Top 10 of 2012

Here are the top 10 most popular blog posts on the Laird Wireless Connectivity Blog from 2012:

1. FDA Regulation of Mobile Medical Apps: The FDA plans to regulate some smartphone medical applications. This decision has received mixed reviews since its announcement in 2011.
2. BT v4.0 in Windows 8: The relative success or failure of a new wireless technology is dependent on its ease of use, real-world application usage, global availability, and price. BLE® delivers on all of these key points. Native support in Windows 8 further ensures a successful future.
3. 802.11ac and Wi-Fi Client Devices: 802.11ac offers a lot of promise, but 802.11n remains the safe bet in the near future.
4. FCC Allocates Spectrum for MBANs: GE Healthcare® and Philips Healthcare®, which are developing MBAN technology, had petitioned the FCC to allow MBANs to share a piece of the spectrum traditionally used by the aerospace industry and government agencies for flight testing.
5. VA Waives FIPS 140-2 Requirement for Wi-Fi Patient Monitor: The Veteran’s Administration® has chosen to deploy a Draeger  patient monitor on its Wi-Fi® networks, even though the monitors are not validated for FIPS 140-2.
6. Wi-Fi Mobility at 5 GHz: The vast majority of Wi-Fi client devices operate only in the 2.4 GHz band, which has only three non-overlapping channels. The 2.4 GHz band also is the home of Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, microwave ovens, and other devices. The 5 GHz band is less cluttered and offers considerably more capacity.
7. TV White Space: After TV White Space was proposed, there was pushback from television broadcasters and event coordinators. Technical and regulatory restrictions will reduce the use cases for TV White Space.
8. Applications for TV White Space: Currently two very different use cases are emerging to take advantage of restriction-laden frequencies available: rural broadband deployments, and low-cost, low-power machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.
9. What OS is Best for a Medical Device?: Android makes a good operating system (OS) choice for some medical devices, stacking up well against traditional mainstream OS competitors such as Microsoft Windows Embedded Compact (CE) and Linux.
10. Wi-Fi Networks at VA Hospitals: What Security is Acceptable?: The VA recently made news because of a complaint that it was circumventing federal rules for information security in its deployment of certain devices.

Our blog posts cover the latest Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other wireless news.  Which posts will be the most popular in 2013?  That’s up to you.