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Imagine that you have a Cisco router running IOS but don't know the first thing about how to use it as a home router. Stop imagining because there are many people that are in the same situation. This guide will help you through it.

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Rolf Devegt, senior director of business development at Airgo Networks, argued that the Wi-Fi Alliance should begin 801.11n interoperability testing now to avoid even more delays. "Typically the Wi-Fi Alliance starts interoperability certification after standard ratification, but they should start certification before the standard is ratified, like they did with the 802.11i standard." Devegt predicted that Draft 2.0 of 802.11n will be stable enough to proceed with final ratification in the first half of 2008.

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Now the "do-it-yourself" model has begun to move into more densely populated areas, like Douglas County, where telecommunications providers and cable operators are already offering services. These municipalities want to control their own networks, and they want to be able to offer services to their government agencies or constituencies that the local incumbent provider is not offering, such as fiber to the home (FTTH).

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In an MPLS network, incoming packets are assigned a "label" by a router. Packets are forwarded along a label switch path where each router makes forwarding decisions based solely on the contents of the label. At each hop, the label is stripped off and a new one is added that tells the next router how to forward the packet.

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The task of devising a way to connect multiple computers to one another and to exchange messages over increasingly busy networks fell to Xerox PARC researcher Bob Metcalfe, who in a 1973 memo described the technology that would evolve into today's ubiquitous Ethernet protocol. Metcalfe's Ethernet wasn't the first of such network protocols--some preceded it, and many more followed. But it won out and became the the dominant local area networking technology for businesses, en route to its place in the Internet, besting a long series of what Metcalfe today calls networking "Godzillas."

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At present, FM radio supports datacasting over so-called subcarrier frequencies, which can deliver information at about 1.5 kilobits per second. That's sufficient for relatively light data needs, such as displaying a radio station's number on an LED screen or sending weather information to a digital watch--but little else. Yet, forthcoming digital enhancements could supercharge radio datacasting, providing feeds of up to 300kbps.

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Little did they know that their pet project, a humble application named Mosaic, would fundamentally change everyday life. While Web browsers with graphical interfaces had traded hands among academics years earlier, Mosaic was the first to be widely adopted and introduce the masses to the Internet.

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Building an 802.16a network is up to half as expensive as installing a T1 line for operators, said WiMAX President Margaret LaBrecque, who is also a spokeswoman for Intel's broadband wireless initiatives group. By using 802.16a gear to build a wireless network, operators would be able to make broadband access available to customers sooner, because it would not entail major construction.

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EarthLink Plus improves download speeds up to five times over standard dial-up, the Atlanta-based company said. It costs $28.95 per month, $7 more than standard dial-up, comes with a guarantee that help calls will be answered within five minutes. By comparison, EarthLink's Cable Internet, a broadband service powered by ComCast, starts at $45.95 per month, plus a $3 per month modem lease fee.

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The Plus package, at the standard price of $23.90, will include firewall, antivirus software and parental controls that will function on the PC itself rather than within the AOL client. The service also includes the company's advanced e-mail software, Communicator; the ability to share AOL Radio with other AOL subscribers via instant messenger; and, for broadband users, a redesign of its Welcome Screen.

AOL will charge subscribers a slightly higher price--$24.95--for a version of the service that lets a single account have seven screen names that can dial in simultaneously, targeting homes with multiple computers. Up to now, the company permitted only one screen name to have access at any one time.

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As it keeps both wholesale and retail prices for Internet service high, Comcast says its pretax operating profit margins are nearly 50 percent. That margin does not include any accounting for the $10 billion it will ultimately cost Comcast and AT&T to update their systems. But the main purpose of that renovation--which involved running high-capacity fiber optic cables into each neighborhood--was to offer hundreds of television channels and interactive services like pay-per-view movies. Internet service uses less than 1 percent of the capacity of these systems.

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A new Internet speed record has been set by scientists. Using the Internet2 network, scientists were able to send data from Sunnyvale, California in the U.S. to Amsterdam, Holland at a speed of 923 megabits per second. The Internet2 network is a network operated by a consortium of 200 universities which are exploring the next generation of the Internet. 6.7 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of two DVDs ("four hours of DVD-quality movies") was sent in less then a minute over a distance of 6,800 miles.

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When ENUM domains become active, users will be identified by their telephone number including the country code. What that means is a phone number such as +46-8-9761234 would be mapped to the 4.3.2.1.6.7.9.8.6.4.e164.arpa Internet address in a process that is expected to become automated and transparent to the user.

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The survey, conducted in December, looked at the Internet use of 501 people over the age of 18 and found that people who spend 3.7 hours per week surfing the Web at work spend an average of 5.9 hours per week at home using the Internet for work-related purposes. By contrast, people who don't have Internet access at home spend spend more time at work -- 6.5 hours per week compared with 3.7 hours -- using the Internet for personal reasons.

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Companies like Texas Instruments began the wireless migration to devices other than laptops by shrinking the necessary silicon small enough for even a cell phone's snug confines. That paved the way for printers, personal digital assistants and even the office staple white board to abandon cables in favor of the Wi-Fi standard.
Soon, television set-top boxes, MP3 players, camcorders and even digital cameras will shed their wires as well, and the list will only grow as manufacturers try to cash in on Wi-Fi's increasing popularity.

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It's kind of like Wi-Fi, but with a big, big difference.

"The big difference is the range. The range of 'free-air' of 802.11 is typically 1,000 feet. We have a maximum range in free-air of 29 kilometers," Gilbert says.

"Anywhere you go, anything you want to do on the Internet, or be connected with, is possible with this," IPWireless CEO Chris Gilbert says.

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For many years computer scientists have been proposing protocols to improve the efficiency of distributed computing systems, but Park asserts that his method works with greater efficiency for time-critical applications. The current protocol is generally known as the Order-based Deadlock Prevention Protocol, according to Park. While the performance results of the new protocol have impressed analysts, they note that other more critical issues holding back collaborative Internet computing and Web services need to be addressed first.

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Instead of moving to 802.11a from 802.11b Wi-Fi, many manufacturers are producing gear that uses the 802.11g, analysts say. An 802.11g network is as fast as an 802.11a, and it can be used by anyone with an 802.11b modem in a laptop or personal digital assistant.

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The first generation of the Intel gadget will let people view and play PC-stored image and audio files on a television or stereo receiver, said Vogel. A subsequent generation will also permit the transfer of video. By offering video and photo capabilities, the Intel adapter serves up more bang for the buck than current devices, which mainly store and play music.