Andrew Garcia

Skypes two-day-plus outage in August was caused by, of all things, Microsofts Patch Tuesday. But the outage has served as an excellent reminder that Skype is an “as you can get it service,” with no additional protections for business-class users and accounts that may already pay the most for the service. During the outage, Skype […]

Skype engineers appear to be making some progress recovering from the outage that has plagued their services for the better part of the last 48 hours, but the company is not out of the woods yet by any means. Personally, I have found several times today that my Skype client successfully logged in to the […]

Word is trickling out from today’s Sprint tech summit in Reston, Va., that a new Palm smart phone will be coming soon. According to a PR representative writing me on Palm’s behalf, the new device — called the Palm Centro — is aimed at a younger demographic and will be Palm’s smallest smart phone yet. […]

When products based on the 802.11n draft specification first came to market, I cautioned that the time was not right to buy, as changes to the wireless draft specification could render those products unable to interoperate with the true specification down the road. As it turned out, the specification did not evolve far enough to […]

Lost amid Apple’s glut of announcements today, I learned that Apple’s flagship wireless access point — the 802.11n-enabled Airport Extreme — is also getting a little refresh. According to Apple’s tech specs, the Airport Extreme is now Gigabit Ethernet-enabled on both the WAN uplink port and the three LAN switch ports. In my tests earlier […]

While Aruba Networks purchase of Network Chemistrys wireless intrusion prevention intellectual property in late July does not necessarily herald a surge of acquisitions among enterprise wireless LAN vendors, the wireless market is well-positioned for the largest infrastructure vendors to make their own plays if Arubas move quickly shows benefits. However, Arubas acquisition should cause significant […]

This week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the city supervisors have delayed for a month the next hearing about the city’s proposal to grant EarthLink and Google the right to build out a municipal wireless network across the city. Given the statements Rolla Huff (EarthLink’s CEO) made at EarthLink’s quarterly financial report last month, […]

Four weeks later, my simmering anger that stemmed from my rocky start with the iPhone has largely been replaced with a general sense of satisfaction as Apple’s “revolutionary phone” has morphed into a fairly important component of my day-to-day operations. However, that anger was reignited as I read about Apple and AT&T’s financial reports over […]

I was one of the million plus people who pre-ordered the latest Harry Potter opus from Amazon. Saturday, I found myself milling around my living room, impatiently awaiting delivery. Every bump, shuffle or footstep I heard from the front of the house caused me to peer out the window to see if it was here. […]

This week, ShoreTel formally announced its new Voice over IP speakerphone, the ShoreTel IP 8000. Although it was not really discussed at length in the press release, the phone represents a fairly significant shift for ShoreTel, as the IP 8000 is the first SIP-compliant user device the company has shipped to date. ShoreTel has been […]

As I reported earlier this month, the iPhone is hardly the ideal device for corporate users. However, the device inspires a lot of love, and over time, will likely engender a lot of creative thinking that will get it up to speed. Even now, with its mostly-full featured browser, there are many ways for the […]

The iPhone is finally here, complete with a fantastic industrial design that stands up well to the considerable hype thats been swirling for months around Apples first smart phone device. However, for all the iPhones groundbreaking design attributes, the units spotty data service and limited applications conspire to deliver an experience thats mixed at best. […]