NextPhase Wireless, a regional fixed wireless access provider wants to go national with its Wimax based offerings. On Jan 25, the FCC granted a license to the company for national deployment.

The company designs, deploys and operates WiMAX ready wireless networks along with advanced wireless technology solutions to both businesses and municipalities. Its ISP services encompass most of the states in the U.S besides offering broadband coverage in California and Nevada.

Commenting on the license approval Robert Ford, President and CEO of NextPhase Wireless, said in a press release, “In late 2007, theFCC ( News - Alert) acknowledged the challenges faced in deploying WiMAX services in the US, and opened up the 3.65 - 3.7 GHz band for Wireless Broadband Services in an attempt to encourage multiple entrants and stimulate the expansion of broadband service to rural and under-served areas.” (from TMCnet)

This could be a trend for Wimax evolution in the US. The smaller entrants have been targeting business customers who have taken a financial beating at the hands of the Telcos for years simply because in many locations there was no lower cost alternative. It’s low hanging fruit for a willing competitor, with fast payback using a Wimax based infrastructure. It could be that the medium bandwidth customer the AT&T and Verizons have counted on for high margin business will be be departing en mass soon.

As a public service, were a passing along the news that DTV set top boxes should be showing up on retailers shelves by Feb 18. So says the NTIA:

DTV converter boxes should be on store shelves by Feb. 18, one year before the turn-off date of analog television, the acting administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) said last week.

Meredith Atwell Baker, acting NTIA administrator, made the statement at the first formal meeting with its government partners in a wide-ranging DTV education effort. She said she did not think the FCC will need to require broadcasters to air public service announcements about the transition or cable operators to use bill stuffers, adding that voluntary industry efforts remained the best way to get the message across. (from Broadcast Engineering)

You are entitled to 2 $40 coupons toward the purchase of 2 boxes. If you have not applied for your coupons yet, you may do so here. No word on how quickly the coupons are being issued. We applied on Jan 02, the first day online apps were accepted and are still waiting.

Please be sure to share this information. Our potential Third Pipe in the air depends on transitioning the analog TV world. It’s a safe bet the transition will be delayed if enough broadcasters complain, so lets make sure they will not have a reason.

The French police are moving to Open Source in a big way. They are converting some 70000 desktops from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux. This follows a previous effort to transition off Office applications and browsers in 2005 and 2006. –

There are three reasons behind the move, Geraud said at the Solution Linux 2008 conference here. The first is to diversify suppliers and reduce the force’s reliance on one company, the second is to give the gendarmerie mastery of the operating system and the third is cost, he said.

He also added that “the Linux interface is ahead of other operating systems currently on the market for professional use.”

Vista, for example, Microsoft’s latest operating system, is being spurned by consumers who cite “concerns about its cost, resource requirements, and incompatibility with their existing applications,” according to InformationWeek.com.

Geraud explained that the move to an open source operating system was logical after the police switched in 2005 to open sourcing for its office applications and in 2006 for its Internet browsers and its email.

The move away from licenced products is saving the gendarmerie about seven million euros (10.3 million dollars) a year for all its PCs.

The savings in $10m a year has to be a delicious side benefit. The Open Source movement is not even breathing hard yet. Most of the ThirdPipe companies we are aware of are using Open Source as part of their competitive advantage to get into the market. Even established telecom giants are using Linx and embedded Linux in R&D.

Linky.

According to the minutes of their meeting on January 23, ICANN will stop the extremely questionable practice of domain tasting that has been standard practice for many registrars. Was it an act of Congress or in response to the public’s outcry? No, it was in reaction to Google crack down adsense accounts for tasted domains. While ICANN has done a horrid job of policing the less than ethical practices of many members since they left DARPA’s oversight, this is a step in the right direction. Moral to the story: if registrars misbehave, complain to Google first. They seem to be the most effective sheriff in the wild west of the internet.

Overseeing the world’s largest communications market could get a lot easier if the FCC doesn’t get their act together soon. Why? Because the US market will cease to be the largest if the present policy continues. The agency recently sought to fine ABC for a broadcast breifly showing butt cheeks in 2003 and has been pushing for a la carte cable channels (a good idea, but enable TVoIP with fat broadband pipes and the market will do it). What they have not done is enforce a 1996 agreement with the Telcos that was supposed to bring big investments in last mile infrastructure and open access for competetion:

In 1996, the government agreed to free the Baby Bells to compete in the long-distance market if they met certain conditions. Among other things, the Bells promised to share their facilities with other providers and pledged to run fiber to every home. “Almost every one of them reneged on their promises,” says David Passmore, an analyst at Burton Group.

Ironically, the rate relief the carriers were given over the years in return for their empty promises — by some estimates as high as $70 billion — would have gone a long way toward running fiber to every home in the U.S.

“The politicians gave away the store, and all of the networks that were paid for by the rate [payers] were handed over to the Verizons of the world,” says Passmore. source: Computerworld

Unwittingly, the FCC is shipping US jobs overseas every bit as effectively as wholesale factory closings did. The largest carriers, AT&T (aka SBC) and Verizon spent more far more capital on mergers and acquisitions than on the promised network improvements without even a harsh word from the FCC. An act of Congress won’t fix this. An executive order might. IF Mr Bush would lke to leave a more positive legacy, he could forcibly direct the FCC to enforce existing regs already on the books. We’ll recover from the naked butt cheeks most of us missed in 2003 and being forced to pay for Al Gore’s Current TV that no one watches. We will not recover from the rest of the world passing us by if we do not get serious about a 100MBPS pipe into every American home and start deploying it now.

In what has to be a blow for folks like EMI and Sony the Euro court remanded the issue back to the individual EU countries for codification. That means the Suits will have go from Spain to Sweden to seek relief. –

January 29, 2008 (IDG News Service) In a blow against the music industry, the European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that E.U. countries don’t have to require Internet service providers to reveal subscriber data for use in civil cases.

The Luxembourg court said E.U. nations may decide on their own whether to require such disclosure, but advised them to seek a balance between disclosing personal information and protecting intellectual property.

Existing E.U. directives on intellectual property do not require disclosure of personal data to ensure effective protection of copyright, the court said in a news release (PDF format).

The court’s decision means that music and film industry groups may have to find other ways in some countries to identify those suspected of illegally sharing files without the permission of the copyright holder.

It also bolsters prevailing opinions in Europe that an IP (Internet protocol) address — which identifies the computer used by a person — is a privacy issue, personal data that should be protected.

With a pending determination that the EU may consider IP addresses private information, the ability of someone like the RIAA to operate may become impossible.

Linky.

We have mentioned several times of firmware upgrades on common WiFi routers like the Linksys 54WRTG. Tomato for example. That is an example of a proprietary hardware design that the mfr opened to permit others to tinker. That is gracious meaningful marketing on Linksys’ part. Another oddly is MS’s Windows CE platform. Much of which can be updated through firmware plugins. But its rare to see a full scale OSD (Open Source Device) –

“HACKERS, welcome! Here are detailed circuit diagrams of our products — modify them as you wish.”

That’s not an announcement you’ll find on the Web sites of most consumer electronics manufacturers, who tend to keep information on the innards of their machines as private as possible.

But Neuros Technology International, creator of a new video recorder, has decided to go in a different direction. The company, based in Chicago, is providing full documentation of the hardware platform for its recorder, the Neuros OSD (for open source device), so that skilled users can customize or “hack” the device — and then pass along the improvements to others.

The OSD is a versatile recorder. Using a memory card or a U.S.B. storage device, it saves copies of DVDs, VHS tapes and television programs from satellite receivers, cable boxes, TVs and any other device with standard video output.

Because the OSD saves the recordings in the popular compressed video format MPEG-4 (pronounced EM-peg), the programs can be watched on a host of devices, including iPods and smartphones. The OSD is for sale at Fry’s, Micro Center, J&R Electronics and other locations for about $230.

I’ve tinkered with electronic kits in the past, so in a sense that was Open Source from that perspective. But this is something different. The hardware is already cooked but the circuit diagrams, software, etc is provided to allow someone to ‘upgrade’ or ‘morph’ the device within it’s technical limits to something else. You could for example turn this into a OpenID encrypt/decrypt for an external hard drive.

I hope we see more like this.

NYT article.
Neuros website

How about an Oracle compatible, enterprise class database on demand in the cloud? One more way of doing very big things with very little comes in a cloud via broadband. EnterpriseDB has done just that for what is a yet ot be announced price, but I’m betting it will be small.

The company on Tuesday started taking invitations for a beta program for EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition that will launch in March. The final product should be available this summer, according to EnterpriseDB Chief Technology Officer Bob Zurek, who spearheaded the initiative.

Amazon already offers a hosted database, called SimpleDB, but Zurek said that its database is designed for transactions and industrial-strength applications.

The service works with clustering software from Elastra, which means that servers and storage are quickly brought online to meet changes in computing demand, he explained. It taps into Amazon’s Web services for hosted servers and storage, called Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). (from Cnet)

More on the rationale I raised in a previous post on this buyout. But I think it misses a core point that I will get to in a minute. –

Nokia is responding to tectonic market shifts. These days, when consumers buy digital content—such as music or a movie—they want to be able to pay for it once and move it easily between different devices they own. What’s more, analysts say, consumer expectations for software on phones have changed dramatically since Apple’s iPhone went on the market last year.

Trolltech’s Qt technology addresses both issues, by allowing programs, services, and content to run easily on various devices while at the same time ensuring a consistent look and feel. That should help bring Nokia’s user experience more in line with Apple’s precedent-setting software interface. And it should also help the company more easily incorporate Web 2.0 services such as social networking into the mobile world. “This is the first in a series of moves we are going to see from Nokia to fix the software gap,” says Richard Windsor, a mobile analyst at Nomura Securities in London.

At the same time, buying Trolltech helps fend off Google. Nokia is keen to propagate high-end phone features from its priciest models into midrange phones, but runs into big software challenges making the move. That’s precisely the opportunity Google is targeting with its Android initiative (BusinessWeek.com, 1/22/08), which aims to provide a standard, inexpensive software environment for mass-market phones—something the industry has long lacked. If Nokia can get there first, it stays ahead of the search giant.

the article goes on to suggest that this deal is a problem for Motorola which I agree wtih. But then why is this deal not a problem of Google Dog? Its the structure of it my friends. TrollTech is NOT open source. If you don’t believe me go to www.trolltech.com and enter ’source code’ in their search bar. TrollTech admits that source code is not available, which is one of the hallmarks of a Open Source GPL2 or 3 license. Contrast that with Android where the source code will be available once the final API is released.

That marks a strategic battle line. For Nokia that means that their TrollTech offerings move at the speed of the development staff for fixes, updates and additions. On Android with the source available fixes can be identified quickly as many eyes can be placed on a problem once encountered. Whole additions can be wrought from anybody with the skills. Hence we see Google offering prizes now for development on Android. To do something like that on Qt would be impossible without the permission of Nokia. Essentially its the old The Cathedral and Bazaar paradigm all over again.

Nokia will advance their position with this purchase. But they miss the leverage provided by Open Source.

Linky.

Just when things look bleak, technology comes to the rescue — maybe. HP, unknown to us, has a digital content unit. Their task? Provide content on demand. No not pay per view. Ala NetFlix but as a buy not a rental. So all those movies of yore that have never made it to DVD may now have a chance.

There are a number of film titles that I store in the My Movies section of IMDB that have inexplicably not been published on DVD, and I use the list to periodically check to see if they’ve finally surfaced. And it looks like I’ve got an inkling of hope of marking some titles off of my list, thanks to movie studios looking to the long tail to counter falling DVD sales. This week, Sony (which owns such studios as Columbia, Tri-Star, and Screen Gems) announced that it would license older DVD titles not currently released for production and distribution through HP’s manufactured-on-demand service. As Studio Briefing notes:

The deal will allow consumers to order movies that ordinarily would not be stocked by dealers because they are too obscure or too old. HP indicated that it expects to sign similar deals with other studios. "We're hoping this provides another option to make available products that wouldn't necessarily garner widespread retail shelf space," Jason Spivak, head of strategic development at Sony Home Entertainment, told the Times. Added Doug Warner, head of HP's digital content business, "If studios can sell more catalog than previously, they can generate more money."

For the Studios this only stems their slow slide to irrelevance. But for the consumer, this is a boon. All those old Steward Grainger and Errol Flynn flicks will now have a chance to make to a DVD. Yes, showing my age. But many of the old films are better than the ‘new stuff’ passed off as film.

Its a Good Thing.

Linky