Tech Lover

During the past six months, the prospects for delivering free high-speed wireless Internet service throughout metropolitan areas went from a sure bet to a sucker bet.

Even as Los Angeles explores building a free or low-cost citywide Wi-Fi system, cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and Houston are delaying or pulling the plug on similar plans.

The catalyst for the sudden retrenchment came last month when Internet service provider EarthLink Inc., the nation’s largest builder of municipal Wi-Fi networks, said it was halting work on such projects and bailing out of some contracts as part of a massive corporate restructuring.

The Atlanta company plans to complete construction in Anaheim, Calif., and Philadelphia, the nation’s first major city to embrace broadband wireless, and operate those and a few other existing locations.

But EarthLink is stopping all new projects until it figures out a way to make money.

Offering wireless Internet service for free is a business model that is “simply unworkable,” EarthLink chief executive Rolla Huff said.

“None of this should be a surprise,” Craig Moffett, a cable-TV industry analyst, wrote in a recent report. “Free may be hard to compete with, but it’s also a tough way to make any money.”

But don’t expect cities to pull out completely, industry analysts said.

With more Wi-Fi products coming on the scene such as T-Mobile USA’s Wi-Fi cellphones and Apple Inc.’s iPhone and new iPod Touch, demand for citywide wireless broadband connections is likely to grow.

Wi-Fi networks are much faster, more efficient and cheaper to build and operate than cellular systems.

“We’ve gone from one end of the hype meter to the other,” said Craig Settles, an Oakland, Calif.-based author and communications-industry consultant. “We’ll balance this out sooner or later.”

Los Angeles may well become the city to watch as it goes through a laborious process to determine whether a wireless broadband network is needed - and how the service would pay for itself.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa outlined plans in February to blanket Los Angeles with wireless Internet access that people could use for free or for a small monthly subscription.

The city’s Information Technology Agency, which heads the Wi-Fi initiative, hired consulting firm Civitium in June to conduct a feasibility study.

The study, expected to be delivered in December, is being built on information from meetings with schools, hospitals, businesses, consumer groups, focus groups and other city agencies

http://www.denverpost.com/telecom/ci_7035851

This an interview with Melanie Braidich, president of the mountain region for Verizon Wireless, that’s posted on Denver Post.

Q: What are some trends you see coming for the wireless industry, either near-term or long-term?

A: There are a couple of trends going on right now. One is the whole idea around multimedia devices and the services we put on those multimedia devices. When I talk multimedia, I’m talking music, video and beyond that. We have 25 multimedia devices that allow for over-the-air music downloads, etc. That’s one trend. It’s no longer a voice-centric device anymore. The second trend is really data as part of our revenue. It’s 20 percent of our revenue stream right now; that’s up 64 percent year over year. I only see that growing in the near future and beyond.

Q: Could we ever get to the point where people use their phones for data as much or even more than they do for voice?

A: It’s absolutely possible. It depends on what the consumers want to use their device for, so absolutely.

Q: What are some of the bigger changes the industry has seen since you joined Verizon Wireless in 1989?

A: The major change that I’ve seen is that it’s not just pressing the send button and making a phone call. It’s also not solely for folks that have spare change in their pockets. It’s really now very competitive. There are more competitors in the marketplace. There are more applications that we can use on the service and more people using the service.

Q: How many employees do you oversee as president of the mountain region?

A: I have a five-state region — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, most of Idaho and Montana. I’m based here in Denver. We have 1,100 employees across the region, about 500 in Colorado and 150 here specifically in Denver.

Q: Are there any products or services that Verizon subscribers in the Rocky Mountain region use or buy more than other regions?

A: I think consistently they’re much like customers on the West Coast and East Coast in that they want the best devices on the best network and are always looking for what’s new.

I can tell you my favorite product as of late, only because I’m a recent import to the mountain region and I’ve been visiting a lot of new cities and states, and that is our product called VZ Navigator. It gives me wireless turn-by-turn directions. So I can either find the closest Starbucks at the touch of a button or I can find the most efficient way to get to a business meeting.

Q: What are the growth and investment plans for the region and Colorado?

A: We’re always investing in the network. That’s our primary offer. In Colorado we have a history of spending about $100 million on our network annually. Last year we spent $106 million. Through October this year we’ve spent $97 million and intend to push through that $100 million mark. Our intention is to continue that kind of investment in our network.

In terms of stores, we just opened a new store on Colorado Boulevard with the cross street of Evans. It’s the first “evolution” store in the Rocky Mountain region. It has more devices. It’s set up differently and allows customers to really sit and experience the products. There are a lot of interactive demonstration bars with more than 70 active devices.

Q: What are your thoughts about Apple’s decision to lock the iPhone to one phone carrier, and will that be the trend for future highly anticipated gadgets?

A: The market will really decide what the future is for an iPhone-like product, whether it’s locked down to one carrier or not.

Q: What does the Voyager, viewed as Verizon’s response to the iPhone and set to hit stores this week, offer that the latter doesn’t have?

A: It’s the first device that will have an interactive touch screen and a QWERTY keypad. It’s working on a high-speed network. That’s a huge differentiator for the Voyager.

Taken from: Phone Blog

“This is a radical new idea in supercomputing, as well as an important scientific and social experiment,” said John Witchel, graduate student and co- creator of FlashMob Computing. “The goal of the FlashMob I project is to demonstrate the viability of widespread supercomputing. We hope to give ordinary citizens the power to explore and address problems that are most important to them — whether it’s a high-school science class looking to participate in study of global warming, or a family impacted by breast cancer, or even a chess club looking to build an electronic grand-master. In short, we want to democratize supercomputing.”

“FlashMob Computing was effectively invented in the course of a classroom discussion,” said Pat Miller, USF lecturer and computer scientist at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “A student posited that could break into the Top 500, by simply inviting people to come together to create a supercomputer for a few hours.”

“Today, supercomputers are reserved for issues the government deems important, primarily defense research,” said Greg Benson, USF Professor. “We envision a supercomputing landscape where individuals can effectively ‘vote with their laptops’ by volunteering to lend their computers to causes that are important to them — regardless of governmental interest and support. Because FlashMob supercomputers are relatively easy to set up and its code is so portable, scientists can develop can write programs that are ‘flashable,’ and put out a request for a FlashMob, breaking science’s long-time dependence on traditional supercomputer centers. Our ability to harness the power and promise of supercomputing will directly impact our individual and global well- being and prosperity.”

FlashMob I
FlashMob I will occur on April 3, at the University of San Francisco gym. Network setup will begin on April 2. Doors open at 8:00 AM, with arrival times staggered throughout the morning. Participants will be assigned a specific arrival time when they register. As participants arrive, they will be given a copy of FlashMob I Software which they will boot from their CD-ROM. Because the program runs entirely from the CD-ROM, hard drives will never be touched, safeguarding personal data security. Once the PC is connected to the network, it will self-configure and begin processing requests from a central server. With the addition of each volunteer computer, the power of the supercomputer grows.

At 1:00 PM on April 3, USF students and faculty will run LINPACK, a well- known benchmarking software package. The last benchmark will be run at 5:00 PM that same evening. The best benchmark will be submitted for inclusion in the Top 500 Supercomputer list.

Throughout the day, USF will host a series of lectures and round table discussions, with industry experts from Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, NASA, NERSC and others, as well as technology exhibitions and an XBox tournament.

FlashMob I is a modified Linux kernel containing original software that allows individual PC’s to join a network and operate as a single supercomputer. Standard supercomputer libraries such as MPI have been specially tuned for the unusual nature of a FlashMob and original code has been written to facilitate bootstrapping PC’s, real-time reporting, on the fly network and node diagnostics, and ad-hoc performance optimization. Both the modified Linux kernel and the accompanying software are burned onto a bootable CD-ROM and duplicated in volume.

In the tradition of Open Source computing, raw data from the experiment will be made publicly available at www.flashmobcomputing.org, a website where people can share ideas, tune software, and improve implementation, to encourage further research in the area of FlashMob Supercomputing, and to provide a strong baseline of practical experience in preparation for FlashMob II and FlashMob III. Additionally, the site will start tracking FlashMob computers with a Top 500 Flashes list — separate from the top500.org list to encourage the exploration of this exciting new area.

For more information, or to sign up to participate in this historic event please visit http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/.

This is Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the internet, and he is warning the ISP providers to get their act together and roll out the next generation of net addresses before the current ones run out in 2010.

Every device that goes online is allocated a unique IP address but the pool of numbers is finite and due to run out around 2010.

It seems that a new system known as IPv6 has been waiting in the wings for ten years, but needs to be switched on within the next couple of years to ensure that devices don’t drop off line. The rate of consumption of available remaining IPv4 numbers appears to be on track to run out in 2010/11.

Cerf is a guy to listen to. He is Google’s chief Internet evangelist and is still chairman of Icann, the body that oversees the internet.

The main issue seems to be that the current IPv4 isn’t compatible with the new IPv6, so two systems would be required to run side by side which is sure to dig into the profits of the ISP’s.

Source: http://www.gadgetell.com/2007/10/isp-addresses-running-out/

Swiss telecommunications operator Sunrise partners with Google to provide its e-mail customers, new e-mail service based on Google Mail. The service will be launched in the first quarter of 2008 and will be only available for residential customers. Previous clients of Sunrise freesurf plus, Sunrise premiumsurf and mysunrise, as well as all new clients, will start benefiting from an increased storage capacity for their e-mails, among other things. More details of the service and partnership will be announced at the launch.

Source: http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?id=193503