FORUMS: Official NWR WiFi Night - December 5

The day is decided on and it’s Friday, December 5. Now it’s instance to vote on which game we’ll play. Hit up that link to cast your vote!

Virgin America to enable WiFi on flights by April

Great news for internet addicts all across America - Virgin America has answered our prayers, and delivered the best news we could have hoped for; that they plan to have free WiFi available on all of their flights by April. This of course means that we can now look forward to keeping up on our e-mails, streaming our favourite music and checking the latest news, views and reviews on Geek.com whilst on the move.

Free WiFi on flights is great news for us all and was inevitably going to happen at some point, and I can’t say that I am surprised that it was Virgin that got there first. Also, from the report delivered by Engadget’s Ryan Block, who was one of the lucky few to be aboard the inaugural flight, the service is surprisingly decent. He quoted a consistent download rate of 1Mbps, and an upload rate of 200Kbps. Impressive, considering the entire plane has a total connection of 3.6Mbps.

It seems that Virgin have really put the effort in to the service, including such features as bandwidth shaping to ensure that everyone gets a fair slice of the action. Of course, if you are the only one using the service you will have free reign to max out the connection, but if a fellow passenger decides to fire up a torrent client, you will not have your connection choked. One of the reported limitations is that voice and video chat have been blocked in order to maintain a calmer, quieter atmosphere on board.

The service has been named ‘GoGo’, and represents a major step for…

Metro WiFi firm BelAir reaches inside the walls with latest gear

BelAir Networks is known for powering the biggest public WiFi networks in North America: Minneapolis, Toronto, and Cablevision’s in-progress New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut network for its cable data subscribers.

That might make today’s announcement by BelAir of the BelAir20, an indoor 802.11n access point, seem a little odd. For a firm that’s known for having its nodes strung outdoors, why point inwards? “Because our customers asked us to, which is a good place to be in,” said Stephen Rayment, the chief technical officer and BelAir’s co-founder.

“Over and over again, we got requests from all these service providers customers: ‘BelAir, it’s not just outdoors, it’s not just beaming indoors from outdoors, there’s a totally indoor component to this as well,’” he said. Rayment said the growing service provider industry, which builds WiFi hotspots and hotzones for hotels, conference centers, hospitals, and mass transit, has specific needs and price points that BelAir thinks it can fill.

Rayment acknowledged the industry his firm is in has changed focus enormously since the collapse of many city-wide wireless proposals, and the success in Minneapolis is a rare exception. “It’s now all about targeted coverage as opposed to the silly stuff people were asking us to do three or four years ago: 95 percent of the metropolitan area on day one,” he said. “This outdoor WiFi stuff is still tough to do: a lot of the hurdles you have to go over to deploy indoors is less,” and th…

In-Flight WiFi - Finally Taking Off

Virgin America looks set to be the first US commercial airline to have with fleet-wide WiFi up and running. The company said yesterday that it plans to offer in-flight WiFi to all passengers by the middle of next year. Yesterday the airline showed off its service, provided by Aircell’s Gogo, by streaming live YouTube videos to passengers on-board a flight 35,000 feet over the West Coast of America.

Aircell’s service is a departure from other in-flight data connections which connect via satellite to the internet. Instead the Gogo service relies on antennas attached to the planes to pick up a data signal from 92 ground-based hubs. The data is delivered at 3Mbps via a modified version of Qualcomm’s EVDO system.

According to Aircell, routers stationed throughout the planes will ensure that almost all passengers can connect up their devices. The speed of connection is maintained, the company says, via a mixture of on-board signal compression and caching techniques.

The Gogo WiFi service is currently available for US$12.95 on three American Airlines flights, which run between New York and San Francisco, Miami, and Los Angeles. Air Canada and Delta are also in line to offer WiFi to their passengers, though they haven’t said when this will happen.

In-flight Wi-Fi service is already will available on one Virgin aircraft. Passengers on this plane will find Gogo cards in the seatback pocket in front of them, and are encouraged to employ their mute buttons or headphones and t…

Nokia slips out 5 megapixel 6260 slide with AGPS - first for S40 devices

Peeped in spy pics on these Interwebs since June, Nokia just went official with the 6260 slide. Unfortunately, “slide” in this case reveals a numeric keypad not a QWERTY. Otherwise, it’s pretty much an iterative step beyond the 6220 classic. As such, we’re looking at a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens, WiFi, and HSDPA/HSUPA data to quickly share photos and video on Nokia’s Ovi service with the promise of support for other photo and video sharing sites you might actually use. The 6260 slide also features Nokia Maps riding AGPS — a first for a mass market, Series 40 device. Ships in early 2009 for about €299 before taxes and carrier subsidies, naturally.

Update: Detailed specs just released show a 2.4-inch, 320 x 480 pixel display on this 15.4-mm thick slider with quad-band GSM/EDGE and tri-band UMTS radios and microSD expansion.

Nokia’s QWERTY slider E75 spotted in the wild again

In the “form factors Nokia hasn’t fully explored, but probably should” bucket, side-sliding QWERTY candybars ranks pretty dang high on the list, so we’re delighted to see that — as far as we can tell, anyway — Espoo’s still hard at work banging out the details of its E75. We’re told to expect WiFi (naturally), a 3.2-megapixel camera, and a 2.4-inch display, but more importantly, you’ve got a generous keyboard that should give the S740 a serious run for its money. We’re a bit concerned about usability on a totally flush keyboard like this (E90 anyone?), but hey, maybe that’s the reason it hasn’t been announced yet, right?

The Virtual Machine Tsunami

Hughes Brings WiMAX + WiFi + Satellite Backhaul to Amazonas Hughes do Brasil has won a public tender and signed a 36-month contract with PRODAM - input Processing Company of the State of Amazonas, to deploy a turnkey broadband network solution that combines WiMAX and WiFi access technologies with satellite backhaul.

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