UK-based infrastructure vendor Moovera Networks recently announced the availability of its Moovbox F Series Fixed Broadband Gateway device. What's the what on this seemingly commodity Wi-Fi mesh device? It's able to make use of carrier networks for backhaul, taking advantage of 3G UMTS/HSPA, TD-CDMA, HC-SDMA and WiMAX 802.16e technologies to pass off data from local 802.11 clients.

Currently marketed as "[i]deal for municipal Wi-Fi hotzones, temporary hotspots, and public saftey [sic] applications" I see no reason why businesses with a large number of remote offices, disparate locations or a need for temporary network access (BC/DR anyone?) could not find a use for this.

This is a product that exemplifies the multi-network future and illustrates how lines will blur between "internal" and "public" networks. Are you listening Cisco, Motorola and Nortel?

I've recently been talking a lot about ubiquitous mobility, that future-state when folks in an organization are all wireless, all the time. We're not there yet, but I regularly urge enterprise IT managers to think about this future state and consider how soon they want to reach it when making strategic investment decisions.

It turns out there is some public data to point to a more ecological push for enabling mobility in the enterprise. The Texas Transportation Institute recently released a study examining the benefits of mobile employees over those that commute to an office. At peak congestion times, workers traveling to an office expend "an extra 38 hours of travel time and consume an additional 26 gallons of fuel, amounting to a cost of $710 per traveler." Numbers to put the cost of investing in a WLAN refresh, even one based on 802.11n, in clearer focus. 

Part of a successful Identity Management (IdM) project is a successful role discovery and mapping phase. Many organizations -- after having mapped and optimized their business processes -- turn to role design and management solutions (VAUU RBACx, BHOLD, Oracle's BridgeStream, and others). While these solutions give a great initial insight into the existing role structure, they are not the only source of role interrelationship information. Role design can build

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many other sources: demographics mined from helpdesk tickets from users requesting access, job descriptions, quality management systems (it certain cases this is wishful thinking...), and increasingly from Enterprise or Desktop eSSO solutions (PassLogix, ActivIdentity, CA). eSSO solutions store multiple login credentials for users to multiple applications. As such, extracting account linkage, mapping and correlating user IDs between user repositories based

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access information built by end-users is much more reliable than any artificial role mining logic, usually based

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Cisco's acquisition of spectrum analysis vendor Cognio this week signifies the vendor's move beyond infrastructure provision in the WLAN space and  shows Cisco taking an interest in improving the performance of dense wireless environments. 

This move is likely to support its increased focus on wireless applications over wireless hardware as evidenced by its location-based-services pitches earlier this year. Also interesting in the fact that the Cognio solution will likely let Cisco take on a management role of more types of wireless technology, perhaps a harbinger of more wireless offerings outside of the 802.11 space in the near future?