Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) News

Apple Search (Apple Found) - Quite Plausible

One of my must-reads is I, Cringely. I've been a fan even before he "Cringley'd" me in 2002. Many Cringley posts are provocative and throught provoking, but he had a doozy yesterday - Avram Miller says Steve Jobs has one more Apple intro. 

Then I read Miller's post - How Apple crushed Google in the fall of 2015 from my book "the Future History of Technology".

As I was sipping my coffee this morning and my wife Tina was rushing to leave to catch her bus, I persuaded her (just barely) to listen to me read her part of Miller's article, and then went on to explain why I thought Miller's idea was so plausible. She fixed me in a steely gaze and said "I look forward to reading your article on your blog." So, here goes. Thanks, Honey.

My first observation is another one of those things that you either get about Apple, or don't - Apple's customers just want stuff to work. They're willing to pay Apple's prices to get a product with a low hassle factor - that works reliably, repeatedly, and when it breaks, you can get help quickly and efficiently. You just have to go to the average Apple store to see just how profound this effect is - the average Apple store is packed with people. Most are buying things, but the ones that aren't buying are getting help with their existing Apple product.

So, Miller's right that there's an existing base of Apple users ready to try a search capablity that doesn't spam them like Google and Bing and Yahoo! are doing.

My second observation is the mystery of Apple building enormous data centers (and according to "CHRISGRAY", a commenter on Miller's post, buying existing data centers). Most observers on Apple's data center activity have simply asked "why so big"? You don't need that much data center to do what Apple's currently doing, even projecting forward to Apple doing something like buying Netflix (total speculation on my part) or maintaining each user's music and video collections totally in iCloud. Siri apparently isn't that compute-intensive (or, per my experiences with it overall, not compute-intensive enough). So, adding on a search capability to what Apple is already doing begins to make sense of what Apple could do with so much datacenter capability.

My third observation is a leap that as far as I am aware, unique to me. This is total speculation. The biggest factor in data centers is watts per "compute function" - how much electrical power does it take to accomplish a calculation... a search? If you look at the rack of an average data center, you'd see something that's vaguely recognizable as the successor to a desktop PC. It'll have big Intel processors that are air-cooled or even water-cooled.  It will have sticks of RAM, sticks of cache memory, and lots of disks, usually spinning, but more and more, solid state. Conceptually, it's a PC.

But Apple thinks differently. Unlike Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple builds things. They're used to... comfortable... building things. Apple likes building things, and they're good at it. Apple has even built servers. So, what if... in their data centers, Apple is building their own servers around the 64-bit A7 processor that they use in their current leading-edge products? Two things immediately come to mind from that possibility. The first is the compute-density would be astonishing - they'd be able to do astonishing amounts of computation. The second is that Apple is seriously motivated to make the watts per "compute function" very high, because Apple is committed to powering their data centers from renewable energy sources like solar. So, for Apple, every watt that's spent spinning a fan or pump to cool a processor is a lot of money (more renewable energy required).

So, imagine a huge data center, populated floor to ceiling with very, very dense racks of processor boards populated with cool-running A7 processors. I've been told that some of these data centers aren't even accessible by humans any more - when they (rarely) need to be serviced, they have to be disassembled to provide enough room for a human to get to it.

I can't really imagine the applications that are possible with a huge data processing capability like that. The possibilities not only boggle my imagination... let alone what I know. But Apple has an incredible number of smart people dedicated to making my experience as an Apple customer as good as possible, and I'm guessing they have some ideas on what to do with all that compute capability.

Including Search. I'll certainly use Apple Found, if it comes to pass.

The obligatory BWIA tie-in? None, really, except that if Search could get as good as Arthur C. Clarke imagines the "Minisec" to be, all the data would be kept in the cloud, not on the device, because you'd want it all to be easily searchable. In that future, we're going to need a lot of Broadband Wireless Internet Access.

 

By Steve Stroh

 

 

Why I Continue to be an iPhone User

Nothing really leaps out as a "big deal" about Apple's announcement of the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s on Tuesday.

But, I don't really care about any "big deals". My iPhone 4S works very well, but I'm looking forward to the iPhone 5S working better:

• Better radios!
  • LTE vs 3G. I wouldn't have guessed that the wireless telcos would have deployed LTE so widely, so fast, and so well. But they have. LTE is faster and better for the same price as 3G.
  • 5 GHz Wi-Fi (big deal in my household, and conferences, as 2.4 GHz is getting badly crowded).
  • Better wireless sensitivity overall - I've seen my iPhone 4S side by side with an iPhone 5 and where my iPhone 4S could not pick up any wireless, the iPhone 5 could.
• Better camera
  • What  looks like a really stunning panorama mode
  • Better low light capability
  • Ability to shoot a number of shots with one button push (really useful at conferences sitting in the audience)
  • Better flash for better skin tones when using a flash
• Lightning connector (believe it or not, it's a minor pain to figure out the right orientation of the 30-pin connector, get it in straight, etc. The Lightning connector is simply easier and less hassle.
• Better sound - Apple wisely used the "reclaimed" real estate from the 30-pin to Lightning connector transition on the bottom of the iPhone to include a bigger, better speaker (and undoubtedly some new audio processing tricks) to provide better sound from the bare iPhone 5x.
• iPhone 5x is taller and a better fit for my big paw.
• 64-bit; all of Apple's apps have been rewritten for 64-bit, and it's ready to go in IOS7 for third-party apps. It's gotta be wicked fast.
• Fingerprint sensor. I'm one of those that don't use a lock code on my phone (shhhh, don't tell the muggers) because it's a pain every time I want to check it, but I will use the fingerprint sensor because it sounds pretty painless.
• The M7 coprocessor sounds like it will provide a LOT better battery life. If Apple did it right, the GPS is one of the inputs to it, then apps that require location data won't burn so much CPU and battery life constantly checking my location.

I'm not even factoring in the advances in IOS7, easier to access Control Center (I will be using THAT a lot), AirDrop, iTunes Radio, and a lot of other delightful surprises that I don't know about yet.

One little case in point - Lightning connector. Keyed connectors suck. ALL keyed connectors suck! Because, you have to figure out the right orientation and be careful not to jam a small, fragile connector into the socket the wrong way. Apple figured out that there was a pain point there, and just got rid of it. Yes, they could have gone with a more industry-standard small USB connector, but that still sucks becuase it's keyed. The Lightning connector isn't keyed - you just plug it in and it just works.

One other little case in point - signing up. If you've only ever signed up for wireless telephone service at one of the company stores, or an affiliate, or a third party store like (shudder) Walmart... that's about as user UNFRIENDLY an experience as there is. I've done that, and it sucks, Sucks, SUCKS! It's totally maddening to watch someone tap a keyboard and move a mouse for 15-30 minutes to get a wireless phone account set up. It's painfully obvious that they're inputting information into multiple systems and that's complex and takes a lot of time. I'll never do that again.

When I signed up for my iPhone 4S at the Apple store, and ported my phone number to a new carrier, it was done in under 5 minutes with about six questions total. When my wife and daughter got their iPhone 5s (two of them, not the iPhone 5s which isn't available as I write this), the transaction was more complex than my signup - changing plans, adding some options, two phones... and it didn't take ANY longer. Cloning the phone numbers from my daughter's old phone into her iPhone 5 took another 5-10 minutes.

OK, one more. The Wi-Fi on my iPhone 4S stopped working. I brought it in to an Apple store, they confirmed the problem, set up a brand new phone, explained to me how to set it up to download from the automatic online backup, and I was out of the store in under 15 minutes with a working phone.

So, here's the bottom line, for me about buying an iPhone. None of this stuff was "sexy", worth glaring headlines exhorting me to buy! Buy! BUY! Apple didn't make a sexier phone... it just keeps making a BETTER phone AND making my experience of using their products better, and better. My hassle factor of using a phone and apps keeps going down, and my satisfaction keeps going up. So until they make it worse, I'm hooked as an Apple and iPhone customer.

So, do the math above. Even if, somehow, another phone manufacturer got Android and the hardware to be as good as an iPhone... that still leaves me at the mercy of the crappy experience at something other than an Apple store. So, voting with my wallet, no.

Disclosure - I'm an Apple shareholder (after I became a user of their products and decided it was a good bet).

By Steve Stroh

 

A Lawyer, an Engineer, and a Writer Conspired...

... conspired to write a really excellent article in IEEE Spectrum Online - When Spectrum Auctions Fail.

Not coincidentally, the lawyer, the engineer, and the writer are actually the same person, Mitchell Lazarus of Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth PLC.

In the article, Lazarus takes great pains to clearly explain (great writing!) the history (good legal research!), and technology (great engineering background!), of fixed microwave links, and wraps the article up neatly, with all the history and technology, why it simply doesn't make sense to auction off entire bands that are really only suitable (at the moment) for fixed links, to a single entity.

I rarely say this here given how laughably bad most writing of late has been about wireless technology, especially writing about fixed wireless technology and legalities (and lack of historical context)... but...

I highly recommend Lazarus' article. Lazarus does an excellent job, including a very realistic treatement of the utility and usability of the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz license-exempt bands in fixed wireless usage (this is rarely handled well, accurately, or fairly). And Lazarus gets it exactly right (this is really, really rare) in discussing the little-known 60 GHz band:

Radio waves around 60 GHz suffer an even greater problem: They are absorbed by oxygen molecules, and to a 60-GHz signal, clear air will look like dense fog. But systems in this band are still used, for instance, to connect nearby buildings on a single campus. Here, the atmospheric attenuation can be considered a feature rather than a bug, because it allows the same frequency to be employed a short distance away without risking interference.

One trivial point off for Lazarus not pointing out that the wavelength of a 60 GHz signal is about the size of the cross-section of a pencil, and therefore doubly hard to interfere with (or intercept). One other trivial point off for not discussing the (now) comedic (probably not so funny to investors) antics of the failed predecessor companies of FiberTower (which Lazarus mentions briefly). Two such failed companies that come readily (and laughably, painfully) to mind from those days are Teligent and WinStar. But even online articles have length limits, so perhaps not mentioning these two was the fault of an editor :-)

Steve Stroh

Amateur Radio Works, Mobile Telephones Don't At Boston Marathon Bombing

Via David Farber's IP list, and Dewayne Hendricks' Dewayne-Net list, I learned of a good article in The Atlantic Cities by Anhony Townsend - The Shame of Boston's Wireless Woes that explains how Boston's mobile telephone networks collapsed in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, and some of the why. Townsend did a credible job in this piece.

What Townsend only touched on in the article is that it's not just the mobile telephone networks access capacity that fails in a disaster, it's that the basic architecture of circuit-switched telephony fails in a disaster. Even if you are in the coverage of a cell that has capacity available, you can't make a call in a disaster because the switch that connects your call to the person you're calling doesn't have any available circuits. So you get the hated busy signal. The switching fabric is a shared investment amongst all telephony providers, and there's no incentive to invest in switching capacity beyond what is normal load for an average day... and the occasional sporting event or concert which is handled by bringing in "Cells On Wheels". Of course, sporting events and concerts are known months in advance and can therefore be planned for.

As an Amateur Radio operator, this jumped out at me from Townsend's article: Lacking a redundant cellular system, Americans will continue to resort to the century-old technology of amateur radio for lifeline communications during and after large disasters. In Boston, this technology is still widely used during the marathon because of past experience with cellular traffic jams.

The Boston Marathon is well-known in US Amateur Radio for making very effective use of Amateur Radio operators for effective communications over the entire course. Amateur Radio operator Tim Carter, W3ATB wrote a great story about what it was like to be one of those Amateur Radio operators on the Boston Marathon course. In Boston Marathon 2013 – Bombs, Carnage and Amateur Radio Operators.

Many Amateur Radio operators obtain their Amateur Radio license soley so they can communicate effectively in disasters, either personally, or to help in the aftermath. Being better prepared to help in an disaster was on my mind on Tuesday as my favorite Amateur Radio Club - MicroHAMS, debated how to particpate in Field Day 2013, a nationwide distaster drill, this year on June 22-23. We decided to staff up a local Emergency Operations Center and operate exclusively data modes.

If you're interested in learning more about Amateur Radio, the ARRL (the US National Association for Amateur Radio) website is a good place to start.

Steve Stroh N8GNJ

Dish Networks Really Wants To Buy Sprint

It's not googleable (shame on WISPA for poor coverage of their own event) but if you listened carefully during Charlie Ergen's talk at WISPAPALOOZA 2011, it was obvious that Dish Networks was going to be getting into some kind of Broadband Internet Access. Charlie was surprisingly open that Dish was seeing the effect of "cord cutting" and inroads of Netflix, and Charlie invited the attendees to "talk to us about what we could do together".

Flash forward a year or so - December 2012, and Dish gets its hands on some spectrum. So, now that they have some spectrum, they're a now a credible player in Broadband Wireless Internet Access... right? Well, um, no. The pro's snickered, knowing it's HARD to build terrestrial wireless infrastructure on a national scale. Oh, and it's expen$ive! Sure, you can just pull out the money gun and point it at the largest tower companies and fire away... but that gets you the SITES. That's all. Then there's all of the backhaul. And the equipment choice(s). And the Installation. And the Maintenance. And the Network Operations Center. And the Security. And.. And... And...

In short, it's really, REALLY different than the "simple"* bent pipe model of 99.9% of what Dish does. Dish transmits up to the satellites, customers passively receive from the satellites. Scaling from 1 to infinite is pretty possible (assuming you can handle getting and keeping the installers, maintaining minimal installation standards (hint - running satellite coax through a rain gutter is a bad idea - true story from my Father-In-Law's latest Dish installation), and of course the billing issues (always a challenge given the recent cord cutting frenzy causing a lot of churn).

So today's announcement of Dish really wanting to buy Sprint makes total sense. In buying Sprint, Dish buys an existing terrestrial Broadband Wireless (Internet Access) infrastructure. They also buy expertise in managing a terrestrial infrastructure. They even buy a footprint of retail stores where they can co-sell wireless phones and satellite television service. And theoretically, they can blend television via satellite and television via Broadband Internet.

Softbank is good, but Charlie Ergen is meaner, hungrier, and a better dealmaker. I'm betting on Charlie to win in the end.

* Yeah, I know. Not really simple at all. But simpler than trying to build and operate a national footprint terrestrial wireless network.

 

By Steve Stroh

Personal note - it's good to be back. I've missed all of you.

Sizing Up The Horse After A Fall - Working Towards a New Newsletter

A friend once told me how it was to fall off a horse. My friend was badly hurt, (and it could have been much worse), but bravely and wisely, my friend didn't blame the horse and would happily ride that same horse again... as soon as the injuries healed. I imagine that my friend will be a bit wary from now on, thinking (at least in the background) "well, I'm not going to make that mistake again" (the sequence of events that led up to the fall).

I've only ridden a horse once, and that was one of the wilder experiences of my life. I was a teenager, trying to act cool around my brothers and the pretty girls we were vacationing with (despite this being my very first time on a horse). So, I boldly (foolishly) said "Giddyap!". And, of course, the well-trained horse complied (!!!) and took off like a roller coaster on four legs. I could barely catch my breath, let alone hold on... I was happy just to survive the experience. (No, I didn't impress the pretty girls. Or my brothers.)

For some time I've been working to return to writing about Broadband Wireless Internet Access, and the experience kind of feels like my friend feels now, post-fall, injuries healed, and a bit wiser. In the previous incantation of my writing and previous newsletter, I (no longer) blame the horse (my readers and the wireless industry). I'm willing to ride that same horse again (writing a subscription-based newsletter about Broadband Wireless Internet Access). And, I'll be a bit wary from now on, constantly thinking in the background "I won't make that mistake again" (fundamental business model mistakes... perhaps more accurately, complete lack of a viable business model).

If you're reading this blog, after so many months of no new content, you're a real fan. So I'd like to make you an offer - be a beta tester for Broadband Wireless Internet Access News - my forthcoming subscription-based email newsletter on... you guessed it... Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA). To find out more, just email me (link now corrected). I'll try to acknowledge all applications, but you may not hear back from me immediately (I still have a day job). I won't necessarily accept every person who applies, and I'll cut it off as soon as I feel I have enough beta testers. It will help your chances of being accepted as a beta tester if you tell me a little bit about yourself in the email and why you're interested in Broadband Wireless Internet Access News. It will especially help if you remind me that we've met and talked substantively about BWIA at some point in the past.

For now, this offer will only appear on my blog. If it goes to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and (soon) Google+, I expect I'll be innundated.

There are some of you out there - you know who you are (RH, JS, MS, JS, PL, LG, and many more) who are already on the list :-).

Thanks,

Steve

 

Two Great Articles

I wish I had written both of these articles - they're extremely well written, and they'll give you a perspecitve on wireless that you won't get from any of the conventional sources.

I recommend them highly, and I think they're both exactly correct in their assertions.

Harold Feld - My Insanely Long Field Guide To LightSquared v. the GPS Guys. 

Matt Larsen - Rural Broadband, Picture Essay. 

 

Thanks Guys - you've inspired me to get back on the wagon in the saddle.

 

Steve Stroh

 

iPhone 4 - My Impressions (updated)

Agreed that iPhone 4 is the most advanced cellular phone / pocket computer available right now.

Update: I finally got to use an iPhone 4 myself with no restrictions (unlike in the Apple stores, where they're "theft-tethered"). The display is really gorgeous, it feels good and solid in your hand, and I like the changes in the various buttons. Thanks Ren!

The display is gorgeous. The iPhone 4 does a lot of things right, especially with the new iOS 4, like finally being able to use Apple's very nice and very portable Bluetooth keyboard. With iBooks there finally seems to be a native way of handling PDFs, kept locally, which is something I've wanted for a long, long time.

But there's a number of showstoppers that, for me, add up to not buying an iPhone 4, at least for a while, or perhaps ever, given the rapid rise of the competition.

Apple now consistently runs ahead of any other mobile phone vendor. It comes out with features that take years for competitors to match. The trouble is... not all of Apple's advanced features are all that useful or appreciated. But important features, like an App store, get emulated quickly when their worth is proven.

The first showstopper for me getting an iPhone 4 is, simply, AT&T as the carrier. I was a Verizon Wireless customer and ported my number over to AT&T to get an iPhone 3G, and I've been disappointed with AT&T's coverage and capacity issues at least in the Seattle area. The former is pretty sad considering that AT&T inherited the remains of the McCaw Cellular empire (Cellular One) here in the Pacific Northwest, which was early in the game and so should have ample sites to provide coverage. Of course, that was back in the days of 800 MHz.

I've had so, so many irritating moments with the iPhone / AT&T where I'd be trying to download something and the download would just STOP. There are other times when I'm in a "good coverage" area, but still can't get any data through. Then there are the many times where I'll lapse into EDGE mode from 3G in a very urban area (well within AT&T's stated 3G coverage area), or I'm in an area where only EDGE is deployed. Then there are all the times where the phone doesn't ring at all, but suddenly I have a voicemail message show up, or it will give half a ring and then cut out and the caller reports that they let it ring. When I'm on a long call on a long drive on freeway (where I'm holding the phone with two fingers above the dash so it has the best chance to get good coverage) I routinely disclaim that I'm using AT&T so we'll probably get cut off at some point. Etc.

So, if I'm tempted by the iPhone 4, the thought of putting myself into another 2 years committed to AT&T is enough to damp my enthusiasm. I've seen mention that the Apple / AT&T agreement for iPhone exclusivity in the US will end in December, 2010 so perhaps we'll see a new iPhone with other carriers announced in January. If Verizon Wireless is in there, that will help a lot.

But there are also lingering issues with the iPhone 4 itself. The biggest is that they put the antennas into the metal bands around the edge?!?!?! As an RF (Radio Frequency) geek (Amateur / Ham Radio Operator), that's an incredibly poor design choice. The entire point of an antenna is that it needs to radiate and receive RF energy "in the clear". From the point of view of a handheld radio (which any cellular phone really is, in the end), our bodies are bags of water - great attenuators of RF, especially RF in the range of typical cellular - 1900 MHz. Even worse, our hands emit sweat - salty water, and salt is an even better conductor of electricity than plain water. So it seems to me, from my amateur analysis, that the iPhone 4's antennas being metallic strips on the edge of the phone, where you'll be gripping it (at least I will be gripping it there with my oversized hands) will, of course, severely attenuate both the transmitted and received RF energy.

OK, maybe that's a bit harsh. Conceptually, it is a good idea. Even elegant - take a design element (metal band) and make good, secondary use of it as an antenna. That was clever. But I'm at a loss to imagine how such an elegant design wasn't vetted against the real world of "people will naturally hold it by the band" and thus the antennas will essentially be shorted out or severely attenuated.

Update: Consumer Reports has definitively (RF clean room, controlled conditions, engineers who really know what they're doing) confirmed this flaw. Apple's explanation for the problem now looks lame at best and outright deception at worst. I believe that this will be another low point in Apple's much-vaunted design expertise, that it apparently ignored usability over elegant design. It does happen sometimes, even to mighty Apple. The class action lawsuits have already begun.

Other, lesser factors in my decision not to get an iPhone 4 (current design) on AT&T:

• Apple and AT&T are just clueless about Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and voice should switch over to VOIP (and those minutes should be free) whenever you're in range of good Wi-Fi. VOIP works just fine over all those femtocells (see below), and you know how to do it from the videophone chat.
• Apple's videophone chat is also elegant, but it being purely iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 is a non-starter. Apple has this really cool thing called iChat on Macs, with some of the best videoconferencing you can get outside of HP and Cisco's video suites costing $100K and up. Imagine two-way video chat iPhone 4 to Mac iChat?!?!?! That would sell a lot of Macs and iPhone 4s. Not doing so just seems clueless and greedy, unnecessarily restricting it to iPhone 4 to flog sales of iPhone 4.
• Continuing irritation that the iPhone 4 doesn't have any kind of a memory card slot, or the ability to easily move my files onto it via Wi-Fi. Perhaps iBooks can do this now.
• Continuing irritation that Apple insists that the iPhone has to be docked against a computer instead of iPhone being a "cloud" device with its data stored both on the device and in (Apple) cloud storage. I mean, how tough could this be in this era of advanced cloud services? Apple is just completely missing what people really want. And if I do have to dock it with a computer... why can't it be done over Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cradle instead of a USB connection directly to the computer?
• Continuing irritation that Apple never "finished the job" and made an app that allowed interoperability between iChat text messages on Mac (and PCs - Jabber, etc.) and the iPhone. That would really be nice to be able to text chat Mac to iPhone.
• Clueless AT&T #1 - now that AT&T has implemented transfer caps, it ought to make tethering available and free. Now that we cannot abuse the AT&T network without paying for excessive use... wouldn't it be in AT&T's best (financial) interest to make it easy for us to go into excessive use, with secondary customer convenience being able to tether when that's needed?
• Clueless AT&T #2 - I'm still at a loss to understand it make sense to make customers pay for femtocell usage. I'm perfectly OK with making customers buy femtocells - they cost money to make, ship, and support. But, really AT&T, considering that femtocells 1) use the customer-paid-for broadband connectivity for its backhaul, and 2) take traffic off your cellular network, and 3) provide coverage in areas where (your customers have determined that) you don't have good coverage... just make femtocell usage free. More femtocells can only help.

I think I'm going to do long term is to move to an Android phone on another carrier. There are several Android phones that look really promising, and the recent Froyo software update fixed a number of fundamental irritations with Android.

Update: Lifehacker is way ahead of me, as usual, with Jumping Ship from iPhone to Android: A Switcher's Guide.

One of the things that I really like with Android is that Google services work really, really well with Android. That means that I can access email equally well from Gmail on a desktop browser or the phone. I can finally have one (Gmail / Gvoice) contact list. And I think best of all, Google Voice, once fully implemented with an "origination" option, would be a godsend on an Android phone.

Android phones do have data card slots. Android phones do have tethering. Android phones sync with cloud services (Google). Etc.

A friend has an Android phone that he bought unlocked. He inserted his SD card from a prepaid phone and it just worked. The data mode only works when the phone is in Wi-Fi coverage, and the voice costs are minimal, but he has the ability to make and receive calls over the cellular network when that's needed.

Your mileage may vary.

Disclaimer - I'm an Apple shareholder.

By Steve Stroh
July 7, 2010

Restarting BWIA News

Hello

I've missed being part of the discussion on the evolution of Broadband Internet Access. So, I've decided to resume blogging on here on BWIA News. Posting may not be daily, but will be "pretty regular".

Here are a couple of things that are interesting to me at the moment:

LTE vs WiMAX
The idea that WiMAX is "over" and "LTE" has won. Well, yes, and no. In the end, Broadband Wireless Internet Access has "won" because more infrastructure is going to be deployed. In the US, that will (eventually, by the end of this decade) mean that the destructive, expensive schism between CDMA/1xEVDO and GSM/HSPA will be over, and eventually your devices will be able to work on any of the five national wireless networks. WiMAX will continue to have a place in simpler, smaller, less-expensive network deployments.

WISPA Regional Meeting
WISPA has decided to organize a Summer 2010 Regional Meeting to be held in St. Louis, MO July 21-22, 2010. I've been on a mailing list for WISPA announcements, and this event has evolved rapidly into a very interesting lineup of speakers including FCC personnel and a number of interesting speakers from outside the "traditional" Wireless Internet Service Provider industry. This feels like the same level of energy that was present in the first few WISPCONs (that's high praise). If personal logistics would permit, this is an event that I would attend.

By Steve Stroh
Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Of iPads, BWIA, And The Future Of Small Computers

Slashdot tumbled me onto this excellent blog post by Charles Stross - The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash. I recommend it highly.

Stross seems to have 50,000 foot view of tech, and removed as he is from the day-to-day comings and goings of tech (read his bio - interesting background!) I think he's got a good overall perspective that merits consideration.

Stross posits that Apple's moves to date with iPhone, iTunes, App Store, and now iPad are all part of a master plan to allow Apple to stay relevant in the coming total commoditization of all small computers, operating systems, and applications software. Basically, we'll all have cheap, commodity computers, ubiquitous Broadband Internet Access, and all apps and data will live in cloud services, and we'll all like it that way because we no longer have to be expert enough to maintain the OS and security - all of that will just be part of the cloud services.

Stross makes a compelling argument. He seems to intuitively understand how BWIA changes nearly everything, and how BWIA is is the key to tying cheap commodity hardware to cloud services. I think Stross nails it - he's expressed a kind of grand unification theory of computing f1or the 2010 decade:

• Cheap, commodity hardware
• Ubiquitous, high-bandwidth, Broadband Internet Access (often wireless)
• Cloud computing services that handle anything you want to do

Supporting this...

• Amazon's aggressive moves with the Kindle ecosystem - Amazon wants to, essentially, lease you books via the cloud.
• Netflix is trouncing everyone around with their low-cost streaming of movies, which suits perfectly the way most people want to consume movies purely for passing entertainment.
• Microsoft sees the same thing Stross sees... and is terrified that their lucrative desktop PC cash cow will dry up in the face of no-cost "boot loader" OS' based on Linux that will just act as a cloud computing services smart terminal.
• Google (mostly) proving the cloud computing model with steadily more capable (and seamless updates and bug fixes) cloud-based apps. Google's not perfect, and sometimes they don't get it right... but generally they do.

Stross doesn't come to a conclusion of how he thinks it's going to turn out. But I will.

I don't think Apple's current model of a closed ecosystem for the iPhone and iPad - (desktop) iTunes, iTunes Store, or App store being the only sources of content and apps will stand for more than a few years.

Ultimately the world does want choice, and when there is choice, a lot of people will take choice over the certainty of Apple's approach. One of the things that chafes me about the iPad is that Apple makes it damn difficult to get one's own data onto the iPad. You have to resort to tricks like mailing it to your iPad account, syncing through iTunes (desktop), etc. It would have been trivially easy to include a SD Card slot on the iPad and just mount the SD card as a file system. But that would relinquish too much control for Apple, and in leaving that gaping void in capability, there will be many, many variants of the iPad concepts by other companies. Apple can't sue them all into oblivion (just the stupid ones).

In keeping the iPhone and iPad locked down, I think Apple is playing right into Google's hands. Google can afford to be patient, letting its hardware partners perfect their versions of the iPad, while it continues to encourage "everyone else" to continue refining Android and Chrome OS. All the while making their cloud computing services even more compelling.

I fondled an iPad again over the weekend. Yeah, I want one... but that stupidity of putting up a (purely artificial) wall between the iPad I buy (and then own) and bringing all my data onto the iPad so that it could become truly, incredibly usable to me, is sobering. It's enough to make me want to wait at least a little longer to see if 1) Apple gets the message and loosens up enough to allow people to bring their data onto the iPad, and 2) see the Android / Chrome OS versions of the iPad to start showing up to see how they stack up against the iPad.

Put it this way... I'm an Apple (hardware) customer right now. Apple offers cloud services for a fee, and although I paid for it a while ago, I never used it, and likely never will. I'm also a customer of Google, and don't pay them - the free services are that good.

But if Google said tomorrow that their free services were going to be severely restricted or terminated and if I wanted to continue to use them, I had to start paying...

I'd fumble for my credit card and sign up happily.

Apple and Microsoft don't engender that kind of loyalty and willingness to pay.

And the BWIA angle? In the above scenario, I don't care what Broadband Internet Access I'm using. Home Wi-Fi? Corporate / College Wi-Fi? LTE? WiMAX? 3G? DON'T CARE! As long as I've got some. Isenberg was incredibly prescient that the Stupid Network is what we really need and want. In this, Verizon, AT&T, and all other big carriers are in the "uh oh... commoditization ahead lifeboat with the PC builders - no value add wanted or needed (or willingness to pay) - just move the bits.

By Steve Stroh
May 3, 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Steven K. Stroh