Our buddies over at Wired finally caught on to the massive amount of dough that the 700mhz reallocation represents. Nothing wrong with that. Its part of the FCC’s mission to maximize, for the public good, the value of the spectrum to the taxpayer. But I am afraid that the FCC has mentally locked  itself into a  ‘its the pipe and always the pipe’ thought line.

Truth be told the action is in the CPE space. The legacy wireless vendors know it. I even see  glimmers from the FCC docket that they kinda recognize it. The problem is for the US to see real advances in the marketplace, some portion of the 700mhz space should be given free reign for CPE makers and users alike to play and experiment without having to pay a fee or worry about being kicked off the spectrum. Till then we will continue to lag behind the rest of the world.

Wonder why I rail against the wireless vendors? Here is Exhibit A. The DeathStar is dumbing down the Blackberry to those users so they can cater to the Apple iPhone.

We need the FCC to dictate CPE portability. Its the 21st Century. Captive audiences went out with the dodo.
Link

The mission of IEEE XXX.YY is to develop the specification for an efficient packet based air interface that is optimized for the transport of IP based services. The goal is to enable worldwide deployment of affordable, ubiquitous, always-on and interoperable multi-vendor mobile broadband wireless access networks that meet the needs of business and residential end user markets.

This is a mission statement for an upcoming standard. Here is the test. Its for:

1. New 3G wireless cellular.
2. The final draft of the 802.11n standards.
3. The new 802.20 standards.

If you guessed 3, move to the head of the class. Yes we know, 802.16e has hardly made an impact in the market. But the guys with the thick glasses realized that there was a flaw in .16e — mobile is only supported at the speed of life in the 20th century, not the 21st. That’s right if you intended to use .16e on a French TGV or Japanese Bullet give it up, its not built for it. .20 is.

The market question is, can .20 get a standard out that does not take 5 years and kills hundreds of careers in the making.?

Linky

Nokia introduces the e90 digital device. Good points: it has all the right protocols and webtop language support built it and excellent camera. Bad points: smaller screen, stuck to a 2G/Bluetooth/Wifi world.

For somebody that frequents Europe this could be a decent road warrior tool. Its smaller than the N series but with similiar capabilities.

Story

Its done all the time these days. I still think it funny.
Story

Had a funny thing just occur, AT&T came knocking at my door offering Fiber and Uverse. Fiber imagine that in my little part of the world.

Ok so what’s the fly in the ointment Dog, you never say everything is all rosy? Well yeah, portability of my email for one. You see I just went thru the pain of switching from Comcast to Time-Warner. Not MY idea - Comcast sold out in my area. So I was forced to switch my mail. That was 5 months ago. Do I really want to go thru that again??

Oh I hear ya. “Well dummy set up your own mail server and get the MX records set up.” I could but I don’t want to. That’s just another service for me to manage. Sorry I am busy enough already. Bye the bye, that isn’t the half of it either. Consider that many web sites now are adopting the clever scheme of using your email as the user id. That opens up a whole new kettle of fish. What happens when you forget one because you have only been to the site in a year and now NEED to get there? Till we see wide adoption of Open ID I don’t see an easy solution.

What is needed is email portability just like we have phone number portability. You get a single email account you keep for life. If I transfer ISP’s I just give them the email data and they adapt their forwarding rules to accommodate. Closest I have to that right now is Google Mail which is an advantage to them in the market.

I know I sound like a whiner. But honestly the Ma Frickert’s of the world really want this. Anybody listening??

[Photo: www,kimweston.com, rights reserved]

We usually post on the broadband aspects of commuications here at ThirdPipe. But there is another side of the coin — old analog due to reallocation. Feb. ‘09 is when the old broadcast TV gets turned off and the spectrum switched on to spread spectrum broadband. Wither all those folks with non-DTV sets? Aaaah there is an answer dear reader:

Between Jan. 1, 2008, and March 31, 2009, all U.S. households will be eligible to request up to two coupons, worth $40 each, to be used toward the purchase of up to two, digital-to-analog converter boxes, while the initial $990 million allocated for the program is available. If NTIA requests the additional $510 million already authorized by Congress, then coupon requests during this “contingent period” will be limited exclusively to over-the-air households. Details on how to apply for the Coupon Program and our 1-800 number will be established later in 2007.

A cursory glance and I could not find a reference to the 800 number and its almost September.  Might we see a slapdash problem for the digital side of things because the conversion was botched on the analog side? Hmmmm.
link

Broadband speeds in the US are abysmal compared to the offerings from other developed countries, according to the Communication Workers of America. The organization conducted its own download/upload speed tests online, which were taken by roughly 67,000 people across the country, and concluded that the average download speed in the US was 1.9Mbps. According to CWA president Larry Cohen, “the results are deeply troubling.”