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AT&T extends its free Basic Wi-Fi package to laptop-based mobile broadband subscribers, but not to smartphone users, including iPhones: This is a logical move, vastly overdue, because it’s a better experience for a laptop user to have access in a Wi-Fi hotspot, while simultaneously removing load from AT&T’s 3G network. This was predicted many years ago–as early as 2001 by EarthLink, Boingo Wireless, and Helio founder Sky Dayton–that 3G spectrum was scarce enough and expensive enough to operate that using Wi-Fi like a local heat sink to bleed usage off would keep 3G usable.

The other advantage, of course, is that 3G laptop users that find themselves out of the HSPA coverage area offered by AT&T don’t fall back to EDGE or GPRS as long as they can find an AT&T-included hotspots. No hotspot operator likes to guarantee a particular local network speed, but I know that Wayport–which has or will build nearly all of the 17,000 locations in question here–aims for T-1 speed (1.5 Mbps each way) and quality (guaranteed uptime), depending on availability.

Windows laptop users with AT&T’s Communication Manager software (version 6.8) installed will be automatically logged onto hotspots–and, I would guess, logged off 3G whether the user wants that or not! I’ll be curious about reports from the field.

A 5G/month ($60/month or greater) plan is requierd for free Wi-Fi service.

The Boy Genius Report quotes what appears to be an internal AT&T memo about today’s launch that free Wi-Fi for smartphones is coming later in 2008. Boy Genius has a remarkably good track record for a rumor/leak site, so I’m inclined to believe their report.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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In the aftermath of the last man standing, MetroFi, announcing its metro-scale Wi-Fi endgame, three useful essays have appeared: If you’re trying to understand the past, present, and future of the space, I recommend you read these short opinion pieces.

First, Karl Edwards of Excelsio, a firm that consults on municipal broadband, lays out a pretty straight case as to why EarthLink, Kite, and MetroFi’s networks, among other one-offs, were designed to fail. I’ve written about aspects of this over the last four years, but Edwards is succinct. In part, EarthLink offering to build Philadelphia’s network at no cost to the city set the mold wrong for all networks to follow. We’re resetting now, and Wi-Fi’s moment may have passed.

Edwards offers as one the constraints set by cities, “Expectation that the network would cover 90-95% of the City with wireless coverage as opposed to just in the areas where there was a solid business case.” This has been a problem I’ve had for a couple of years when it started to become clear that 90-plus percent coverage wasn’t in the interest of the ISP–nor in the city’s interest because these networks couldn’t be completed.

Edwards also notes that when consulting for Grand Rapids, Mich., which chose Clearwire as its wireless partner, EarthLink told the city that they expected a conservative 22-percent uptake for their Wi-Fi service by end of the fourth year. Given that in mature markets, a high-single-digit uptake is considered very good, that’s shows how the Excel spreadsheets were skewed. USI Wireless’s estimates for break-even require less than 10 percent of the population in their covered areas to subscribe, and their numbers of subscribers to date are tracking that number closely.

He closes with a set of eight principles for wireless network builders to come to the table with and cities to adopt, all of which I agree with.

Next, Esme Vos suggests a very modest proposal: San Francisco should have required all its cafes to offer free Wi-Fi, and then Fon or others could have aggregated and bundled access to these locations. There’s a long set of comments accusing Esme of communism, socialism, utopianism, and other isms. The post and the comments make for lively reading.

Finally, Craig Plunkett, who operates hotspot networks around New York City and Long Island, chimes in with a summary of these opinions and the notion that muni-Fi jumped the shark when Ocean City, N.J., decided to put Wi-Fi in garbage cans. He points out that “an infill strategy” of providing service where needed and then extending from there is effective.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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The Google of Russia is Yandex, and it is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq in the fall with the hopes of raising $1.5 billion to $2 billion, reports Reuters. That would give the company a $5 billion valuation. Yandex was founded 15 years ago and the last funding I can find was […]

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Sugar Inc., the company behind PopSugar and a number of other blogs geared towards women, has acquired StarBrand Media. StarBrand provides an online marketplace for a number of major television shows, allowing viewers to purchase the clothes and props they see on TV.
Los Angeles based StarBrand will help expand Sugar’s ShopStyle, an ecommerce site […]

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If you’ve been following author Michael Pollan’s simple eating philosophy—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”—you’re trying more than ever to incorporate vegetables in your diet. What you may not know, however, is how to best prepare those vegetables so you’re getting the most nutritional value. From the New York Times:

“There is a misperception that raw foods are always going to be better,” says Steven K. Clinton, a nutrition researcher and professor of internal medicine in the medical oncology division at Ohio State University. “For fruits and vegetables, a lot of times a little bit of cooking and a little bit of processing actually can be helpful.”

Though the article emphasizes that no cooking method is best, it does explain the trade-offs you make when you make the decision to cook or not to cook.

For example, boiling carrots increases carotenoid levels while decreasing polyphenol. Often you can cook better with your microwave than your stove, and—according to the article—microwaving can retain more vitamin C than other methods. You don’t have to weigh the health options every time you decide to prepare a vegetable—you’re eating vegetables, after all, which is already healthy—but do know that variety in your preparation methods is advantageous. Let’s hear how you prefer to prepare your veggies in the comments.

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Now that Mozilla’s locked down Firefox 3’s feature set, it’s clear the new browser iteration will render some extensions obsolete. Firefox 3 will include functionality out-of-the-box that you could only get with add-ons before. Let’s take a look at five extensions you might not need when you switch to Firefox 3.

• NoSquint: Never have to enlarge the text on that web page with the teeny tiny font size again. Firefox 3’s new “Text Only” zoom feature doesn’t enlarge images, and is smart enough to remember your text size setting on a per-site basis when you visit again.
• Google Gears: While offline web application support is still a ways off, Firefox 3 does have support built-in and ready for webapp authors to turn it on, effectively making Google Gears unnecessary. It will be very interesting to see Gears’ fate in the face of Firefox 3 offline webapp support, and which webapps support which. Overall, it’s great news for users who want their data whether they’re online or not.
• Resize Search Box: Sometimes, it’s the little things that make us happy, like a search box that can be as big or as small as you want without having to hand-edit CSS. In Firefox 3, just grab the dot to the left of the Google search box and drag and drop to the size you desire. It doesn’t auto-expand as you type, however, like Searchbar Autosizer does; perhaps in Firefox 4.
• DownThemAll: Ok, so Firefox 3’s improved download manager definitely does not have ALL the features DownThemAll offers, but it does include dTa’s key feature, which is the ability to resume downloads even after you’ve restarted your browser or lost your network connection. We still do love dTa for all the other download acrobatics it can do; see more on how to supercharge your Firefox downloads with DownThemAll.
• Better Gmail and other Mailto: handler add-ons: Pre-Firefox 3, to invoke your web-based email compose screen from a web page link, you’d need an extension like Better Gmail, toolbar, or a third-party program like the Gmail Notifier. No more: Now Firefox 3 can register web-based protocol handlers, meaning it can open certain kinds of links (like iCal calendars and email addresses) in webapps of your choice (like Gmail or 30 Boxes.) (Note from Mozilla: web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).

What extensions have you NOT had to install with Firefox 3? Tell us in the comments.

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The greatest.

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