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"Conferences, airports, cafes - they might offer free WiFi to visitors, but they are often sluggish in their operation because everyone else is hogging the connection. This issue might become a thing of the past, after a team of engineers at NC State University (NCSU) announced the development of WiFox (via ExtremeTech), a new software protocol that could theoretically be added to existing Internet routers and is capable of boosting WiFi performance by 700 percent."

O2 has got its free outdoor WiFi running across the most popular parts of Central London in time for the spectacle which is London 2012. Unlike the free WiFi on London Underground provided by Virgin Media the O2 WiFi service in these areas will remain free even after the close of the Olympics and Paralympics on 9th September.

Virgin Media's WiFi on London Underground proves to be successful as over eight million tweets, Facebook posts, emails and web pages were delivered during the Olympic Games. Accessing WiFi on the underground is practically a social holy grail for Londoners. Known for their ability to avoid eye contact at all costs, a good excuse to remain eyes-down in any situation is bound to be popular.

"Bientôt dépassé, le WiFi? Les États-Unis commencent à tester une nouvelle technologie sans fil, un «super WiFi» plus puissant et de plus longue portée, qui pourrait notamment apporter l'internet à haut débit dans les zones rurales."

"Bientôt dépassé, le WiFi? Les États-Unis commencent à tester une nouvelle technologie sans fil, un «super WiFi» plus puissant et de plus longue portée, qui pourrait notamment apporter l'internet à haut débit dans les zones rurales."

"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."

"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.

La société britannique Tep Wireless vient de lancer une offre d'accès Internet mobile low-cost qui fonctionne dans 38 pays d'Europe et permet aux voyageurs de disposer d'une connexion permanente sans se ruiner en frais de roaming.

"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."

Today, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot unveiled the city's 2012 Digital Roadmap, which follows the success of last year's 2011 digital roadmap. This initiative was created to share NYC's past success in digital and tech initiatives, and to simultaneously "spur the development of" the city's tech scene. According to the release, 80 percent of the objectives that NY established last year are now complete. This includes everything from rapid expansion of WiFi-serviced parks and the city's Big Apps competition to the nearly 5.5M individuals reached by government social media channels. As you might expect, plenty of boasting was done, especially when it comes to NY's recent growth as a tech hub. Check out the related infographics here. What's next? As far as the city's next steps go, the graphic below shows the direction which NY hopes to head. Specific areas of improvement include expanded broadband connectivity, mobile payments in taxis, a new NYC.gov site, live broadcasted city council hearings and more.

"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."

CORPORATE RESISTANCE to publicly-owned internet networks dates back to the fabled days of dial-up. In 1995, companies lobbied successfully for Texas to enact a law barring municipal entities from providing certain telecommunications services. In response, a number of national organizations lobbied Congress to include a provision in the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996 that would pre-empt states from enacting laws that would bar "any entity" from providing telecommunications services. But in 2004 the Supreme Court ruled in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League that that pre-emption was too broad (more on the decision here). If Congress wanted to restrict states from exercising traditional state powers-including instructing municipalities on what services they could provide-it had to say so explicitly, the Court decided.  Since then, nearly half the states have enacted barriers to public communications initiatives. The first such laws were "flat-out, in-your-face" bans-outlawing municipal networks outright. But more recently, telecoms began pressing for state-level laws to establish a "level playing field"-a wireless market that doesn't pit private companies against public providers. These laws typically impose onerous regulations on public networks that invite costly litigation and frequently lead to delays and cost overruns.

" Researchers from A*STAR's Institute of Microelectronics (IME) have developed the first compact high performance silicon-based cavity-backed slot (CBS) antenna that operates at 135 GHz. The antenna demonstrated 30 times stronger signal transmission over on-chip antennas at 135 GHz. At just 1.6mm x 1.2mm, approximately the size of a sesame seed, it is the smallest silicon-based CBS antenna reported to date for ready integration with active circuits. IME's innovation will help realize a wireless communication system with very small form factor and almost two-thirds cheaper than a conventional CBS antenna. The antenna, in combination with other millimetre-wave building blocks, can support wireless speed of 20 Gbps - more than 200 times faster than present day Wi-Fi, to allow ultra fast point-to-point access to rich media content, relevant to online learning and entertainment."

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