Wireless grab bag

For a change of pace, let’s take a brief look of happenings throughout the wireless world.

* Wired-wireless LAN integration.

HP this week announced a unified wired/wireless Wi-Fi management architecture competitively aimed at the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Wireless Integrated Services Module (WiSM). HP has created a wireless services blade for its own ProCurve 5300xl edge switch. The blade integrates configuration, policy-setting and access control across both environments, while bundling in centralized RF management capabilities such as channel auto-selection and AP load-balancing, the company says.

There are newly available management applications that run on the company’s ProCurve Manager Plus platform for traffic management and access control, which can work with or without HP OpenView, says Darla Sommerville, vice president and general manager of HP ProCurve Americas. The system functions with three HP access points – two “thin,” or switch-dependent options, and one “thick,” or autonomous AP. A competitive point, according to Sommerville: The ProCurve system lets you set access policies once across both wired and wireless environments. Cisco confirms that with its own system, you must configure policies separately across domains, at least at this juncture.

* Radio-frequency identification (RFID) privacy.

IBM has designed a “clipped” RFID tag. IBM head researcher Paul Moskowitz says the tag supports the distance benefit that RFID tags have over barcode scanners as goods are being checked out, but that the consumer or the supplier can “clip” the antenna of the tag at the point of sale (POS) to limit its transmission distance. The range of the tag would drop from about 30 feet to a few inches and could be an alternative to the “kill” command built into the EPCglobal Gen 2 RFID tag specifications. The kill command deactivates the tag entirely, leaving it “unusable for other downstream applications,” such as being used as a return receipt at a store, Moskowitz says.

* FCC spectrum auction (#65).

If you already feel your space invaded on crowded airplanes, prepare for the noise level to potentially get more intrusive. An FCC auction for 4 MHz total spectrum in sections of the 800 MHz for plane-to-ground radio telephone services (and Internet access services) was under way at press time, when gross bids had fallen just shy of $4 million.

* WLAN standards.

The Draft 1.0 802.11n first ballot did not receive final confirmation from the IEEE during an April 29 vote to advance in the standards process to reach “sponsor ballot” status. A ratified 802.11n standard is still expected by mid-2007, however.