, replacing a current similar coverage area. They may expand the network and add VoIP in the future.

The university and USIW are discussing interconnecting their networks for roaming.