Phil Earnhardt  <pae@dim.com> wrote:

> Yesterday, Motorola announced a GSM phone that also works with Wi-Fi.

> From the 7/27 Wall Street Journal:

>> Motorola Inc. yesterday unveiled a phone that combines cellular
>> and wireless Internet-calling capabilities. The device, called the 
>> CN620, which could be the first mobile phone that combines 
>> wide-area GSM cellular technology with shorter-range technology 
>> known as Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, could open the floodgates for 
>> users to steal away significant minutes from cellular networks 
>> and place free calls over the Internet.

> I was talking with the owner of a local cafe that provides Wi-Fi for
> its customers about this yesterday. I was wondering how these little
> shops would cope with such phones when they start to become widely
> available. Will they have to buy new base stations that will disable
> their network for such devices? Start limiting bandwidth to each MAC
> address? Do any reasonably-cheap base stations provide such
> capabilites today?

Any of the cheap base stations that have "firewalls" will do the job
already.  You can easily filter whatever port is being used.  Already
they should be filtering a lot of traffic to and from the outside,
most notably forcing outgoing e-mail through a filtering server to
prevent spammers from taking advantage of their services, and blocking
the Microsoft network ports for security reasons.

--scott

"C'est un Nagra.  C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."