Archaic Telecom

700 MHz Public Spectrum at Work on the Gulf Spill

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The FCC reported that  emergency agencies in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were able to stitch together a 700 MHz radio network to connect first responders and government workers.   This was an ad hoc telecom effort to, in effect, route callers into the right conference group.

The agencies in these Gulf states created a workable, but still somewhat primitive (compared to what’s coming), radio trunking system to share available frequencies more efficiently and allocate them into separate radio talk groups.

A better solution is in the works.
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Quote of the Day

I think it’s true that the Communications Act gives us the authority that we need. But I also think that by virtue of it’s structure, …

Archaic Telecom

Verizon's Good Deal: 1 Mbps for $20/month, forever

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Carriers have always loved to meter. They are utilities after all.  Of course, then came the Internet,  dirt cheap bits,  and a generation of consumers brought up on free.  Wanting to charge on a piecemeal basis but fearful of consumer outrage on being nickel-and-dimed, the telecom industry has been adopting pricing tiers (see AT&T) as a compromise solution.

With tiers, the meter isn’t running. Instead, customers pay a fixed amount for a given level of service (speed, capacity, quality, etc.)   This has traditionally been the arrangement in business telecom—of course, in that world you’re protected by service level agreements that pay out for disruptions, excessive latency, and packet errors.

I was excited to learn about an interesting variation on the pricing tier model that was revealed in a  letter from Verizon.  In its latest  marketing campaign, Verizon promises to lock in a  stingy 1 Mbps broadband for its subscribers at $19.99 per month, forever: “...low price you can count on, month after month, year after year.”
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The Rack

Shogo: Rhymes with iPad

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Shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Freescale’s  7″ tablet prototype was supposed to inspire manufacturers and design houses to produce real products.  Realease took the bait and has followed up with an iPad clone it calls Shogo.

This Hong Kong product design company has come up with a Linux-based, iMX-37 powered, 10″ multi-touch capacitve screen… Oh, heck here’s the spec list, so I don’t have to string together more coordinating adjectives:Continue reading

@NYC

Soluto: The Windows Whisperer

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I had allocated a small slice of my attention span to keeping tabs on the TechCrunch Disrupt startup battlefield earlier this week.  I was wowed by UJAM, and thought  they would surely come away with first place.

The judges instead chose Soluto, a company that sells  “anti-frustration” software for Windows owners.

Curiousity got the better of me, and I downloaded Soluto onto my aging Dell Dimension Tower to see what got the judges excited.

Disclosure: I recently purchased an Apple MacBook Pro because my long standing aggravation with Windows had reached a breaking point.  I had made a vow to not spend another dollar on upgrading my Microsoft-Dell productivity killer.

Soluto is a slickly designed utility that analyzes your bootup sequence— I had initially 47 apps in mine—and visually explains what processes are needed and what can be removed.

Bottom line:  After letting Soluto tame my unruly Windows bootup, I’m willing to spend more quality time with Windows XP.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Communications Act Version 2.0

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Congress announced on Monday that they will start the process of revising the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The key committee players (Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Sen. John Kerry, Rep. Henry Waxman, and Rep. John Boucher) will bring together “stakeholders” in a “series of bi-partisan, issue focused meetings beginning in June.”

As you may vaguely remember, the ’96 legislation was intended to spur innovation and competition by forcing the incumbents to unbundle parts of their networks and make them available to competitive carriers at wholesales prices.

The incumbents resisted mightily both in the trenches and in the courts, and the competitive carriers that have survived to this day are just holding on.

There is a big difference this time around as Congress rolls out 2.0 of the Act. Continue reading

Social Studies

The Helpfulness of Crowds

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For the past few weeks I’ve been trying out a few of the collaborative recommendation sites that are  currently on the scene. My interest was initially piqued by an NYC startup or two, then I learned about Aardvark, now part of Google and one of the most successful of the purely crowdsourced Q&A sites.

You ask a question  and one of Aardvark subscribers is likely to have an answer. I was quite impressed that I got a quick and meaningful response about a good Spanish white wine to match with seafood.

Not all of the cloud-based oracles work this way.  Many instead rely on machine-learning techniques (decision trees, Bayesian classifiers, clustering, …) in which the mileage of your answers will vary based on the terrain of the data.

Then I learned about a mega success story from MetaFilter, a community weblog, in which two young Russian women were saved from entering the sex trade by MetaFilter members. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Apple: World's Most Profitable Mobile Manufacturer

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According to tech research firm Gartner, Apple sold over eight million mobile handsets in 1Q 2010 for a 2.7% share of the market and ranks 7th on the leaderboard (hat tip to MacRumors.com).

Nokia is in the first spot with over 110 million units sold in the first quarter.

However, Apple’s iPhone sales add up to over $5 billion, while all of Nokia’s unit sales across its many models accounted for $9 billion.Continue reading

The Rack

The Chrome Web Store

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I’m keeping one eye on my Wave box as I try to follow the Google IO conference while juggling a few other tasks. One significant product announcement that came out of yesterday’s keynotes was the Chrome Web Store.

Yes, it is very nice that Google is now creating a place for web developers to put up a shingle and sell under the Google banner. Google does make it very clear that these are ordinary web apps:Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The Real FCC Plot: Open Internet Access

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After the FCC lost its net neutrality case against Comcast, I put on hold a project to review a series of YouTube videos involving Chairman Genachowski. The rough plan was to gain some insight as to how the FCC would approach net neutrality, open internet, and universal access based on Genachowski’s public statements. I wasn’t going to do this alone, instead I would enlist the resources of Crowdflower’s cloud workers to help with the analysis.

That was ages ago (last month). Since then the FCC has announced its plan to place has placed broadband transmission under Title II regulation and has regained the net neutrality high ground. And in response, one well known, respected FCC watcher, Glen Beck, has said that the President plans to regulate the Internet and control the “misinformation” through net neutrality—there was also some talk about Marxism and public utilities.

This was enough to spur me into action and get those videos scanned for certain keywords.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Cisco Loses $3.7M Patent Suit

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Cisco Systems, lnc.

A federal jury in Texas decided in favor of closely held Commil USA in its patent infringement suit against Cisco. Commill USA owns a fixed mobile convergence patent that was developed by an Israeli tech company, also called Commil.

The Israeli company, started by three engineers in 2000, gained early success with a networking architecture to switch calls between Bluetooth and cellular.

With the networking industry’s move to WiFi , Commil couldn’t develop a similar type of technology and the company was closed down by CEO Yuval Duvev.
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Social Studies

Social Networks as Living Organisms

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Leading public health and social network scientist Nicholas Christakis spoke at TED in February.  As a doctor and public health researcher, he brings the study of social networks back to its roots as a tool to understand disease spread. One of his better known research projects shows that obesity can be contagious.

While watching the presentation, you quickly realize that visualization of data related to obesity, emotions, and friendships is more effective than tables of numbers in explaining how the power of our connections can influence our behavior.

Interesting factoid: if your friend’s friend’s friend is obese, your risk of obesity is 10% higher.

In other words, something is spreading.Continue reading

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