Clearwire and Sprint have apparently reconsidered their decision to abandon a joint WiMax venture. Last fall the two companies ceased work on a network build-out that would have brought wireless connectivity to even remote parts of the country. Now, with a recent infusion of cash reported at $2 billion from Intel, a major WiMax supporter, the partnership between the two service providers is back on.

Tags: Wi-Fi

Beginning this spring, more than 7,000 Starbucks across the U.S. will offer AT&T Wi-Fi service. For existing AT&T broadband and U-verse customers, this means free Wi-Fi when visiting a Starbucks store.

Starbucks cardholders will be eligible for two hours of free Wi-Fi per day at participating stores, and all other Starbucks customers will be able to purchase two-hour installments of Wi-Fi time for $3.99 or monthly access for $19.99.

Intel unveiled a new-look Wifi-enabled Classmate PC at IDF. It is designed to provide schools with a low-cost educational platform.

The company was accused last year of undermining the One Laptop Per Child project to produce $100 laptops for schools in poor countries by offering first-generation Classmate at below-cost price to gain market share. It later joined the project.

Elonex is selling an educational mobile in the UK for just £99.

Wimax mobile Freedom4, the company formerly known as Pipex Wireless, has applied to Ofcom for the right to offer mobile Wimax services. In a joint venture with Intel, the company has already begun a rollout of fixed Wimax services.

News via PCW

More companies are begin bidding on a section of the 700MHz spectrum that had previously been used by analog TV. This auction, however, has engendered much more media interest than past FCC auctions, in part because of the spectrum’s features but also because of the companies participating in the sale.

The section of the 700MHz spectrum the FCC is auctioning off is composed of five different blocks. Of these, the A, B, and E blocks are further divided into smaller regional areas. These sections of the spectrum are of most interest to regional carriers hoping to fill out their networks. Unlike the other blocks, the D block is being sold as a single, nationwide license, however, there is one caveat: The spectrum must be given up to public safety officials in times of emergency. Allen Nogee, a principal analyst at In-Stat, explains that this makes the license most attractive to a big operator that can use other spectrum if the D block has to be given up.

The most attention, though, has been paid to the C block, which is divided into 12 regions. The C block is valuable because it has much stronger penetration than traditional cell signals and because of the FCC’s acceptance of open access rules that Google fought for, assuring that the spectrum will be open to essentially any type of device from any manufacturer.

Nogee believes only a handful of the 100-plus bidders are serious competitors for the C block. Of them, Verizon, Google, and AT&T are at the top of the heap, with Verizon having the best chance of winning. The company new policy of glasnost, after a long period of Soviet-style suppression of its network, going so far as to strip features from handheld devices, suggests a serious change in its business model.

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Atheros Shrinks Wi-Fi Wireless Networking Chips So They Can Fit In The Tiniest Applications

Atheros Communications said in the fall that its tiny Wi-Fi chips would be used in a range of exciting new applications. It revealed at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January that its chips are used in the award-winning Eye-Fi SD memory cards. The cards have a built-in wireless networking antenna that lets them automatically upload digital camera images to networked computers or even Internet photo sites such as Flickr. The Atheros ROCm mobile WLAN chips in the Eye-Fi cards are able to get wireless reception even through the metal casing of digital cameras. Eye-Fi cards will be used in a variety of cameras, including models from Nikon.

If you visit Chicago and you want public Wi-Fi access, you’d better go to Starbucks. Once hailed as one of the pioneers of the citywide municipal Wi-Fi movement, Chicago reevaluated its original $18.5 million plan, citing market conditions, and will redeploy the project in the next year or two. On the heels of Chicago’s announcement, Philadelphia and New York have also reported problems getting their Wi-Fi programs off the ground. In fact, MuniWireless.com has downgraded its growth estimates for the industry from 108 percent to 35 percent. One cited reason is the difficulty of making wireless providers live up to the pricing promises the local government has made to its citizens.

Municipal wireless has become a political football,says Craig Mathias, a Wi-Fi expert at market research firm Farpoint Group. City governments have put a lot of constraints on vendors, in some cases requesting free access for every citizen.

One element that may have kept city residents away is how the pricing model was devised. For most cities, access is free at a very low bandwidth (often 500 kilobits per second). Then you pay a monthly fee for higher bandwidth, which subsidizes lower-income residents. Many residents already have home networks with faster connections and newer technologies, such as 802.11n.

But there is one emerging technology that could salvage municipal wireless: WiMAX. It’s a more robust technology that covers a larger area with relatively few towers, as opposed to the hundreds of access points municipal Wi-Fi requires. (Mountain View, California, has about 380 of them.) Analysts say WiMAX is coming, but there have been no successful rollouts in the U.S. yet, so costs are an unknown. Greg Goldman, CEO of Wireless Philadelphia, is not convinced that WiMAX is ready for prime time. WiMAX will encounter the same obstacles and challenges as Wi-Fi in a dense urban environment, he says. It’s still extremely new and is, today, cost-prohibitive.

Meanwhile, as the United States waits for WiMAX to achieve mass adoption, a few cities have already made good on the Wi-Fi promise. In Minneapolis, U.S. Networks built a public-safety network (with the city as a primary customer) and a public-access network covering 60 square miles. In August, when the I-35 bridge collapse killed seven people, cell service went AWOL, but Wi-Fi kept working. Nevertheless, signal reaches only about a third of the city and can be weak. It appears that even the cities that are ahead of the Wi-Fi game still have a long way to go