It's Monday, October 22, 2007 and welcome to Good Morning, BWIA, a first-thing-in-the-morning (well, West Coast time, anyway... when I started it...) compendium relating to Broadband Wireless Internet Access... hopefully delivered with a light touch.
I occasionally pick up the hardcopy version of the Wall Street Journal along with my morning caffeine fix and I noticed in today's edition that technology guru "Uncle Walt" Mossberg has delivered a scathing screed against the "Soviet ministries" business model of the US wireless telephony carriers. Mossberg makes an entirely valid comparison between the severely limited choices offered by the wireless telphony carriers and "landline" Internet usage being totally decoupled from one's choice of computer, web browser, other software, etc. To wit:
So, it's intolerable that the same country that produced all this has trapped its citizens in a backward, stifling system when it comes to the next great technology platform, the cellphone.
In my opinion, Mossberg is completely, totally, on-target with his criticisms, down to proactively deflating the invalid defensive spluttering of the US wireless telephony industry. After reading Mossberg's piece, it's difficult to see the US wireless telephony carriers as anything other than outdated, fumbling buffoons.
(Click below to continue the story.)
Is 'Fixed Wireless' Broadband Internet Starting a Price War? Dan Baldwin makes a good case for including Broadband Wireless Internet Access options when evaluating Broadband Internet Access options for a business. (Lead for this item from Peter Radizeski, posting to a private mailing list.)
Wireless Telephony "legacy technologies" now have a new "official" option in WiMAX. To date, WiMAX hasn't been officially blessed by the ultimate arbiter of the telecommunications industry - ITU, the International Telecommunications Union. That has now changed, and the WiMAX standard (IEEE 802.16) as refined and implemented per the WiMAX Forum organization to insure interoperability, has been certified by the ITU as part of their IMT-2000 set of global standards for wireless technology. This makes WiMAX part of the "official technological evolution" of wireless telephony... essentially "legitimizing" WiMAX in the eyes of every wireless carrier in the world. Likely there's a run on crying towels at Qualcomm (primary partisan of legacy wireless technology CDMA) and Ericsson (primary partisan of legacy wireless technology GSM). For feisty wireless technology upstarts like Alvarion, one of several companies possibly next in Cisco's food chain of acquired companies, the ITU/WiMAX news was mostly greeted with "Um, what's an ITU... and why should we care, exactly?"
Today's Clearwire Weather Report* for Woodinville, Washington- Alternating between 3 and 4 bars.
On Friday, DailyWireless.Org featured a good rundown on the Kyocera KR2 Mobile Router that can make use of ExpressCard and USB devices as well as PCMCIA/PC Card wireless telephony Broadband Internet Access modems. Hopefully Junxion, who essentially created this category of device, will rise to the challenge.
As Seen On Google News, Broadband Wireless This mundane-sounding story, NextPhase Wireless CEO Issues Operational Update Providing Insight Into Key Corporate Developments was at the top of this morning's collection of BWIA stories. I'm still not quite sure what to think about NextPhase Wireless, but the following sub-heading of the clicked-through story really leaped out at me:
Board of Directors Approves 1:20 Reverse Stock Split
I've heard of stock splits before... but 1:20 ?!?!?!?
Wi-FI Networking News has a good story on yet another Metropolitan Wi-Fi Network. But before you you yawn and page past, I encourage you to give it a read. The real story behind Metropolitan Wi-Fi Networks is well-illustrated by this story - this new network already has a sound business model driven by Burbank Water and Power; Broadband Internet Access via Wi-Fi will merely be an ancillary use of this network.
Today's WiMAX.com features several interesting links, including:
- C-motech and Wavesat Announce a WiMAX ExpressCard
- Mexico Approves 3G, WiMax, Backhaul Spectrum Auction Plan
- Taiwan to spend $664 mln on WiMax development
- Mobile WiMAX approved, Korea says
Checking on a few of my "favorite" BWIA-related sites:
- www.broadband-wireless.com - Still breathlessly announcing the upcoming Broadband Wireless World @ Interop conference... in May, 2007 :-) Sadly... looks like we've lost the online versions of Broadband Wireless Business magazine.
- I was browsing... and along the way found a pretty good treatment of BWIA that I, as an inside joke, sometimes call "THz RF" technology, otherwise known as Free Space Optical - www.free-space-optics.org. While it's not exactly an impartial treatment, it's pretty good; "sponsor" fSONA makes very solid FSO BWIA systems.
Relating to technology, On This Day in 1879:
Thomas Edison conducted his first successful experiment with a high-resistance carbon filament. (courtesy of www.on-this-day.com).
128 years later, with the incandescent light bulb's filament updated to
a coiled tungsten wire, Edison's same basic design for the incandescent
light bulb, down to the same screw-in base (now called "Edison base")
still dominates lighting. We've had a brief flirtation with a lighting
variant called Compact Fluorescent, but we're (finally!) on the cusp of
purging incandescent and fluorescent lighting in favor of using white
Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). LED's are vastly more efficient at
converting electrical power to light, more rugged (no delicate,
failure-prone filament), and operate at low temperatures. Being solid
state electronic devices and thus operating directly on low voltage at
low current, and operating on Direct Current (DC) rather than
Alternating Current (AC), the shift to LEDs may change the way we
distribute electrical power. We'll know that LED lighting has truly
gone mainstream when we can buy Edison-base LED lighting at Home Depot
and Lowe's. It's clearly coming - LED Christmas lighting is widely
available this season.
Feedback solicited! Do you like Good Morning, BWIA? Or not? For now, Good Morning BWIA is purely a caffeine-fueled "why not try it?" experiment; its fate may well be determined by whether readers find it useful, interesting, or just plain amusing.
* Clearwire Weather Report - My Clearwire modem (NextNet Wireless, non-WiMAX) is aimed out the first-floor window of my home office on Hollywood Hill, through the dense tree canopy of the adjacent greenbelt, the leaves of which, especially when wet, are good attenuators of the 2.5 GHz band that Clearwire uses. The wetter the weather, the fewer the bars. It's impressive that Clearwire's system works, let alone works pretty well, under such conditions. Maximum signal strength is 5 bars solidly on (which I've never achieved from this location).
Fine Print - In all fairness, Good Morning, BWIA is inspired by Good Morning, Silicon Valley, originally edited by Patricia Sullivan and her able successors such as John Murrell. The opening image of sunrise over Mount Rainier, Washington courtesy of Buckley (WA) Chamber of Commerce... and a great example of why this Midwest boy is still enthralled, after 20 years, with living in this wonderfully beautiful part of the world. This morning's output of verbiage was fueled by a large Starbuck's (by Safeway) Coffee Of The Day... with two shots. Thomas the cat "encouraged" me this morning, and Mac the dog kept my feet warm. This was written on a Mac... it just works.
By Steve Stroh
This article is Copyright © 2007 by Steve Stroh. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).
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