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BT Wi-Fi is the exclusive hot-spot provider for the London 2012 Olympics, and a promise made in 2011 to have some 500,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the capital has been met. The celebration for meeting this target was to deploy new wi-fi hotspots along 27 miles of the River Thames. The hotspots are a mixture of commercial deployments, and BT Total/Infinity customers offering access via the partner Fon. Though while the number of Fon sites is increasing, oddly in the TV advertising for BT Infinity it is neglected for the risky prospect of sharing a private Wi-Fi key with pretty people you don't know very well.

There's free Wi-Fi all around you, particularly if you live in a big city. That café you walked by, that neighbor who didn't properly lock down her network, that public park you sat in on the way to work... free Wi-Fi abounds. But since you often have to hunt about for it manually, and you're unsure of its quality until you test it, you often just opt to stay on your 3G service--or to just go without Wi-Fi for the moment.

After trials, Wi-Fi in the London Underground has gone live in two stations (Warren Street and King's Cross), with plans to fit 80 stations out before the Olympics, which are now only a few weeks away. From the article: '"Our new Wi-Fi service is a fantastic deal for Londoners, with live travel updates, entertainment and news freely available to everyone while they are on the move across the capital," said Gareth Powell, London Underground's director of strategy and service development. "Wi-Fi at Tube stations will help us improve the journeys of the millions of people that use the Underground everyday at no cost to fare or tax payers.

Si les hotspots Wi-Fi gratuit se multiplient dans les lieux publics, leur accès est parfois fastidieux. Le propriétaire d'un PC portable ou d'un smartphone doit en effet trouver le réseau, le sélectionner et s'identifier, le tout manuellement. L'équipementier Ruckus Wireless s'est associé à la Wi-Fi Alliance pour développer un nouveau type de point d'accès public permettant de simplifier cette procédure.

"Giving is receiving" is an old adage that doesn't work for everyone - at least, not when it comes to Wi-Fi. Few of us are happy to discover unauthorized others have been leeching bandwidth off our hotspots' signals. But a new kind of WiFi hotspot launching later this year wants to change that. It's called Karma. And, like the regular kind of karma, it works by returning to you what you share with others. In this case, Wi-Fi. Anyone in the vicinity can log on to your Karma Wi-Fi hotspot for a pay-as-you-go fee of $14 per GB of data. In return for each person who purchases connectivity through your device, you earn 100 Megabytes of free data - about enough to browse the Internet for five hours, and open 10,000 emails.

"Comcast says the cable giant is expanding the number of free Wi-Fi hotspots available to the company's east coast customers. According to Comcast, they've activated 2,500 additional hotspots throughout eastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire in locations Comcast found to be the highest-traffic regions. Comcast followed on the heels of Cablevision in 2010 and began offering free Wi-Fi to customers in the hopes of offering a little something extra to users in their battle against Verizon FiOS. Comcast customers can sign in wherever they see the "Xfinity WiFi" SSID."

"Piggyback the installation of connected, smart utility meters with free Wi-Fi service for outdoor use. That's exactly what the City of Santa Clara is doing."

"IR.U is a new coalition by the founders of Gig.U that will bring Super Wi-Fi networks - better known to some as White Space networks, or wireless internet over unlicensed and unused TV channels - to over 500 educational institutions across the US. Comprised of higher education associations, public interest groups, and private tech companies like Microsoft and Google, AIR.U aims to offer fast, reliable internet to remote schools and universities in areas otherwise too remote for wired broadband."

"U.S. Cellular has added Wi-Fi to its mobile data toolbox. But rather than build or lease time on expensive managed hotspot networks, the Chicago carrier is working with Devicescape to tap into its virtual network of nearly 8 million open access points."

""802.11ac is an extension for pure mainstream Wi-Fi," said Sean Coffey, Realtek's director of standards and business development. "It's evolutionary. ... You're not going to see dramatically new use cases." 802.11ac is a development of the current 802.11n standard, producing improved performance on the same 5GHz frequency bands. Some routers using the 802.11ac have already been deployed, and the experts on the panel agreed that it will become commonplace by early 2013. By contrast, 802.11ad adds 60GHz connectivity to the previously used 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, potentially providing multi-gigabit connection speeds and dramatically broadening the number of applications for which wireless can be used."

En seulement quelques années, la chambre d'hôtel est passée de source de revenus à source de dépenses, à mesure que les clients ont des attentes de plus en plus élevées en ce qui a trait aux technologies: téléviseur à écran plat ou à haute définition, lecteur DVD, chaîne audio avec lecteur MP3, accès Wi-Fi, et même un intérêt croissant pour les tablettes électroniques. Des chercheurs ont pourtant démontré que des investissements dans le Wi-Fi gratuit peuvent se traduire par une augmentation des revenus pour l'hôtelier.

The Northern Ireland capital plans to make itself one of the most connected cities in Europe with widespread Wi-Fi to cover Belfast by 2015. Guaranteed funding of £6 million is already available through Westminster's plans to create Super Connected Cities. Further funding is possible through the scheme, and the Belfast City Council will be putting forward a bid which it hopes will more than double this funding.

The Imps get down to business the moment you wake up: Your blinds automatically open, and your coffee maker starts brewing your favorite dark roast. But the mischief doesn't end there. Throughout the day, the Imps assume control over other household technology. Your garage door sends you a text message confirming that it's closed. Your fridge sends you a shopping list reminding you to buy milk. Your ambient room lighting changes color at dusk for a more moody vibe. And when 9 p.m. rolls around, your dishwasher turns on to take advantage of cheaper utility rates. This is the connected world envisioned by the team at Electric Imp, a six-employee startup that's created the Imp card, a small wafer of plastic that houses a Cortex-M3 processor and Wi-Fi antenna, and taps into an accompanying cloud service. Imp cards can conceivably be installed in any electronic device, making it possible to connect conventional appliances to the internet.

The Emanuel administration today is unveiling the first portion of a much-anticipated initiative to position Chicago for the digital age with expanded access to ultra-high-speed broadband links. The two-pronged plan, dubbed the "broadband challenge," seeks private partners to bring relatively low-cost, gigabit-speed Internet to 15 emerging business zones, most of them academic centers outside the Loop, and to offer free Wi-Fi in every park in the city.

If you thought the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite e-reader was a great deal at $119, take a look at the Txtr Beagle Read|Only, undercutting it by more than a C-note - it sells for a mere $13. As you might expect, for such a rock-bottom price you're going to have to make some sacrifices. If you just want to read text and you can live without a touchscreen, 3G, a backlight and Wi-Fi - and you don't mind inserting three AAA batteries once a year - this 5-inch, 4.5-oz E Ink device with its 800×600 screen might be the e-reader for you. The Txtr Beagle's 4GB of storage will give you room for a boatload of books, and its 5mm thickness is almost razor-thin enough to give you a paper cut.

"The US Department of Transportation said it will run a massive road test of cars, trucks and buses linked together via WiFi equipment in what the agency says will be the largest test of automated crash avoidance technology to date."

The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) recently announced that the organization has finished their trials of the Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) standard. One of the more compelling parts of the new standard is the ability to automatically log into hotspots using simply SIM card identification and not the traditional username and password, something that will be highly beneficial to carriers using Wi-Fi offload to ease congestion on wireless networks. The WBA has just recently announced that numerous global telcos have agreed to begin conducting trials of the technology starting in the fourth quarter, with actual product being available sometime in the first half of 2013

"By the end of the year, citizens and tourists in Hue City, Vietnam's former Royal Capital, will be able to enjoy free wireless internet service anytime in the major public areas."