AirTight Networks Inc., a startup company offering what it claims to be “the industry’s first Wi-Fi firewall,” had its intellectual property portfolio expanded yesterday by the issue of U.S. Patent No. 7,002,943 (“Method and system for monitoring a selected region of an airspace associated with local area networks of computing devices”). This patent teaches methods and security monitoring systems that “can monitor wireless activity within and in the vicinity of the region of local area network [LAN] operation” and “advantageously detect unauthorized wireless activity and alert the owner of the network about it.” Two companies, Colubris Networks Inc. and Extreme Networks Inc., have already licensed this technology, and Dennis Tsu, the Vice President of Marketing at AirTight, claims to be “in talks with a number of other companies” about additional licenses. So far at least one company (AirDefense Inc.) plans to dispute this newly issued patent, claiming that it had filed applications considered to be “prior art” under current patent practice.

Unstrung Article: LINK
U.S. Patent No. 7,002,943: LINK
Homepage for AirTight Networks, Inc.: LINK