It's always in threes: Three big pieces of Wi-Fi news today, folks, and I'll post more information as I have it.

Wayport is being purchased for $275m by AT&T: This is a purely logical move, because Wayport not only has 10,000 McDonald's that they operate the Wi-Fi service for under a direct contract and resell to AT&T for the telecom's customers, but Wayport is also the managed services provider--the outsourced company--that handles AT&T's "internal" Wi-Fi network of Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, and other locations. The deal is cost conservation, bringing outsourced expense inhouse. With the close of the deal, AT&T's Basic footprint--free to its broadband, laptop 3G, iPhone, and some BlackBerry users--expands from 17,000 U.S. to 20,000 U.S. locations, sweeping in premium hotels and other locations.

Is TKIP dead, already? A report in advice of the PacSec conference from IDG News Service says that researchers have found a non-brute-force method of cracking a TKIP key in 12 to 15 minutes on average. TKIP is used with WPA Personal, as the weaker of two encryption algorithm options. Even more specifically, researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck seem to have cracked a router (AP) to adapter (station) key, as the crack works only for data aimed at an adapter. If this is true, it would require a move by an organization concerned about security to WPA2 only, which uses the AES encryption method. (802.11i-based security with WPA or WPA2 creates a master key from which TKIP and other types of keys are derived. The crack apparently covers just one of the derived keys.)

Virgin America has press flight set for 22-November: I'll be on the plane if all goes well. The promotional flight of the one Wi-Fi equipped craft will be followed each week by an additional plane being unwired with the whole fleet set for Internet access by Q2 2009.

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