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Russian regulator requires registration: The folks at the Rossvyazokhrankultura (Russian Mass Media, Communications and Cultural Protection Service) have decided that every device with Wi-Fi inside requires registration for use by an individual user without a transferrable license, according to The Other Russia, which picked the story up from Russian-language site Fontanka.ru.
While Wi-Fi wasn’t as broadly unlicensed in Russia as it is in most other industrialized nations, a state regulator exempted indoor use in certain bands from registration. The Mass Media agency apparently believes that it has the authority to compel this, although there’s some doubt by observers as to whether it really falls in their purview.
Setting up a home Wi-Fi network or a hotspot would require what sounds like vast amounts of paperwork, akin to putting a cell tower.
Posted by Glennf at 8:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator, allows use of phones in the air: Ofcom, in conjunction with other EU nations, will allow the use of mobile phones on UK-registered aircraft. The use of the phones over various airspaces is separately regulated by Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority, the European Aviation Safety Agency, and a variety of national aviation agencies. They will separately issue airworthiness approval. The Ofcom portion of this deals with whether the mobile phones and on-board picocells would interfere with other uses of spectrum. The agency will extend existing airline licenses for 2G purposes, with 3G possible in the future.
Air rage is mentioned in the executive summary of the approval; the issue of passengers getting angry about other people talking (or texting) on phones is left to airlines to manage. The regulator already “requires that airlines have appropriate procedures to deal with disruptive passenger events and further requires that such events are notified through the formal reporting system.” Ofcom is also concerned about the fees charged and that “consumers will receive unexpectedly high bills.” Steps will be taken to make sure callers are informed of the high tariffs, which are expected to run about US$2.50 a minute—but that was in 2007 US dollars.
OnAir, the in-flight operator that’s been waiting for years for this and other rulings, issued a statement that they’ll be proceeding with all due haste to obtain licenses. Their equipment is already EU certified as airworthy.
Posted by Glennf at 9:18 AM | Comments (0)
T-Mobile offers an interesting deal to encourage support for One Laptop Per Child: The carrier will give you a year of free T-Mobile HotSpot service if you donate an XO laptop to a child in a developing country. The promotion lasts Nov. 12 to Nov. 26, 2007. Pay $399, and you get one laptop, and a child get the other. T-Mobile typically charges $30 per month for a one-year commitment to its hotspot service or $360.
Despite the marvelous intent behind OLPC, I continue to be highly dubious because specific programs of studies and goals are not set. The idea seems to still be, give kids laptops and marvelous things will happen, like they will all become programmers. Decades of research show that’s not the case. Computer-assisted learning is all over the place in terms of results, and without a tight focus, good software, trained teachers, and objective goals, there’s no hope of helping kids learn anything.
Posted by Glennf at 10:32 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
England’s Health Protection Agency will study Wi-Fi’s effects: The group backs previous statements made that further study would be prudent by planning a comprehensive health study. However, the agency’s head notes that, “There is no scientific evidence to date that WiFi and WLANs adversely affect the health of the general population.” The study will look into what the actual exposure rates are and provide a firm scientific footing on health effects focused on Wi-Fi. Most studies look at mobile telephone and cell tower/mobile mast outputs.
I contacted the HPA press officer to find out the timeframe of the study, and was told that the estimate was roughly two years.
Posted by Glennf at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Most of the 1,200 UK outlets of the fast-food giant will serve up free Wi-Fi by year’s end: The Cloud will handle the build-out, apparently, although that detail is mentioned only in passing. Hotspot service costs around £5 ($10) per hour in England, so this might have an impact on pricing and users. Jiwire lists nearly 24,000 hotspots in the UK.
In the US, about 9,000 of 12,000 McDonald’s locations have Wi-Fi, operated by Wayport, which is a paid offering. While I sometimes read that McDonald’s offers free access with a purchase, that doesn’t appear as a policy, nor is it stated anywhere in information McDonald’s makes available about its Wi-Fi. Free service is, however, provided to Nintendo DS users, an instant-messaging appliance’s users (Zipit, starting in mid-Nov.), and subscribers to AT&T WiFi Basic.
Posted by Glennf at 8:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Prague forced to scale back on free Wi-Fi network? Time magazine reports on the spread of Wi-Fi and wireless data in Europe, and notes that the EC told Prague in May to “tone down its proposed $16 million free wi-fi [sic] initiative by stripping out full Internet access” and offering just public services. The EU Competition Commissioner said that broadband is the province of private firms unless there’s a “well-defined market failure.”
Posted by Glennf at 4:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Developers behind KisMAC scanning/cracking software, plan to give it up: A statutory change in Germany leads KisMAC’s developers to believe that if they continue to make the source code available and develop the software, they would be liable to criminal prosecution. KisMAC software is a Mac OS X Wi-Fi stumbler that can capture data and crack Wi-Fi passwords.
The change would make it illegal to access private networks or private communications, by adding penalties not just for extracting passwords and other codes, but if you simply create software that could facilitate this illegal activity. In the U.S., it’s still legal to create software that cracks passwords; intent is what drives criminality. (A description of the law’s changes can be found—in German—can be found here [PDF], at the Federal Ministry of Justice’s site.)
Because KisMAC scans for non-public information and can crack passwords, it would clearly be within the scope of the law. While the developers could conceivably tear some of the guts of the program out to remove cracking code, it’s likely that the mere act of passively scanning a network to which you don’t have permission to access, which might allow you to see unprotected passwords, would be illegal. (I start reading a little German, and the dependent clauses just start multiplying.)
A demonstration is planned for August 9, as the law also requires onerous data retention policies. The Stop the Data Retaining movement—it sounds better in German, honestly—says that the law will require retention by providers and telecoms records of all communications by landline phone, mobile phone, and the Internet. Six months of connection data would be stored . That is, not the contents of communication, such as email messages, but all the calls placed and received, to whom messages were sent, and so on. The movement also says anonymization services would be banned.
Posted by Glennf at 2:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
iPass joins the growing array of aggregators of hotspot access in providing flat-rate service: In a briefing prior to today’s announcement focused on enterprise device management, iPass product manager director Piero DePaoli said the company has been offering a flat-rate price for unlimited hotspot use across their network since 2006. iPass decided the time was right to discuss the pricing with Wi-Fi Networking News in context of the changes in the industry, and their bundling of IT tools to help tech managers keep mobile workers’ laptops safely up to date.
The firm charges roughly $50 per month per network user that uses an iPass location at any time during a month. Users that stay off iPass hotspots but uses the iPass Connect client during that month to connect to non-iPass locations costs about $2 to $4 per month. DePaoli said that the unlimited use fee organizations pay varies upward or downward from $50 per network user based on the minimum number of users a client contracts for, and the areas of the world that a company has the most usage in. The flat rate “encourages [companies] and their users to use the service on a regular basis and be productive,” DePaoli said.
iPass joins—or, rather, quietly predates—Boingo Wireless and Trustive in offering unlimited hotspot access at a single rate across their entire aggregated networks (Boingo coverage, Trustive coverage). iPass confirmed via email today that they count 80,000 locations in their network. Boingo claims 100,000 under contract with 60,000 live and accessible (the rest coming in a matter of weeks and months), reselling unlimited service for $39/€29 per month. Trustive just opened its network of about 30,000 European locations for €33 per month.
While I am not privy to the detailed terms of the deals arranged between aggregators and venues, I’ve been told on many occasions that aggregators typically pay a per-session fee to a venue. At one point that ranged from 50 cents to $1; I have no idea what price it is today. I suspect that there are an increasing number of deals in which an aggregator pays a guaranteed monthly minimum to a venue, which would then behoove the aggregator to accumulate more flat-rate customers who use that venue or set of venues.
All of which means that, on average, aggregators have customers who use about 10 to 15 sessions a month. Some power users who travel to countries in which aggregators pay higher than normal fees or frequent venues with better deals may far exceed their monthly payment in what the aggregators settle to hotspot operators and hoteliers; others may use just a few sessions a month, still coming out ahead on $7 to $15 daily fees.
iPass mostly does business with larger firms (386 of Forbes’s Global 2000) that buy access for a subset or all of their employees, with iPass integrating the directory services already running at the company with their software allowing single login services for company employees, and a single bill with full itemization that hits corporate accounting in electronic form. iPass does work with resellers that sell to individuals as well.
iPass, like EarthLink, is the middle of the massive shift from dial-up to Wi-Fi and broadband among their user base. In their most recent quarterly reporting, they show a massive drop in revenue from their bread-and-butter, metered roaming dial-up, from $30.6m in Q1 2006 to $20.3m in Q1 2007. That would leave most companies weeping, and shifting management. However, in the same period, they increased broadband revenue (including Wi-Fi and other services) from $5.7m to $15.4m, a staggering rise. With an increase in software and service revenue, the firm managed to slightly increase overall revenue, while keeping losses at a dull roar.
Today’s announcement, by the way, was that iPass’s Mobility Management package is included in the cost of those monthly service fees. DePaoli explained that the management software lets IT personnel “use our system to push out operating system patches, homegrown software, configurations, and everything else.” This keeps staff in the field up to date and in sync, reducing downtime or manual upgrade operations.
Posted by Glennf at 4:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Nomade Telecom and Radioactif will build Wi-Fi across Montreal, Canada: The service will launch in Plateau Mont Royal this fall, and the companies plan to cover nearly 90 percent of the city’s population. Montreal has 1.6m citizens spread over 365 sq km (141 sq mi). VoIP service will be part of the offering. Service will run C$30 per month with speeds up to 5 Mbps downstream. (With C$1:US$1 coming soon, C$30 is relatively expensive.)
The network will later extend to the North and South Banks after the first rollout. The firms then plan to build networks elsewhere in Quebec, as well as Halifax, Toronto, Windsor, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver. This could be the big launch for metro-scale networks across Canada. So far, the only big city-wide effort in a large town is in Toronto by the incumbent electricity provider.
The Montreal companies have chosen to build service in areas with a population density exceeding 1,000 people per sq km. They expect this to cost C$25m. The Plateau is Montreal’s most density populated borough, this article says. This is in opposition to how most municipal efforts have been targeted in the U.S., where a city issues a proposal that requires 90 to 97 percent coverage, with a focus on the areas less served by existing broadband, even if population density there isn’t ideal.
The Plateau is also home to the main efforts of community wireless group Île Sans Fil (island without wires) which has quite a few locations.
While the article and the press release both mention WiMax, it’s an infrastructure thing—for backhaul. This isn’t a mobile WiMax deployment for end users. The press release notes that the downstream speed they’re achieving “est possible grâce à l’infrastructure WiMAX déployée en arrière-plan” (is possible thanks to the WiMax infrastructure deployed in the background). But WiMax or WiMax-like technologies are being used by all metro-scale networks and equipment makers; I think the firms just wanted to put WiMax in the headline.
Posted by Glennf at 11:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The great breadbasket of Canada looks to bring wireless to major municipalities: The middle part of the country is known for agriculture, and has under 1m population, although food ranks far below oil these days in revenue. The province aims to help improve connectivity for its residents and for business travelers by adding free Wi-Fi to the four largest cities. Because of the relatively low population and large amount of business conducted, it’s a relatively low-cost win—Cdn$1.3m for installing 250 nodes across the locations selected and Cdn$339K per year.
Posted by Glennf at 2:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Wi-Fi Alliance’s head Frank Hanzlik recently made a tour of India: The reason? The country is poised for vast growth, according to a report released coincident with his visit. Annual sales of US$42m today will grow to $744m in 2012, or 61 percent per year on average. This excludes embedded devices and laptops. Hotspot access will growth as well as WiMax trials turning into full-scale deployment, with the potential for mobile WiMax to play an additional role. The 60-page report is available at no cost.
Posted by Glennf at 10:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Good interview with The Cloud’s Owen Geddes, its biz-dev director: The Cloud is one of the world’s largest hotspot networks, and started out with the notion of being a reseller to aggregators. Geddes obviously has an interest in the device-driven Wi-Fi market, as opposed to pure laptop Wi-Fi. He notes that Western Europe could move from 80 to 90 percent laptop Wi-Fi usage last year to 70 percent consumer electronics in 2008. The Cloud just introduced what’s unfortunately rare—flat rate Wi-Fi, costing £12 per month. They’re adding rates for devices ranging from £5 to under £10 per month depending on the device.
Geddes also mentions something that I’ve heard about from some US hotspot operators: the fact that music download services can’t per se expect a free ride from Wi-Fi locations because of the bandwidth consumed. He casts it the opposite way: a 99p download price with no Wi-Fi fee. But that also means that the Wi-Fi hotspot shares in that download revenue.
Posted by Glennf at 2:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The city of Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi province, China, will get 1,000 Wi-Fi hotspots: Although the press release describes provider Along as turning Xi’an into a “Wi-Fi city,” it’s not a city-wide Wi-Fi network so much as an extensive network of hotspots. The city covers nearly 900 square miles, and 1,000 access points doesn’t provide enough density for residential use, of course. The release says 7m people live there; Encyclopedia Britannica cites a 2003 estimate of city population at 2.7m. The company will add a number of hotspots at universities and “tertiary institutions,” by which I have no idea what’s meant.
Posted by Glennf at 11:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Meraki’s inexpensive mesh-routing nodes are a hit: About 15,000 users are connecting to their $50 nodes ($100 for outdoor units) in 25 countries during their testing phase. The company didn’t note how many routers were shipped, but it’s likely between 1,000 and 2,000 based on their descriptions of density. Meraki’s devices cost a tiny fraction of what metro-scale mesh networking equipment costs, and that’s partly because they have fewer features and reach much shorter distances, requiring denser installations. But the point isn’t necessarily blanketing a city, but rather putting a signal over a neighborhood, a village, or an apartment building. Meraki is a bit like powerline networking: Covering connected areas without a lot of infrastructure. You can listen to an archived podcast interview I conducted in Oct. 2006 with Sanjit Biswas and Hans Robertson, two of the co-founders.
Meraki received very positive coverage in Randall Stross’s Digital Domain column yesterday in the New York Times, in which he looks at how the next billion people will be connected to the Internet. Stross compares the efforts of city-wide networks to outdated methods of lighting cities by using huge arc-lights high in the air. He cites a practical test in Portland, Ore., where 400 apartments were served by 100 Meraki routers, which works out to $13 a household for installation, and, Stross writes, about $1 per month per household for Internet access. Because this rollout was in association with a non-profit, that group is obviously dealing with the labor costs of installation, tech support, and maintenance. (Even with a very low failure rate, 100 routers might see a 1% failure per month or higher, especially in high-use conditions.)
Finally, Meraki announced $5m in first-round funding led by Sequoia; other investors weren’t noted. GigaOm mentions that Google and Sequoia invested in Fon; Sequoia in Ruckus Wireless; and Benchmark Capital in Whisher.
Posted by Glennf at 10:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Reuter reports that Fon could move from grassroots to mainstream: Fon, so far, has build its tens of thousands of nodes mostly through individuals who obtain a router from them or flash an existing device with new firmware, and set up shop. Although some ISPs allow and some tolerate sharing a connection via Fon, only a few actively encourage it. This could change, Reuters reports, if a deal with BT goes through.
Under the deal, which BT and Fon wouldn’t comment on for Reuters, BT would allow its millions of broadband users to share their networks with Fon, and BT’s Fusion mobile callers—who can call over Wi-Fi or cell using UMA (unlicensed mobile access)—could access Fon’s nodes to place calls. Fon claims 250,000 Foneros, but a smaller number of active nodes.
The Fusion plan would benefit from BT-broadband-backed Wi-Fi nodes because BT can separate VoIP packets on their side of the broadband connection, providing a higher-quality service than a company like Vonage, which must push VoIP packets over the broadband connection out to the Internet, over an unpredictable route.
The article claims that BT could push software to its routers to enable Fon, but I imagine that’s an oversimplification—unless most BT broadband users also received a Wi-Fi router from BT, and it’s a router that they can insert Fon software into.
Posted by Glennf at 7:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Boingo Wireless wrote to note that their new VoIP pricing at hotspots includes all locations: On Dec. 7, Belkin announced their Skype phone that would work with a Boingo hotspot service plan. At the time, I assumed that the $8/month fee for unlimited VoIP usage would be subject to the same restrictions that applied to Boingo’s pure data plan: US and Canadian locations are included in their $22/month charge for “unlimited” access, while negotiated metered rates apply to many locations outside North America.
Not so, Boingo says. The VoIP plan is really Boingo Mobile, a new service aimed at the category of mobile devices that sport Wi-Fi. This will be a large category in 2007, with potentially tens of millions of units across games, cameras, phones, and handhelds sold worldwide. And tens of millions might be too low a number. Despite predictions that cell data networks will improve in speed and coverage, there are no cameras or gaming systems that use cell networks for connectivity, and no plans that I’m aware of because of the heavy data demand that real cameras (not phonecams) and interactive games would place on the limited bandwidth of cell networks.
Boingo said that their $8 per month mobile service buys you unlimited access from supported devices at all their locations—no metered charges will apply. Right now, the focus is on phones, but that will change. As Devicescape noted in their beta launch of their method of making it easier to log into Wi-Fi networks from mobile devices, current account systems require a unique paid account for each unique use—you can’t use your T-Mobile account on two laptops at once, but you also can’t use it on a phone, camera, and laptop. New pricing models have to evolve to allow unique devices you own to have their own subscriptions under a super-account you manage.
Boingo’s network now stands at about 35,000 hotspots worldwide with about 19,000 more ready for near-term integration, and 6,000 others in various stages. However, not all 35,000 integrated locations work with VoIP yet, due to software and authentication updates that are in progress.
Posted by Glennf at 12:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
UK hotspot builder The Cloud is in talks with 30 cities: The company had previously announced their intent to unwire city centers in about 10 UK metropolitan areas; they already operate service in The City of London, the square mile famous for finance, as well as the newer Canary Wharf district. The new deals include Stuttgart, Germany, and Karlskrona, Sweden. The company says it is talking to many other towns, too.
Posted by Glennf at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The GNER rail line in Britain has Internet access on all its trains: The East Coast rail operator announced that it would expand service ahead of schedule, based on positive feedback. I spoke this summer to the head of the joint venture between GNER and Icomera, the Swedish developer of this particular technology, and he spoke glowingly of the uptake by their customers; once service was running on some trains, it became a drumbeat to get it running on all trains. One factor in adding service earlier was the boost to cellular uplink capacity via UMTS/HSDPA that was rolled out across parts of the service area in recent months.
GNER now has Wi-Fi-based access on 41 trains; the Swedish operator SJ has Wi-Fi on all its 42 trains. (GNER claims the world’s largest operation based on carriages equipped.) Service fees run from £2.95 for 30 minutes to £9.95 for a full day in coach. First-class passengers pay no fees.
The UK operator for First Great Western and First ScotRail, First Group, told ZDNet, “The move in technology with handheld devices like BlackBerrys means not everyone wants to use laptops on trains.” Which means that they haven’t thought about the implications of having a high-speed network onboard—they’re only thinking about the backhaul link, a major mistake, as it ignores using VoIP within trains for operational purposes, as well as surveillance video, and entertainment services, to name a few other options. And comparing Blackberrys to laptops—well, Blackberrys may be great, but every business traveler on a train is carrying a laptop, anyway.
Posted by Glennf at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) “standard” won’t die: WAPI is a homegrown, proprietary encryption and authentication solution developed in part by the Chinese computer industry and in part by military- and government-controlled entities. WAPI has been slapped around by the ISO, in part because China’s industry won’t publish the spec. Problematic. A few years ago, WAPI was going to be required for all equipment sold in China, but high-level Bush administration negotiation apparently squashed that plan. It would have required foreign firms to partner with domestic companies, revealing significant silicon intellectual property in the process. You can see the posts in the WAPI soap opera through this link.
The latest news is that the Asia Times reports that two non-governmental wireless integrators have agreed to use WAPI as their preferred standard—over 802.1X and 802.11i, apparently. There’s also been an increase in the number of firms involved in the WAPI Industrial Alliance: Once 11, there are now 22. One of the arguments made for developing a domestic standard, which is not an unusual step in China, is to reduce IP payments. Of course, there are extremely few royalties paid for any aspect of 802.1X or 802.11 deployment. If devices made in China can retail in the U.S. for $20 or less, it’s hard to see that IP forms a significant outflow of yuan.
This Asia Times article is reasonably fair in recounting the technical, standards body, and political turmoil and series of events that have made WAPI such a hot potato. “Supporters of 802.11i say WAPI cannot be considered as a global standard because the Chinese government has not made its algorithms public and therefore independent verification of the strength of the security is not possible.” Dead on.
A Chinese research firm is quoted in the article noting that over half of the WLAN products due on the market by the end of 2006 will be WAPI compliant. That doesn’t preclude compliance with IEEE standards or Wi-Fi certification, of course. The Wi-Fi Alliance, in fact, opened a Chinese certification branch almost 14 months ago. The Alliance requires conformance with 802.11i-derived WPA and WPA2 encryption and authentication, which means that any product that supports WAPI and wants a Wi-Fi seal must also support the IEEE-based security methods.
I’ve said this every time I report on WAPI, but it’s worth repeating. It’s almost certain that WAPI contains backdoors to allow government surveillance of Wi-Fi traffic. As 802.11i has been published, it’s almost certain that it does not contain such backdoors. China has an explicit policy of requiring the ability to monitor voice and data as it passes across domestic networks, so it’s naive to assume that WAPI isn’t being pushed as a way to ensure that a secure protocol that can’t be broken into while in transit isn’t used.
In the past, when I’ve stated this, commenters have accused me of being an anti-Sinite, or making up information. I’m neither. There’s no logical leap involved in connecting WAPI, its government and military backers, and traditional Chinese information technology requirements.
Posted by Glennf at 1:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Metro-scale network equipment provider Strix scores with a giant NTT West contract in Japan: The NTT subsidiary will roll out 802.11j service, using the 4.9 GHz band. Strix says the deployment will ultimately pass 50m people. The deployment uses Strix’s Access/One OWS and IWS (outdoor and indoor) multi-radio products that allow voice, video, and data with quality of service scheduling. Update: Strix retracted this story on a later date, stating that they weren’t providing accurate numbers or numbers with permission! It’s also unclear what their total involvement in whatever scale project this is turns out to be.
802.11a isn’t allowed in Japan, while 4.9 GHz is used for public safety purposes in the US and military purposes in some other countries. Strix is the only mesh vendor, according to Unstrung, that’s selling into the 4.9 GHz band for 802.11j support. SkyPilot and others offer 4.9 GHz public safety gear in the US.
Posted by Glennf at 1:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Interesting experiment for the BBC News Interactive section: They decided to test out Norwich’s citywide service by working in the great out of doors. They had a variety of trouble with VoIP over Wi-Fi phones, but they did manage to use Skype on a laptop. Power, of course, reared its ugly head. Not signal power, but electrical. All four reporters ran out of juice within a couple of hours and needed to borrow a long extension cord to charge. (Photos)
Posted by Glennf at 1:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Dalai Lama offers his support for the conference: The summit, taking place in the Tibetan government in exile’s home in the Himalayas, happens Oct. 22-25. The Dalai Lama released a letter in support of the event, which will focus on the advantages of wireless networks for rural communities in bringing better education, health-care information, economic development, and a host of other potential enhancements to life. The local wireless mesh network was recently highlighted in the US by BoingBoing editor and NPR Day to Day correspondent Xeni Jardin who trekked out to see many-mile-high Wi-Fi. She writes over at Wired News about the summit. [link via BoingBoing]
Posted by Glennf at 3:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Xeni Jardin spent weeks off in northern India looking into how technology and media have affected the Tibetans living here: She talks in one of her four reports for NPR radio show Day to Day about a mesh wireless network that uses Tibetan Buddhist temples—typically the highest point in towns—and abandoned radio towers. This isn’t a public Wi-Fi network. Rather, it’s a tool for communicating about Tibetan culture among their own society and with the outside world. Nodes are solar-powered; batteries are heavily used where electricity is relied on. About 2,000 computers hook into this network, and a summit will be held in October.
This was part three of four. Part I deals with a nomadic Hindu tribe that lives near the Himalayas; the second, about Tibet’s exile community’s connections via the Web; and the final about “Lhasa Vegas,” in which prostrating pilgrims are juxtaposed against “garish sights and sounds.”
Posted by Glennf at 4:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Boingo aggregated hotspot network encompasses whole city: It’s the beginning of things to come, in which entire metropolitan-scale networks are added to the roaming networks of hotspot aggregators, or are part of peering arrangements among like partners, city to city. Taipei’s Wifly network, which spans most of the town with Wi-Fi, will be available through a single account using Boingo’s software. This isn’t free roaming; most of Boingo’s roaming outside of the U.S. involves prenegotiated, discounted fees. All Boingo’s locations in Taipei, for instance, are currently tagged as Premium Locations with per-minute charges.
Posted by Glennf at 9:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The popular press keeps dubbing WiMax “Wi-Fi on steroids”: Ofcom, the British communications regulator, is considering turning Wi-Fi itself into Wi-Fi on steroids by allowing a 100-fold increase in direct power for the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. In the U.S., the limit is 1W (measured as a calculation of the radio, amplifier, signal loss, and antenna) and 4W effective output for 2.4 GHz, and a variety of rules for 5 GHz. Ofcom is considering 10W, while the European Union might allow 4W. There might be some minimal licensing requirements for the higher power plus a requirement of presence to avoid using higher power where it’s not allowed.
This article points to a European technology blogger who noted the Ofcom plan, and who writes about the higher limits, that the plan “completely ignores the health risks as 2.4GHz is the frequency microwave ovens use and 10W though low power could have significant health risks.” Let’s just call that bloody ignorance, shall we?Microwave ovens reflect a signal in a confined space to change the magnetic polarity 2.4 billion times a second of water molecules; the twisting thus causes friction and heat. Microwave ovens typically use 800W to 1200W of power. Beaming out microwaves doesn’t produce an oven effect because it doesn’t have the reflection.
However, there are extremely well known health effects from close proximity to high-power microwaves, and 10 watts counts. Even in the U.S., you can produce signals of nearly 30W under certain directional rules using certain kinds of antennas. It is never clever to position oneself closely to a high-power antenna—something at least an order of magnitude higher in output than a home gateway. High-powered Wi-Fi or other wireless uses directional antennas typically (because the rules don’t allow high-power omnidirectional use). These antennas are typically on roofs and poles or pointing far away from human beings.
Posted by Glennf at 7:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
BSkyB is latest to offer free broadband in the home: Free needs an asterisk, as the Sky Broadband service requires a subscription to the satellite television service (about £17/$31 per month), a £40 ($73.50) activation fee, and may involve some installation fees. The service is ADSL with 2 Mbps downstream, and will include a free wireless router. A 16 Mbps downstream service is just £10 ($18) per month. And a landline VoIP-like service will add £5 ($9) per month for unlimited calls to landline numbers in the UK. BSkyB will put £400m ($735m) into its broadband service over the next three years, expecting profitability in 2010. (A reader notes that this isn’t VoIP per se: It’s Carrier Pre Select (CPS), in which wireline calls are terminated via Sky’s network. This is similar, I believe, to US providers like Speakeasy which use VoIP as a carrying mechanism over the local loop.)
BSkyB isn’t alone, which sounds odd to those of us outside the UK. Television service and mobile phone offerings are in such a high state of competition, that broadband-included packages are not unusual. Carphone Warehouse offers 8 Mbps ADSL with a £20 ($38) per month unlimited UK landline voice package (that’s the £11 line fee plus their service), a £30 ($54) activation fee, and an 18-month contract. An extra £1 per month gets you unlimited landline calling in 28 countries. (The British advertising watchdog ruled that Carphone can’t call this service “free” because the broadband service is integral to the voice offering, but Carphone has finessed this and can advertise free by adding the broadband t