These arrangements, especially the latter, will hold vast ramifications to the current marketing strategy of service providers and hardware vendors alike. While business model and deployment strategy changes will require reconditioning by all players, the strength in the industry's foundation will allow for more genuine and secure growth. The first provider out of the gate, iBlast, began field trials in January in Los Angeles, Orlando, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Jose. Geocast also has a number of terrestrial TV station partners, but its service will first be available via EchoStar satellites in the third quarter of 2001. The companies differ in the makeup of their chosen receivers and in their content focus.
Terrestrial broadcasters have high hopes for datacasting services.
Datacasting will increase the number of DTV receivers in U.S. homes, which will encourage content providers to develop more differentiated digital TV content. In early February, Berkeley computer science researchers found security flaws in the WEP protocol, which is employed in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN equipment. A slough of vendors, including heavyweight networking equipment companies, offer Wi-Fi products, and have been very successful in pushing them into the mainstream enterprise environment. Naturally, WLAN vendors felt as if cold water had been thrown on their faces because, in reality, vendors had already discovered this hole in Wi-Fi's security, and had compensated for it by offering scaled security solutions. In fact, in October 2000, a member of TGe wrote an article highlighting the weaknesses of WEP and suggesting points of action.