Newport Media Introduces 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi SoC to Address Rapidly Growing M2M Market

Newport Media, an innovative fabless communications semiconductor company supplying products to the wireless connectivity and broadcast media industry, today announced its first system-on-chip (SoC) product specifically designed to address the market for IEEE 802.11 based-Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connected products.

Built upon Newport Media’s leading NMC1000 802.11n SoC for smartphones and tablets, the NMC1500 is a Wi-Fi® SoC that incorporates a Cortus APS3 32bit RISC microprocessor. The addition of this microprocessor and accompanying ROM and RAM enable the NMC1500 to execute the entire network IP stack without the aid of an external host controller.

“There has been phenomenal growth in the number of Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones over the last several years,” said Mohy Abdelgany, president and chief executive officer of Newport Media. “As impressive as this growth has been, the market for other connected devices - the Internet of things - is forecasted to far exceed that of smartphones and tablets. Newport Media believes that the key to this growth, and the use of Wi-Fi as the preferred method of connection, is the ability to drive down the total cost of connecting to the Internet.”

The NMC1500 drives down the total solution cost by significantly reducing the processing and memory resources required by the terminal’s main micro controller unit (MCU). Requiring less than 4KBytes Flash and 1KBytes of RAM from the main MCU to host its driver software, the NMC1500 allows customers to significantly reduce total bill of materials (BOM) cost by enabling main MCUs that are much lower cost than otherwise would be necessary.

The NMC1500 is available in a 40-pin, 5mm X 5mm quad flat no-lead (QFN) package, requiring the industry’s smallest external BOM. Engineering samples are currently available with volume production scheduled to commence in the second quarter of 2013.

Newport Media’s NMC1500 Wi-Fi SoC for M2M will be demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 25-28, 2013.

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GM bringing WiFi to new vehicles

GM Vice Chairman Stephen Girsky plans to tell the Mobile World Congress conference today in Barcelona, Spain, that AT&T's 4G LTE services will be available next year in most 2015 models in the U.S. and Canada.

Eventually, GM plans to integrate wireless capability into its vehicles in Europe and elsewhere by working with other carriers.

If it meets this declared goal, GM would be the first automaker to offer 4G embedded in all of its cars. German automaker Audi last month said it would offer one model with the technology.

"That's a big commitment by General Motors, which I think is pretty telling about how important the connected vehicle is becoming for the auto industry in general," said Thilo Koslowski, analyst with the technology research firm Gartner. "General Motors is understanding that they need to step up their game."

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Infographic: College Students Need Food, Sleep, and Wi-Fi

An Online Colleges infographic breaks down the reasons students say the love Wi-Fi: because it makes school easier (79 percent) and helps them earn better grades (75 percent). In-classroom access gives 44 percent of students an added push to begin research for an assignment before the class has ended.

The Web is important outside of the lecture hall, too. When searching for a place to hang out with friends, work on a paper, or grab some grub, many students remain on the hunt for free Wi-Fi.

But powerful and portable Internet access is more than another luxury of higher education; it offers American universities a means to retain their preeminence in international research, Online Colleges said. Losing out to academic communities in other countries could have "profound implications for the American economy and society," the site said.

According to ABI Research, an increasing number of universities worldwide are investing more in Wi-Fi access points and controllers than ever before. In 2007, colleges collectively dropped $137 million for wireless Internet. This year, ABI projected upwards of $837 million — a 611 percent increase in six years.

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FCC Moves to Ease Wireless Congestion (in US)

Congress has mandated that the F.C.C. undertake the expansion of unlicensed spectrum, and the Obama administration has urged the freeing up or sharing of airwaves currently allocated to the federal government. Under the proposal, up to 195 megahertz of spectrum will be made available, the F.C.C. said, increasing by as much as 35 percent the total amount of airwaves available for unlicensed use in the 5-gigahertz spectrum band. But various government agencies, including a division of the Commerce Department, have warned against allowing consumer uses to interfere with current government applications.

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Google expands free Wi-Fi in The Dalles

Google said this morning that it’s invested another $50,000 to expand free Wi-Fi in The Dalles, where the company has a $1.3 billion data center.

Google set up its free Wi-Fi network in 2011 with $130,000 from Google and $17,000 from QLife, a collaborative agency representing multiple public agencies in The Dalles. QLife’s total investment is now $70,000.

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Boingo to Acquire Endeka, Expand to Military Bases and Federal Training Centers

Boingo Wireless (Nasdaq:WIFI), the Wi-Fi industry's leading provider of software and services worldwide, today announced that it has signed a merger agreement to acquire Endeka, a provider of Wi-Fi, VoIP and IPTV services to military bases and federal law enforcement training facilities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"Endeka's military specialization focuses on large populations of enlisted men and women who are Internet-hungry users and are clamoring for high-quality broadband," said David Hagan, President and CEO of Boingo Wireless. "Their portfolio of venues and management team are natural additions to our managed network business."

"Boingo's experience and resources will help us scale to meet the opportunity ahead of us," said Tim Rout, President and founder of Endeka. "Extending the value of our broadband subscription services with global Wi-Fi roaming capabilities will further differentiate our offering to military bases and federal law enforcement centers. The combined services will contribute significantly to morale and welfare of the troops, wherever they are."

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Mobile devices will get next-gen Wi-Fi in early second half, Qualcomm says

Smartphones and tablets with the emerging Wi-Fi wireless networking technology, 802.11ac, will arrive early in the second half of this year, a Qualcomm executive said.

Mobile devices based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 series processors will be the company's first to get 802.11ac Wi-Fi, said Murthy Renduchintala, executive vice president of Qualcomm Technologies, ahead of the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona.

The new Wi-Fi standard in Snapdragon will increase peak data transfer rates, but at the same time enable tablets and smartphones to retain battery life similar to mobile devices with 802.11 b/g/n technology, Renduchintala said. The theoretical data transfer rates for 802.11ac is expected to be three to four times faster than that of 802.11n, which are in mobile devices, PCs and routers today.

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Building Meraki’s cloud controller architecture

WiFi & NoWire News's insight:

Meraki is an interesting company. They took a very different approach to the Wi-Fi market. Instead of concentrating on speeds and feeds, like many other companies, their major innovation and idea was to build a cloud controller for their products and make the refinement of that interface the focus of their efforts. This has resulted in a highly customer focused company. I admit I’ve taken a while to warm up to their offering, but I do see its value for customers and I admire what they have built. Meraki has participated in three Wireless Field Days. They chose this time to give us an in depth look at how they designed their distributed cloud based infrastructure. It was fascinating on several levels for me. First, it was really a ballsy move to open up and show the world what they had built. Next it answered directly some lingering criticisms that I have heard about their company using customer data in nefarious ways. It also showed exactly what the value proposition was that made Cisco spend $1.2 billion on this company and indeed from the brilliance displayed here I can see it was worth that price. Last, but not least, the technical details that went into building their platform and how they solved the various problems they encountered are simply a spell binding story.

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Nokia Siemens Targets Carriers' Wi-fi, Small-cell Rollout Challenges

"A lot of this stuff was just overtalked before products became available to start with," Ovum analyst Daryl Schoolar said. "There's been a humongous hype factor around small cells," though not with carrier Wi-Fi, he said. Still, Schoolar expects product shipments and early commercial deployments of small cells to start picking up in the second half of this year. There's no urgency now, but continued growth in mobile use will make so-called hetnets, or heterogenous networks, necessary in the future, Schoolar believes.

As carriers such as AT&T prepare for planned small-cell rollouts and Wi-Fi integration, vendors are making rollout and management part of their pitch.

On Tuesday, Nokia Siemens Networks said its product push at MWC will include new small cells and a package of offerings for integrating Wi-Fi into mobile operators' networks, both tied in with the company's Flexi Zone heterogeneous network architecture.

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Operators Set Stage for International Wi-fi Roaming

Mobile operators have come to see public Wi-Fi as an important part of their networks as their customers generate increasing volumes of data traffic. But processes for users to connect to and roam on to Wi-Fi networks are still fragmented, according to the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA).

By defining a blue print for Wi-Fi roaming, carriers will better understand how to integrate their networks to support roaming with greater consistency and efficiency, the WBA said on Wednesday.

Following the initial launch of the Interoperability Compliancy Program (ICP) in December, operators have done a self-assessment analysis to gauge their own readiness. They looked at areas such as authentication, network discovery and selection, access security, information exchange and charging models.

Based on that, the WBA has been able to create a set of compliance guidelines, offering different support levels to operators, it said. The guidelines will simplify network aggregation and global roaming, benefitting operators and consumers, according to Bjorn Thorngren, vice president international markets at Boingo.

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T-Mobile’s First LTE Mobile Hotspot Pictured In Press Image Glory

While we’re still waiting patiently for T-Mobile’s LTE network to go live, we’re already starting to make a list of the LTE ready devices that will be available come launch day.

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TriQuint Enables Gigabit Wi-Fi and 4G Coexistence For Next-Generation Smartphones and Tablets

The company has captured smartphone design wins with its two 5 GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi RF modules, as well as its new 2.4 GHz product. Thanks to advances in output power technology, all three TriConnect™ Wi-Fi modules provide extended operating ranges when compared with earlier products. For Wi-Fi users, that means the freedom of wireless connectivity across longer distances.

Rounding out the company’s expanding WLAN product line are two new specialty 4G / Wi-Fi coexistence filters. These high-performance filters serve as electronic traffic guards to keep signals in the crowded 2.4GHz spectrum isolated from one another. They leverage TriQuint’s advanced bulk acoustic wave (BAW) technology to address some of the industry’s toughest filtering challenges.

“TriQuint is the only RF supplier that is currently delivering all three WLAN device components — the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz front-end modules as well as multiple variants of coexistence filters — to provide a superior consumer experience,” explained Shane Smith, Vice President of Global Marketing for Mobile Devices at TriQuint. “We’re enabling 802.11ac gigabit speeds and solving Wi-Fi / LTE coexistence problems simultaneously, for smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices.”

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Sands Expo Unveils 2.25 Million Square Feet of High Bandwith Wi-Fi Connections

The Sands Expo & Convention Center is one of the busiest convention and meetings properties in the United States, with many thousands of attendees often at just one of the venue’s several annual events all wanting to be connected and stay connected at the same time.

The challenge was, if let’s say 5,000 attendees were at a keynote and the speaker wanted everyone to answer a question through an audience response system, how could the Sands make sure they delivered as a venue in this moment?

Justin Herrman, executive director of IT at the Sands, said a lot of the high-performance wireless networks the venue considered to solve this issue just weren’t up to par, until they looked into Xirrus.

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London Overground passengers get free Wi-Fi

Free Wi-Fi is now being offered at 50 stations on the London Overground network, including many on the section running through east London.

Provided by The Cloud it will allow passengers to use their mobile devices to browse the internet, use social networks and get real-time travel information from Transport for London.

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Hotspot 2.0 guru talks Wi-Fi roaming, new job at Ruckus

Stephenson is optimistic about the future of Wi-Fi roaming, which should help carriers offload the growing volumes of data from their cellular networks and keep offering the roaming capability that subscribers are used to. He knows how much work has been required to make that possible, having been involved in several parts of the effort.

The Hotspot 2.0 group built on IEEE 802.11u, a mechanism for automatic handoffs under the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard that was developed starting in 2005, another project Stephenson was involved in. The 802.11u specification gives Wi-Fi network operators a standard way to automatically tell mobile devices about their roaming relationships, Stephenson said. With that information, a device can join the network using whatever credentials it may have for one of those networks.

Hotspot 2.0 combined that capability with other components including security, defining a way to protect all sessions on a hotspot using standard Wi-Fi encryption. Last June, the Wi-Fi Alliance used the complete Hotspot 2.0 standard to set up its Passpoint certification program, in which it tests and certifies Wi-Fi devices for interoperability under the standard.

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The WiSE Article Series: Wi-Fi Subtleties Explained (Channel Bonding)

In this third installment of the WiSE article series from AirTight Networks, channel bonding is considered. Some surprising results will cause you to rethink your network design plans and possibly how you will implement newer 802.11 technologies.

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School buses to get Wi-Fi

Kokomo-Center Schools plans to equip all 65 of its school buses with wireless Internet access by the end of the school year. The plan is part of nearly $200,000 in transportation upgrades that also include a GPS tracking system for all 65 district buses. Installing the Internet service will cost $125,000, and annual service rates are $5,000, district spokesman Dave Barnes said Wednesday. Most of that annual fee is covered by a federal grant, he said.

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