Posts Tagged ‘WIFI destinations’
Written on August 29th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
Smartphones are double-edged swords for carriers. They attract big-spending customers, but tax networks designed for simpler times, explains Fortune.
Independent telecom analyst Chetan Sharma estimates that the typical wireless subscriber consumes 120 megabytes each month; typical iPhone owners use four times that.
And it’s just getting worse. By 2010, global mobile data traffic is expected to exceed 200 terabytes per month, six times last year’s levels, according to Cisco Systems.
“3G networks were not designed effectively for this kind of usage,” says John Donovan, AT&T’s chief technology officer, referring to the current generation of broadband wireless. “We fight the day-to-day guerrilla warfare as the customers move around.”
Many of AT&T’s 60,000 cell towers need to be upgraded, with new 850 MHz gear and backhaul. That could cost billions of dollars, and AT&T has kept a lid on capital spending during the recession. AT&T will delay their LTE upgrade, upgrading its HSPA 3G network from 3.6 Mbps to 7.2 Mbps, instead.
Verizon plans to have 30 US LTE Markets by 2010. Verizon will use their nation-wide 700 MHz band. The carrier hopes to have a data-only LTE trial service available in Seattle and Boston later this year.
It can’t come soon enough. The tsunami is about to hit. Android phones from Samsung, LG, and Motorola are due in stores by early 2010. Motorola will launch their Android portfolio on September 10th. The data-oriented Palm Pre, which operates on Palm’s WebOS platform, is already on Sprint and should be in Verizon stores early next year.
A Cisco Mobile Forecast for 2008-2013 noted that a single high-end data phone today generates more data traffic than 30 basic-feature cell phones, while a single laptop air card generates more data traffic than 450 basic-feature cell phones. Cisco projects that mobile data traffic will increase a thousand-fold over the seven years from 2005 through 2012, with video being a significant component.
AT&T offers free Starbucks WiFi (with a paid data subscription) while Verizon is partnering with Boingo to deliver free WiFi access at hotels, airports, restaurants and coffee shops (with a data plan). PCCW, the Hong Kong operator, has started using Wi-Fi hot spots to ease the load from smartphones and its digital TV service.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has said that the most active 5% or so of data users are causing problems for the other 95%. AT&T is working on a revamped data plan whereby light data users would pay less, and heavy users would pay a premium rate — or leave.
Source: Dailywireless
Filed under Communication Apps
Tags:3G, 4g, Android, AT&T, LTE, mobile marketing, Motorola, phone, Samsung, Verizon, WIFI destinations
Written on August 19th, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
Long-range, low-cost wireless Internet could soon be delivered using “whitespaces” — radio spectrum once reserved for use by TV stations. This week at ACM SIGCOMM 2009, a communications conference held in Barcelona, Spain, a computer network that uses “white spaces” in a fashion somewhat similar to Wi-Fi was outlined.
Networking over UHF white spaces is fundamentally different from conventional Wi-Fi, explains Ranveer Chandra of Microsoft Research, a main contributor to the paper. Their WhiteFi approach is a Wi-Fi like system constructed on top of UHF white spaces. WhiteFi incorporates a new adaptive spectrum assignment algorithm to handle spectrum variation and fragmentation in unused television channesl, and proposes a low overhead protocol to handle temporal variation.
Most of the prior research in UHF white spaces has focused on accurately detecting the presence of incumbent RF signals, says Chandra in the paper (pdf). Researchers are now beginning to look at the problem of establishing a wireless link between white space devices. Their research pushes the state-of-art to the next level by going beyond a single link.
Matt Welsh, a Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and one of the authors of the paper (pdf), tells Dailywireless that the paper was presented at the conference by Rohan Murty at Harvard University, one of his Ph.D. students who contributed to the work along with Ranveer Chandra of Microsoft Research. The paper (pdf) is a joint effort between researchers at Microsoft Research and at Harvard.
WhiteFi focuses primarily on the problem of setting up a Wi-Fi like network, consisting of an Access Point (AP) with multiple associated clients. It uses a new spectrum assignment algorithm with a new mechanism that quickly discovers APs operating anywhere in the 180 MHz white space, using any arbitrary channel width. They also described a new technique for handling disconnections where clients signal to the AP without interfering with ongoing wireless microphone transmissions.
They estimate UHF spectrum fragmentation in 3 settings: urban, suburban and rural (population less than 6000). In all 3 settings there is at least one locale in which there is a fragment of 4 contiguous channels available, that is, 24 MHz of spectrum. In rural areas fragments of up to 16 channels are expected.
Microsoft researchers tested the new protocol, called White Fi, in the Redmond campus. It uses UHF white spaces and adaptively configures itself to operate in the most efficient part of the available white spaces. TV spectrum could provide good long-range connectivity in rural areas, and help fill in gaps in city networks.
The spectrum between 512 megahertz and 698 megahertz was originally allotted to analog TV channels from 21 to 51. It offers a longer range than conventional Wi-Fi, which operates at 2.4 gigahertz. “Imagine the potential if you could connect to your home [Internet] router from up to a mile,” says Ranveer Chandra, a member of the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research behind the project.
The FCC ruled last November that companies could build devices that transmit over white spaces but also gave strict requirements that this should not interfere with existing broadcasts, both from TV stations and from other wireless devices that operate within the same spectrum. Chandra and his colleagues say their “White Fi,” protocol can successfully navigate the tricky regulatory and technical obstacles involved with using white spaces.
A second approach, which is being considered by the IEEE 802.22 working group, involves an explicit channel renegotiation protocol between clients and APs when they detect a wireless mic. This approach, however, assumes that control messages will not induce audible interference on the wireless mic.
The White Spaces Coalition consists of eight large technology companies that plan to deliver high speed broadband internet access in unused television frequencies between 54-698 MHz (TV Channels 2-51). The coalition expects speeds of 80 Mbps and above, and 400 to 800 Mbps for white space short-range networking. The group includes Microsoft, Google, Dell, HP, Intel, Philips, Earthlink, and Samsung Electro-Mechanics. The White Spaces Database Group maps out available spectrum.
On February 27 2009, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Association for Maximum Service Television, Inc. (MSTV) asked a Federal court to shut down the FCC’s authorization of white space wireless devices. The plaintiffs allege that portable, unlicensed personal devices operating in the same band as TV broadcasts have been “proven” to cause interference despite FCC tests to the contrary.
In (somewhat) related news, researchers at Harvard University and BBN have developed CitySense, an urban scale sensor network testbed. CitySense will consist of 100 wireless sensors deployed across a city. Each node will consist of an embedded PC, 802.11a/b/g interface, and various sensors for monitoring weather conditions and air pollutants.
Harvard’s Sensor Networks Lab has also deployed three wireless sensor networks on active volcanoes.
Read Write Web reviews on Citysense and WikiCity, iPhone applications that integrate sensor networks with social networks. A recent W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, held in Barcelona in January, reviews the trend of sensors mixing with social networks and offers some real-world applications.
Both Social Networks and Sensors information can be modeled using Semantic Web technologies, says the paper. They can be connected in an interoperable and straightforward way. The W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF), is an open Web standard that can be freely used by anyone.
By combining social networks and social activities to Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, the Semantic Web can map existing applications in new and innovative ways.
Products involving Web-connected devices include flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, and mobile heart monitors. CardioSign hopes to commercialize a wearable blood pressure sensor.
Sensor Web XML-based specifications were created in consideration of Semantic Web technology, which allows data from various sources to be used with a common semantics for the data.
Source: http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/08/18/microsofts-whitefi-wi-fi-using-whitespaces/
Written on August 3rd, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
Verizon is now providing free WiFi through Boingo hotspots for its medium-and-faster-speed DSL and fiber customers (pdf).
The service is provided by Boingo. It allows Verizon to match the free WiFi available from AT&T which has been available for more than a year.
Verizon Wi-Fi is not available for PDAs, phones, desktop PCs or Macs — only laptops. Only 3 Mbps DSL or faster and 20 Mbps FiOS or faster customers qualify for free Boingo service and it’s not yet available for Macs.
AT&T’s Wi-Fi plan, available at Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, and other locations, requires their 3G Dataconnect service plan for $60 per month.
Boingo also resells AT&T’s Wi-Fi service, notes IDG News. Boingo has 30,000 hotspots in the US, but only some of those are from AT&T’s network, including nearly 7,500 Starbucks outlets.
Cablevision also supplies free WiFi for cable modem subscribers in New York.
Barnes & Noble, the world’s largest chain of bookstores, last week announced it will now provide free Wi-Fi in all 777 of its stores throughout the United States.
Barnes & Noble signed a strategic agreement with AT&T to provide free Wi-Fi to all its customers. No AT&T subscription required.
The company hopes to bring more customers into the store, and expand its current e-book catalog of 700,000 titles — 500,000 of which are free public domain e-books from Google — over the coming months. Source: http://www.dailywireless.org/2009/08/03/verizon-free-wifi-with-dslfios/
Written on August 3rd, 2009 by ADMINno shouts
AT&T has announced that the release of the latest iPhone 3.0 firmware has lead to a dramatic increase in its WiFi hotspot usage. Use has increased nearly 41% over the previous quarter, according to AT&T.
The major reason for such a spike, is the fact that the 3.0 firmware update included an easier way for users to login to freely available hotspots sponsored by AT&T at places like Starbucks, McDonalds and other public places.
Before the update, users had to enter their phone number, receive an SMS message with an embedded link, and click the link to be logged into any WiFi network. Now, the iPhone will automatically detect and log a user in automatically. This ease of connection has resonated with consumers, and usage is finally taking off.
AT&T, and other carriers, have been introducing massive WiFi networks to its customers using smartphones in an attempt to save bandwidth on their 3G networks. AT&T in particular has a major need for this shift, given that increased iPhone saturation is putting a major burden on its network.
Any attempt to get users off its network and using WiFi is a win for AT&T- and it’s doing a pretty good job at it. The company said it has already had 25.6 million WiFi connections for 2009, which already surpasses the 20 million times the service was used in all of 2008.
It’s a relatively smart move for a company that’s been receiving plenty of bad press regarding its weathered 3G network and its surge of iPhone data usage. By covering as much ground as possible with WiFi, AT&T is making sure it’s network remains strong- but will it work? Early reports say it’s helping more than expected, but we’ll have to wait and see. Source: http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com
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