With that the first execution by Twitter was initiated. It was performed by Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.

In itself the technology is no big shucks. People have been using twitter for years now. (why I don’t know.) But at a humanistic level it feels cold. Yes the recipient was a cold blooded killer. But do we need to become as cold as the perp was? Such an event at least requires a phone call so that another human can hear the demand.

Techno death is a little too unfeeling for my tastes.

Alcatel is pondering the development of a 100mbps over copper technology. Its possible for 100mpbs over 1KM. It is DSL after all –

Alcatel-Lucent has developed a prototype technology that could dramatically increase the speed of data communications over the copper wires that make up the majority of the world’s telephone infrastructure. The technology combines three existing techniques, known as bonding, vectoring, and DSL phantom mode. It can reach speeds of 300 megabits per second at a distance of 400 meters from a communications hub, and 100 megabits per second at one kilometer.

Squeezing more speed out of copper connections is an important goal for telecommunications companies in the United States. They want to compete with the 50-megabit-per-second speeds offered by cable providers, but DSL connections transmit data through telephone lines–a fundamentally different technology from that used by cable companies. Alcatel-Lucent’s technology could help these companies extend high-speed Internet access before next-generation fiber-optic networks become widely available.

The first two components of the prototype system, vectoring and bonding, are standard ways to increase the speed of DSL broadband connections: vectoring cancels out noise in a DSL line, and bonding treats multiple lines as if they were a single cable, which increases bandwidth by a multiple almost equal to the number of cables involved. Neither technique is widely used in the United States, but they are deployed to a limited extent in both Asia and Europe, where high urban density makes them more economical.

source

Intriguing yes? Here’s the rub. In many areas of the US, from a remote CO to a end user can be 20 miles. Worst case being that in some cases its over barbed wire. (Yes Mildred, that still exists in some locales.) So for grins lets say that as a DSL service this scales to 10mbps at 10 miles end user to remote CO.

Given that assumption is this worthwhile? Yes in reason. Obviously the Telcos would wish to offer this in high density areas as they could compete with FIOS without the attendant cost of new outside plant installs. Keep in mind that AT&T tried something very similar with a copper based Uverse that did not work out so well.

In practice where does this fit? High density, natch though the market in the urban centers is getting very competitive. The even better fit is the existing suburban neighborhoods where the copper is already in the ground. The issue is price. Would the public see the value of a 10mbps service at say $30/month? Could the Telcos provide it at that price and have margin? That’s where the rubber meets the road.

We’ve listened as duopoly CEO’s have repeatedly stated the we don’t need more speed and that we’re hogging scarce bandwidth. We’ve seen a new FCC broadband plan that is nothing more than a massive power grab by that agency that insures no competition for the duopoly. If you believe these people, then I’m a lone lunatic in the blogosphere who is suffering from a delusion of low bandwidth paralysis.

But I’m not alone. Google announce plans to offer a tiny sliver of American society ultra high speed broadband as a part of a test. Response has been overwhelming and extremely competitive:

Since we announced our plans to build experimental, ultra high-speed broadband networks, the response from communities and individuals has been tremendous and creative. With just a few hours left before our submission deadline, we’ve received more than 600 community responses to our request for information (RFI), and more than 190,000 responses from individuals (we’ll post an update with the final numbers later tonight). We’ve seen cities rename themselves, great YouTube videos, public rallies and hundreds of grassroots Facebook groups come to life, all with the goal of bringing ultra high-speed broadband to their communities. (Google Blog)

Why are there so many other broadband crazies out there? Not only will this new network make downloads and uploads nearly instant, it will enable boundless new opportunity. That means new higher paying jobs, better education, and a much more level playing field for all to take advantage of the opportunities this kind of speed enables. This will not be reported on the evening news. With ultra fast broadband, the evening news is history.

Well shucks I have been saying for quite some time that Femtocell was a total rip. But folks say I am a lone voice in the wilderness on the issue. Well no more –

Even if I’m willing to pay $150 to extend AT&T’s shitty 3G network, it will only be accessible to 10 lines, and it will almost certainly be a pain in the ass to add or remove lines. So, when my iPhone toting friends are down to play Rock Band, they too can enjoy getting 5 voice mails the moment they leave the house, each from a call that never rang inside the AT&T black hole that is my home. There is one spot of good news here though, buried at the end of the paragraph: AT&T has decided graciously not to charge me a monthly fee for the privilege of fixing its network. But wait, that sentence right before it, about the minutes? Does that mean I’m still going to be charged for minutes, even when dialing out over my broadband connection instead of AT&T’s spendy wireless network? Are they fucking kidding me?

In addition, AT&T will offer a companion rate plan option for MicroCell customers – especially customers on Family Talk plans — who want to supplement their existing voice plans. For $19.99 a month, individual or Family Talk customers can make unlimited calls through a 3G MicroCell, without using minutes in their monthly wireless voice plan.

Oh I get it now. This is a revenue opportunity. You know, for AT&T. For $150 down, I can use my broadband connection to extend AT&T’s shitty network, but if I don’t want those calls to eat my minutes I have to pay ANOTHER $20 a month? This is extortion.

So what is the problem? Well I think the blog entry at Tested lays it out pretty well. Link.

But in every grey cloud could be a silver lining. Somebody, anybody get hold of one of those microcells and lets dig into the internals. If we could reverse engineer it, chances are we could turn the tables. AT&T would not have much incentive to deploy this if they knew that with just a .BIN file upload you could have your cell phone operating for free!

Think about it.

Yes Dear Reader a little TCO analysis can save you money. We have been saying for years that the shell game of free phone, payback is a b!@#$ thru the contract is a bear. It also hurts your wallet. –

He’s considering buying a data-only plan from T-Mobile and relying primarily on SkypeOut purchases, with a backup of free Gizmo5 calls through Google Voice, although new Gizmo5 sign-ups are currently suspended. That means little to no mobile calling (unless you used the free Guava app). Then again, Ben sees some significant savings by the end of what would be a two-year contract, and considers himself a “near-total” dependent on Google services. Could you imagine making the data-only jump?

Just go over to the lifehacker article and see for yourself. Keep in mind that the author is considering only going with a data only plan, 2yr contact. There are other considerations one can also employ. For instance, does your spouse have a phone with a carrier who does a Friend and Family deal? Why not punch the Google voice into the loop? Then the calls to her are free. And if perchance one has a small VoIP server then a VoIP app on the Nexus might avoid all the Gizmodo fiddling as well.

While we are on the subject. The Nexus Launch. A captured live blog feed is here with pics. Initial take — very iPhonish. But that seems to be where the jive is at the moment. The wise move being made? You can buy the phone separate and go with any vendor you wish. That’s a damn smart move, especially for the consumer.

I just hope the carriers are prepared for the bandwidth assault. This phone screams — Songbird App. But your data store staying on the home server and streamed to the Nexus as an audio terminal. Oh and anybody out there developing a multiparty audio remix app for the Nexus. It would sell.

We have projected for 2 years that it was time for unbundling the phone. We would have expected it to happen before the smartphones took hold. But I guess it takes the extra functionality of the smartphone to force the issue on the carriers. Hope I am right but wrong.

Nexus one analysis.

I have used Visio for years. First when it was and independent and afterwards when Microsoft bought them out. In the Corporate world it is THE graphics package. Visio is so dominate that there is little competition. You have to go to the Mac space to find viable alternatives.

Well that changes now —

Cacoo - Real-time Collaborative Diagramming & Design from Nulab Inc. on Vimeo.

Issues? I had only one. My base system runs 64bit Ubuntu and the flash player I am forced to use is an experimental v.11 code. Does not work. But a 32 bit Ubuntu with flash does.

But is it a Visio killer? Out of the box no. There are features that this Cacoo do not even touch. For example diagram packs for Cisco gear right down to the card that can go in the frames. Not there yet. But, from small beginnings competitors are made. This online tool is sufficient for most small businesses. It is perfect for any individual. That’s the rub for Visio too. Once someone buys into a base package the customer is more inclined to buy add-ons and upgrades. Now that might get short circuited.

Would highly recommend folks give them a try.
website: http://cacoo.com/

Kurzweil, is there anything this guy can’t do? His book the Singularity is Near has spawned a whole new way of thinking about the future. He is a prolific inventor past and present. So what’s he go an do? Well remedy the bland existence of eReaders that’s what! —

One of Blio’s major advantages over current e-book readers is that the software offers a full color experience. E Ink, which is the black-and-white display used currently in almost all e-readers, works best for text, and even then most e-books still look ugly, thanks to design limitations in the readers.

Blio actually lays out the “pages” as they would be seen on paper, with typography and illustrations copied across. It also supports video and animation. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of the interactive magazine applications (also meant for upcoming tablet devices) shown off by the likes of Time Warner, Popular Science publisher Bonnier and Wired’s parent company Conde Nast.

Add to that some nifty features such as text-to-speech and the ability to synchronize things (like bookmarks, highlights and the page you last read) across multiple devices, and it makes for an interesting e-reader.

“We can take a PDF and an audio book and merge the two to get a combination such that you can hear the audio book and see the words highlighted on the PDF at the same time,” says Peter Chapman, an executive at Kurzweil Technologies.

For publishers, says Kurzweil the advantage is that Blio preserves the original book’s format, including typsetting, layout, fonts and pagination.

Wired goes on to mention stiff competition, etc. My guess is maybe not. First this has the attributes that most any student or researcher keeps in the stachel — marker, highlighter, sticky notes, etc. Then it supports color. Of course that’s more a hardware restriction than anything. But still color will probably be what separates the have nots from the haves in the ebook market very quickly once power issues are corralled.

What’s not to like? Well format for one. Got too many right now. Many non-Amazon systems were starting to gravitate around the ePub format. This will delay that for awhile.

Now the hardware makers need to step up. The merge of tablet and eReader will continue. Somebody will come out with a 8.5×11 formatted screen and the rest will be history. Whoever does it will have the same impact that IBM did when they introduced their laptop line oh so many years ago.

Linky.

Here’s another lab measurement that will probably make it to the real world, but it does give us some idea of what is possible if the marketplace were competitive enough to motivate providers to offer more.

Verizon yesterday said it tested a fiber technology in its labs and a customer home that delivered 10 Gbps downstream over its FiOS network and 2.4 Gbps in upload speeds. The technology, called XG-PON, delivers insanely fast speeds and is part of Verizon’s efforts to make its $23 billion investment in fiber grow with the demand for better broadband.

If you read our blog in mid-November, you already knew about this, but we didn’t have details on the standard Verizon was using. The XG-PON standard won’t actually become official until mid-2010. The current Verizon technology is GPON which delivers 2.5 Gbps downstream and 1.2 Gbps upstream. Currently Verizon splits those speeds among about 30 homes. Brian Whitton, executive director of access technologies at Verizon, who originally told us about these tests, explained what people might do with such blazing web connections, which mostly involves better video technologies.

My guess is that we will be seeing Gigabit connections showing up in consumers homes at reasonable prices in the next couple of years. That will be terrific for those living in Japan, Korea, and some European countries.  As for the US, don;t look for much to change as long as our regulators belong to the duopoly.

No one is really sure what the limits of fiber optic capacity are.   One thing is certain: With a little investment there’s no scarcity of available bandwidth on existing infrastructure.

Alcatel-Lucent today said that scientists at Bell Labs have set an optical transmission record that could deliver data about 10 times faster than current undersea cables,  resulting in speeds of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer.  A petawhat? This translates to the equivalent of about 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer or sending about 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago. (Gigaom)

Latency is that nasty habit of the internet to slow the transfer of data as it has to travel further. Technologies like content delivery networks, placing servers in multiple location nearer to most users beats latency by reducing  distance. It’s expensive and has limited mass distribution of streaming media to the few with very deep pockets.  So what of distance didn’t matter? According to new research that could happen….and the few could become the many.

The researchers, who were supported by grants from both the National Science Foundation and Cisco, presented their work at the SIGCOMM meeting on Thursday; they’ve placed a paper describing it online as well. The paper describes how the system—which they term a Lossy Difference Aggregator—would operate in principle, describe some simulations of its performance, and suggest how it might be implemented. Unfortunately, it appears that it would require an extension to an IEEE standard that’s only been adopted recently, as well as dedicated processing hardware.

Doing real-time monitoring, if you ignore implementation details, is simple: simply assign each network packet a timestamp when it leaves a piece of hardware, and then compare that to the time at which it’s received. The challenge is communicating these timestamps between the hardware. Each has to be matched with a specific packet, which can be computationally intensive, and the two pieces of hardware have to transfer the data in order to make time comparisons. It’s possible to cut down on the work by choosing a representative sample of packets for a given time period, but coordinating the choice of packets across hardware can be a challenge. (Ars Technica)