Wireless Blog

The Enterprise Mobility business of Motorola, Inc. today announced that it has deployed a campus-wide wireless LAN for Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, one of the top universities in China.

Dish Network and DirecTV are battling amongst themselves to promote the most HDTV channels, as well as outflank cable competitors like Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

Dish Network is beating DirecTV and cable competitors to the punch, reports Light Reading. They have begun to roll out standard-def and high-def service in the eastern half of the United States using MPEG-4 (see table for a list of the first 21 markets). Dish is supporting the service with MPEG-4 receivers, including one with an on-board digital video recorder (DVR).

Dish is pushing its recently launched TurboHD service and some 1080p resolution content. Dish expects to offer as many as 150 national HD channels by year’s end, with hopes that it can reverse a second quarter that saw the satellite company lose subscribers for the first time.

Meanwhile, DirecTV began delivering all HD programming in MPEG-4 last month, a spokesman said. But, because it would require massive set-top switch-outs, DirecTV doesn’t have any announced plans to offer Standard Definition in MPEG-4. DirecTV says it has 130 “national” HD channels up, and will have the capacity for 200 when the DirecTV 12 satellite is available next year. DirecTV also expects to offer some movies in 1080p, later this year.

There’s an excellent chance you can get HDTV signals through your current cable provider, with more than 100 million U.S. households “passed” by a cable operator that offers HDTV, reports C/Net. All of the top 100 cable markets have been “passed” by a cable company with HDTV programming. That’s the good news. The bad news is that most providers carry only a handful of the 50-odd HDTV networks. Time Warner Cable has agreed to carry the Big Ten Network in standard-def and High-Def in all Big Ten states while Charter says a deal to carry the Big Ten Network is “imminent.”

DirecTV and Dish Network plan to broadcast the existing MPEG-2 HD lineup, but subscribers with older HD equipment will have to upgrade to newer MPEG-4 boxes to watch the new local and national HD channels.

The wireless solution allows home entertainment buffs to connect their computers to plasma or LCD TV sets without using cables and view their desktop content on a big screen, in high resolution. (via Press Release from IOGEAR - August 27, 2008) Irvine, California - Consumers who desire a simple and mobile solution for viewing content on [...]

WiMedia Alliance monitors global regulatory status for UWB applications (via Press Release from WiMedia Alliance - August 27, 2008) San Ramon, California - The WiMedia Alliance today announced the adoption of the Spectrum Extension Release (SER) update to its UWB Radio specifications. This extension to the existing specifications adds optional features to address certain worldwide regulatory [...]

Business Week summarizes a variety of mobile VoIP services that allow you to make phone calls from your cellphone over Wi-Fi networks.

VoIP calling is already raising a ruckus in telecommunications, putting pressure on the price of land-line calling and luring subscribers toward upstarts like Vonage and Comcast away from incumbents such as AT&T, and Verizon. Now, the technology threatens to erode sales for mobile-phone service providers too.

These apps are popular amongst people who use iPhones, notes GigaOM, thanks to services such as Truphone, Gorilla Mobile and iCall.

ON World estimates that in 2011, mobile VoIP voice services may generate $33.7 billion, up from $516 million in 2006, the most recent year for which the figure is available. Jajah, for example, experienced a fivefold increase in just a year and now has more than 10 million users — and growing.

Carriers are not happy VoIP newcomers snapping up almost one-quarter of all wireless minutes now devoted to long-distance and international calls.

It’s not going to get any better. Skype, the eBay-owned service used by more than 338 million people to make free PC-to-PC calls, later this year plans to release a new product called “Skype for your mobile” that will let customers use local wireless minutes to make international calls. It works on almost 50 handsets, but uses cellular data services rather than Wi-Fi.

Wireless carriers are expected to generate $700 billion in sales of voice services this year, according to consulting firm Ovum. Together, international and long distance will make up 24% of the 1.2 billion wireless minutes used this year, estimates Insight Research.

In other news, text messaging in the United States continues to explode, according to new figures from VeriSign. The company said it delivered more than 52 billion messages during the second quarter of 2008, up more than 20% from the previous quarter and saw a daily average of 572 million messages, more than doubling the 230 million per day during the second quarter of 2007.

VeriSign offers Short Message Service delivery engines to more than 600 carriers, reaching more than 2.4 billion wireless subscribers across carrier, enterprise, and media/entertainment networks. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, according to Wikipedia, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones.

Informa forecasts subscriptions to UMTS/HSPA will number nearly half a billion worldwide by the end of 2009, and will pass the one billion mark in 2012. Currently some 88% use GSM standards while 11% use CDMA.

The iPhone took hits on two fronts Wednesday as Orange -- an iPhone 3G carrier in France -- admitted to limiting 3G bandwidth for its customers, and a security flaw was discovered in the iPhone that enables unauthorized users to access private data on the phone when it is supposedly locked.

The French Connection

When 3G-bug rumors and substandard network performance on the iPhone prompted a groundswell of irate customers last week, forums overflowed with anecdotal tales of the 3G network's slow performance. One Internet forum began to collate users' data speeds to get some answers. After thousands of results were in, France's 3G carrier Orange came in consistently at the bottom of the performance heap.

Calls to the company by angry customers resulted in many of those consumers receiving special treatment by tech-savvy support folks, who upped their bandwidth. After online petitions and more calls to the company, Orange officials reluctantly admitted they had been throttling iPhone users to a paltry 384KB bandwidth. By comparison, neighboring German iPhone users are logging 1MB speeds, as posted in the forum.

In a statement released by Orange, the company admitted its bandwidth restrictions, and promised that it would up the speeds to 1MB by mid-September. No word on why customers have to wait that long to get full 3G service or whether they will see compensation on their bills.

The French Connection problems have fueled Internet rumors that AT&T may be rigging its 3G data speeds here in the United States, as more and more customers complain about substandard data rates.

iPhone Flaw

Reports began surfacing today that the iPhone suffers from a serious security flaw that could put users' private data in jeopardy. Nearly all cell phones have the option of providing a lock code that prevents anyone from using the phone...

It will come as no surprise that Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jen-Hsun Huang believes in the future of graphics processing. As he pointed out in a two-and-a-half hour presentation at the Nvision 2008 conference, today's GPUs have the equivalent of 1,000 times the processing power of a Cray supercomputer from 30 years ago.

What's less obvious is that Huang also sees Nvidia's future in smartphones.

"Few technologies have made the leaps that the GPU has over the past 10 years. Years ago, the GPU was really just an accelerator, an application-specific integrated circuit. Now it's a general-purpose parallel computing processor," Huang said in his keynote.

Computers First, Phones Second

But smartphones, he added, are no less than a "second personal computing revolution." Huang said when it comes to smartphones, Nvidia is "completely focused on Windows Mobile 7."

"Focusing on smartphones. That's our strategy," he said.

The overarching goal of Nvidia's smartphone strategy will be to set on its ear the current assumption that the devices are phones first, computers second. Apple's iPhone and iPod touch -- with full Web browser and third-party applications sold via the App Store -- have made it clear to most observers that there's a market for what are essentially mobile computers that happen to have phones built in (or not, in the case of the iPod touch.)

Focus on VIA

With cell-phone penetration clearly peaking, the opportunity is to put more computing functions in consumers' pockets. And that's where Nvidia steps in.

Toward that end, Nvidia is working to optimize its chips for VIA, a Taiwanese maker of low-power chips, and its new CPU called Nano. "We're excited about VIA; we're optimizing our entire software stack for Nano," the Nvidia boss said.

As Nvidia's fortunes have risen and those of Intel's chief rival, AMD -- which appears to have choked on its $5.4...

Driven by the still rising number of broadband subscribers, the desire to share bandwidth, residential gateway use by telecom broadband providers, and increases in Asia/Pacific, the worldwide installed base of ...

Carol Wilson of Telephony Magazine has an in-depth review of municipal broadband in the United States. She says that despite some high-profile failures, the deep-seated need for broadband is keeping municipalities on the fiber-to-the-home-track.

These projects are being fueled by the falling cost of Fiber To The Home (FTTH) technology and the growing experience in deploying systems, due in no small part to the massive effort Verizon has launched.

It is supremely ironic that one of the nation’s more visible and contentious muni fiber projects, involving the city-owned Lafayette Utilities System in Lafayette, La., is now reaping the benefits of delays to its FTTH construction caused by lawsuits and legal actions launched by incumbent cable and telco operators.

Among the examples she mentions:

• Networks such as iProvo and Utopia found it hard to attract service providers, and without services, customers just weren’t interested. A Utah state law now prohibits municipally owned networks from selling retail services.

  “What happened in Utah is something we have been talking about for years — the state law that effectively prohibits retail service is, in my view, a very substantial part of what is wrong with the environment in Utah and particularly iProvo,” said Jim Baller, attorney with Baller & Herbst, which represents municipalities and has done research for e-NC Alliance, among others. “If applications are slow to evolve — and they have been — service providers are left competing with incumbents on traditional services, where they have no advantages.”

  
• North Carolina’s e-NC Authority is seeking ways to stimulate broadband initiatives in rural areas of that state, while Massachusetts just passed a bill to create a Broadband Institute, using $40 million in state funding to bring broadband to western areas of the state still served only by dial-up.
• In Washington state, the Grant County Public Utilities Department, another FTTH pioneer, still is operating a wholesale-only network in accordance with state law there, although it came under criticism and went through a management change over the $400 million price tag of that network.

  Partially in response to that criticism, the Grant County PUD halted its network expansion in 2004, after four years of construction had connected about 11,000 homes — or one-third of the anticipated homes — said Sarah Morford, spokeswoman for PUD. After extensive review and exploration of other technology options, the Grant County PUD commissioners voted in March to press forward, citing public support for its fiber network. Over the next five years, Grant County plans to expand the network to reach 80% of residents and 95% of businesses, or about 3000 homes and business per year.

• In Chattanooga, Tenn., for instance, the municipally owned utility EPB, is economically justifying its fiber build on the basis of creating a “smart grid” that will enable the company to reduce energy consumption and lower the cost of power it buys from the Tennessee Valley Authority. The plan is to reach 80% of the 167,000 homes in the 600-square-mile service area in the first three years and then reach more rural homes in the last two years of the five-year buildout.
• Glasgow Electric of Glasgow, Ky., which built the nation’s first municipally owned broadband network, is now publicly arguing that instead of spending $18 billion to build nuclear power generators to meet future electric demand, the TVA should build FTTH networks to 9 million homes at $2000 each and use those connections to manage in-home electrical use.
• According to Joe Savage, president of the Fiber to the Home Council, there are 14 states where laws either prohibit or limit muni networks. A national Community Broadband Act failed in 2007 at the federal level, but U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced similar provisions as part of a 2008 bill that also seeks to unlock cell phones from specific mobile networks.

As more cities get more experience and that experience is shared, municipal networks will become more common in the U.S., as they already are in Europe, reports Telephony Magazine.

Private providers, like Integra Telecom, provide voice, data and Internet communications to thousands of business and carrier customers in 11 Western states. The company owns and operates fiber-optic networks comprising metropolitan access networks, a nationally acclaimed tier one Internet and data network, and a 4,700-mile high-speed long haul network (right).

Tim Wu compared U.S. broadband providers to OPEC in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, a charge the CTIA thinks is ridiculous.

Related Dailywireless Fiber articles include; FiOS: Too Risky?, Municipal Fiber: Fits and Starts and Be Your Own Fiber Net.

Eye-Fi’s SD memory cards come with built-in WiFi, allowing ordinary cameras to transmit photos over nearby WiFi hotspots. But WiFi drains the battery, so the ability to turn the wireless feature on and off is a much desired feature.

Today Eye-Fi announced they have collaborated Nikon to deliver enhanced integration of the Eye-Fi wireless memory card with the new Nikon D90 DSLR. The Nikon D90 detects when an Eye-Fi card is inserted and manages its power settings to ensure that photos upload for sharing and storing.

In addition, the Nikon D90 includes an Eye-Fi menu that allows users to turn the wireless function on or off. “This is a great example of how a non-wireless camera can be optimized for the Eye-Fi card to create the best experience possible,” said Yuval Koren, chief product officer and co-founder of Eye-Fi.

Through the end of this year, existing SmugMug members can automatically upgrade their Eye-Fi Share or Eye-Fi Card to include one year of free geotagging and hotspot access at more than 10,000 Wayport hotspots.

Eye-Fi products include the Eye-Fi Home ($79), Eye-Fi Share ($99), and Eye-Fi Explore cards ($129).

Below is a promotional viral video, produced by a professional photographer out of Seattle.

But without auto-focus enabled in the video mode and with a 5 minute max video record time, the camera has limitations. Sony and Canon will, no doubt, have their own competition. Sony’s on-chip VR, for example, might be handy for reducing vibration on prime f1.4 lenses like a 50 or 85mm.

The rumored Canon SX1S ($449), would be a replacement for the S5-IS, with 10 megapixels, a 20x zoom (28-560mm), HD video recording, articulated LCD, and EX-compatible hotshoe. Without external audio in, however, good sound capture remains as problematic as it does on the Nikon D-90.

DP Review has a detailed preview of the new Nikon D-90 which features 12 Megapixels, HD video recording and GPS input. It costs $999 (body only) or $1299 (with 18-105MM F/3.5-5.6 VR lens)