The group developing a standard for wireless charging expects to complete its first specification within six months, opening the door for makers of cell phones, digital cameras and other devices to bring compatible products to market.

Wireless charging lets consumers place gadgets on a mat that plugs into a wall outlet, and have the devices recharge automatically without needing to plug in each one. Apart from the gee-whiz factor, it’s supposed to make life more convenient by letting people walk into their home or office, toss their gadgets onto a mat to recharge and forget about them.

There are still questions about when standardized products will come to market and how they’ll be received, but the Wireless Power Consortium aims to finish its first standard before the middle of the year, said Menno Treffers, a Philips executive who is chairman of the consortium. If it’s not ready by then, “I will eat my hat,” he told a group of vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Friday.

» via NetworkWorld

McDonald’s has confirmed it will eliminate the current $2.95 fee customers must pay for two hours of internet service when they visit a local restaurant. The fee will be waived starting sometime next month, with 11,000 McDonald’s restaurants currently offering Wi-Fi supported by AT&T.

The restaurant has 14,000 domestic restaurants, and is the largest Wi-Fi network among restaurants in the U.S.

» via DailyTech

In a couple of years, crossing the 1Gbps threshold with a WiFi access point will be routine. That access point will likely have two radios, one for each major spectrum band, and support a host of older flavors for compatibility. Eventually, WiFi will approach the robustness and speed needed to make it a completely viable replacement for Ethernet for most users.

In today’s pipeline are optional enhancements to 802.11n that have been in the works since the standard stabilized at the IEEE engineering group nearly three years ago. These enhancements will increase range and performance by up to a couple orders of magnitude, offering raw data rates of 450 Mbps and 600 Mbps.

The slated improvements will also correct for black holes, where current 802.11n gear’s signals don’t reach unless an excessive amount of overlapping devices are installed at relatively high expense. Even better, the boosts to 802.11n are just the start. A new IEEE committee is working on fast WiFi that will hit a raw encoding rate of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps).

» via ars technica

Manufacturers have started adding wireless capabilities to many implantable medical devices, including pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators. This allows doctors to access vital information and send commands to these devices quickly, but security researchers have raised concerns that it could also make them vulnerable to attack.

Seen at Technology Review

The Wi-Fi Alliance today issued a new standard to augment Wi-Fi, called Wi-Fi Direct, that turns a Wi-Fi chip into a mini access point. The technology allows your Wi-Fi gadgets to talk to one another without having to get on a network, and enables anything containing a Wi-Fi chip to combine with other WiFi-chip-containing gadgets to create a wireless hotspot. Using it, you couldn’t connect to the web without some form of backhaul connection to the Internet, but you could send files and share data between devices.

Wi-Fi Direct will be available as a software upgrade for existing Wi-Fi devices and incorporated into new ones after the standard is set sometime in the middle of next year. Even if there’s no wireline or 3G connection to get on the web, there are plenty of situations where this will be useful, such as delivering content around the home. Instead of streaming something from my PC to the router, then to my television, with Wi-Fi Direct I could stream something directly from my PC to my TV.

Seen at GigaOM

Broadband providers such as AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon Communications have opposed regulation or new laws that would dictate how they could run their networks. Up until this point, the Internet has been free of any regulation. And these companies would like to keep it that way.

That said, the nation’s two biggest phone companies, AT&T and Verizon, have accepted the principles outlined by the FCC, when it comes to their wired broadband networks. Even though they don’t think additional regulation is needed, they have agreed in principle with keeping their broadband networks open.

But the regulation that Genachowski is proposing will not apply to just wireline broadband networks, such as DSL and cable modem service. It will also apply to wireless services. And this is where the major phone companies will likely focus their opposition to the FCC’s plans for new regulation.

Verizon and AT&T, which operate the nation’s largest and second-largest cell phone networks, respectively, say the rules should not apply to wireless Internet access.

Seen at cnet news

As predicted last month, the IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard.

Finalization of the new wireless networking standard—which is capable of delivering throughput speeds up to 300 megabits per second (and even higher)—took exactly seven years from the day it was conceived, or six years from the first draft version. The standard has been through a dozen or so draft versions.

Seen at cnet news