NEW ORLEANS -- The Wi-Fi Alliance's Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint Program, which aims to make Wi-Fi hotspots work more like cellular and LTE networks, is on track to start issuing certifications this summer.

Of the nation's four biggest wireless carriers, only T-Mobile USA has revealed plans to deploy Passpoint, a technology that would allow wireless users to automatically access Wi-Fi hotspots from carriers' 3G and 4G cellular networks.

A question we're hearing with increasing frequency concerns the upcoming 802.11ac standard, which promises to do to 802.11n what .11n did to .11g. While the IEEE 802.11ac standard likely won't be completely finished before the end of 2013, and, while the Wi-Fi Alliance similarly has issued no interoperability criteria for 802.11ac, consumer-grade products claiming compliance with the aforementioned 802.11ac standard could be on store shelves as soon as the middle of 2012.

We all love Wi-Fi, as long as we're logged into one particular hotspot and aren't moving much.

At Mobile World Congress this week, Cisco unveiled products designed to provide cellular-like roaming among Wi-Fi hotspots, and disclosed deployments among several wireless service providers.

So this guy at AirTight Networks says Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 has a "hard shell on the outside, but a soft underbelly inside"due to an overlooked vulnerability, and an attacker can decrypt traffic that's been encrypted with WPA2. Is this total panic time?