Tao of Mac

Oct 14th 2003 · 2 min read

Houston, We Have Lift-Off

The Press Release is now online (English) and the launch presentation was this morning. The news is popping up in the usual places, but here's the gist of it:

  • Vodafone Portugal has, as of today, officially launched its Wireless LAN service, taking advantage of its own infrastructure, call center and SMS authentication (for all GSM users - including those of other operators).

Which means I can finally own up to what I've been doing these past few months and start filling out the Wi-Fi-related topics on this site - my coverage of Wi-Fi issues was somewhat self-limited so as to not to give our competition the faintest hints of what we've been doing (yeah, I know you read this - but I only post publicly available information that doesn't have any direct bearing on my work, so you won't get any competitive advantage from reading this...).

And having said that, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank:

  • My team-mate for the past 4 years or so, who put up with my constant ranting and pulled off nearly impossible coding stunts (don't try using RADIUS at home, kids).
  • The guys at DRE, for a great work environment and lots of what can only be termed as "stressful fun" while we worked on this.
  • The "WLAN Man" for pushing (and occasionally prodding) the overall project through (always with impeccable style, as usual) and turning my architecture design into a complete service.
  • The negotiation team, who always managed to settle great deals for all parties involved.
  • The implementation team(s) (transmission/LAN/radio planning/assembly), who turned a technical solution into a palpable reality (actually several palpable realities all over Portugal).
  • The corporate branding folk for alternately harrassing us to keep to the corporate image and pulling off conjuring tricks like delivering updated merchandising and leaflets overnight.
  • The support and call-center teams for their early involvement and smooth hand-over of systems and customer care processes (thanks to Bob and the "Mission Impossible" guy).
  • And, last but not least, "Bullet-Man" (you know who you are) for working nights making sure things worked first time (and improving our general approach the odd couple of times it didn't).

Someone should write an epic ballad for that guy.

And that's the first (and hopefully last) blatantly work-related post here. Maybe next year there'll be some more.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot: of course s are supported...

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