1. Mobile Video Conferencing
   I’m still waiting for a little camera to appear on the front of my mobile phone so I can video chat while I’m on the go. Some mobile phone companies, specifically Nokia, have tried this in the past. However, it worked on a very small scale and only allowed Nokia-specific phone chats. For this to work correctly, mobile handset makers will need to allow video chats with computer users and across mobile handsets.
2. Biometric Sensors
   Some of the current biometric sensors used by high-level security companies could easily fit into your mobile phone and add a needed level of security. Adding iris scanning biometrics, for example, could enable higher protection when making purchases on mobile phones and would eliminate the need for current password authentication. It would also deter theft of mobile devices.
3. Common Awareness Between Devices
   Why can’t my phone talk to my computer and share information, including documents I’m reading? Why can’t I start watching a baseball game on my television and then finish it on my phone while I sit on the subway? Some of these features are available with a U.S.B. cable and a lot of dragging, dropping and waiting, but so far, devices can’t talk to one another and seamlessly share content.
4. Green Battery Power
   We’ve come a long way from cellphone battery packs that were as large and heavy as a phone book, but why not add some green to the current batteries? Apple filed a patent two years ago for technology that would integrate a solar cell into the iPhone’s LCD display, allowing the phone to charge when sitting in direct light. This feature would be environmentally friendly, and could avoid cumbersome plugs and a constant need to recharge. (In his article, Mr. Vance noted that NTT DoCoMo showed off a solar-panel phone at the Mobile World Congress.)
5. The End of Wires
   Speaking of self-charging devices, as many of us spend most of our online time in the cloud, why do we still need U.S.B. cables and headphone jacks? I wish that mobile phones could simple share all of our information, including videos, music and documents, wirelessly over Wi-Fi or 3G.
6. Mobile Projectors
   Over the last couple of years, a few phones have entered the marketplace, specifically in China, that include a pico projector. The technology is still in an early stage, but these projectors are extremely small and enable projection of movies, photos and presentations directly from a mobile phone.

One of the unexpected results was that it caused people to hang around the conference room, including after the sessions ended (a rather surprising outcome in an exceptional beach hotel). It seems that WiFi and the easy connectivity it gives has this effect universally:

Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates).

But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.

Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.

Full story in NYT.

White space could be even bigger. The frequencies involved were chosen for television back in the 1950s for good reason: they travel long distances, are hardly affected by the weather, carry lots of data, and penetrate deep into the nooks and crannies of buildings. No surprise proponents have dubbed them “WiFi on steroids”.

Once the changeover from analog to digital broadcasting is complete, the television networks will no longer need the white spaces between analog channels to prevent interference from noise and other transmissions. Apart from digital broadcasts being far less vulnerable to interference, there’s now plenty of frequency-hopping technology around for detecting digital broadcasts and avoiding them.

The full treatment is here. The qualification is the same that we insisted on when WiFi came on the scene. The business model that works in countries where the network is mature and access to the backbone is available, low-cost and non-discriminatory, does not work in countries where those conditions do not exist. Divakar Goswami’s analysis of WiFi use in Indonesia clearly showed the limitations of thinking that technology alone can fix our connectivity problems. But of course that does not mean we are not for White Space. We need to free it up, and do a number of other things along with that to gain the benefits.

And, don’t forget, our mandarins are not thinking about the analog-to-digital transition; they are busy trying to strangle the private media. They have no interest is reducing scarcity; only in creating the conditions for extracting rent from it. So we have a long way to go before we get the white space.

White space is industry lingo for the unused airwaves that abut broadcast TV spectrum, providing a buffer zone from stray signals and other inferference. The buffer zone was set up more than 50 years ago when TV was first invented.

The FCC’s white-space plan was initially proposed four years ago. More than 25,000 comments — from supporters as well as critics — were submitted.

Under the FCC’s plan, white space spectrum will be unlicensed and free — like Wi-Fi — to anybody who wants to use it. In some markets, there’s enough white space to fill a half dozen TV channels

Read the full story in USA Today here.

This is what ITU’s Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Report for the Asia-Pacific region 2008 says. It was released at ITU TELECOM ASIA 2008, Bangkok, Thailand yesterday (Sept 2, 2008).

The Report finds evidence that ICTs and broadband uptake foster growth and development, but the question remains as to the optimal speed that should be targeted in view of limited resources.

The area in which the region really stands out is the uptake of advanced Internet technologies, especially broadband Internet access. The Asia-Pacific region is the world’s largest broadband market with a 39 per cent share of the world’s total at the end of 2007. In terms of broadband access, Asia-Pacific has made remarkable progress in the past few years, with subscriber numbers growing almost five-fold in five years: from 27 million at the beginning of 2003 to 133 million at the start of 2008.

In the region’s high-income economies, ubiquitous access is progressing through a competitive race to provide ever faster fixed broadband access. Operators in Hong Kong (China) and Japan have launched one-Gigabits per second (Gbps) broadband and triple-play services aimed at the residential market, featuring applications such as Internet telephony and television. The Republic of Korea leads the world in terms of the percentage of households with fixed broadband access, and no less than five economies in the top ten are from Asia-Pacific. The Republic of Korea, Hong Kong (China), and Japan also lead the world in terms of the proportion of households with fibre optic connections, essential for supporting the next generation of ultra-high speed Internet applications.

These high-income economies are also leaders in terms of third generation (3G) mobile cellular deployment. Fixed and mobile broadband technologies complement each other and users enjoy continuous high-speed Internet access. In Singapore, a ubiquitous Internet access plan combining unlimited 8 Megabits per second (Mbps) fixed broadband, 2 Mbps mobile broadband and access at some 800 Wi-Fi hotspots is available for just USD 35 per month.

At the other extreme, in most of the region’s low and lower-middle income economies, high-speed Internet access is limited to urban areas at best, typically expensive, and often not available at all. The regional broadband divide is striking, with poor economies having a close-to-zero broadband penetration, compared to that of rich economies where one in four persons is a broadband subscriber (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Fixed broadband Internet subscribers per 100 inhabitants, 2007

The gap in available broadband speeds between rich and poor countries is as wide as broadband penetration. In Japan, the Republic of Korea and Hong Kong (China), the minimum advertised broadband speed is faster than the maximum broadband speed in Cambodia, Tonga, Laos and Bangladesh.

While in low and lower-middle income economies mobile phones have become a substitute for the shortage of fixed lines, they are not yet fulfilling the potential of broadband access. By the end of 2007, only Indonesia, the Maldives, the Philippines and Sri Lanka had commercially deployed WCDMA networks. The region’s two largest mobile markets, China and India, have yet to launch mobile broadband. By the end of 2007, there were over 120 million mobile broadband subscribers in the region (Figure 2), but almost all (97 per cent) were in high income economies.

Figure 2: Mobile cellular broadband subscribers in Asia-Pacific

While the region’s high-income economies are pushing the frontier of broadband bandwidth to a point where applications have yet to catch up, many Asia-Pacific developing economies are bandwidth starved, inhibiting the development of their information societies.

The ITU Report argues that broadband uptake enables a range of socially desirable and valuable online services in areas such as government, education and health. The use of broadband technologies can help overcome many of the basic development challenges faced by poor countries. The Report provides a number of examples where broadband connectivity has acted as a catalyst for development. These include the provision of education through distance learning in the Solomon Islands, the creation of jobs through business incubators for women in China, and the supply of communication services for disaster management in Myanmar.

Read the press release here. Full report is not yet available in the public domain.

(Please click on the images for a better view)

Both SLT and Dialog boast about their island wide networks. These backbones, they say, are capable of delivering ‘kiri’ to rural communities too. ICTA does not let a day go without mentioning taking ICTs to villages. The reality, as we have experienced for the last three days, is different.

Apparently 3G services are unavailable in Polonnaruva.  All Mobitel could deliver was GPRS at a speed less than 5 kbps. (top) Good that they provide the speedometer on PC. Visiting any site, including speedtest.net is impossible at that rate. (1/200 of the promised speed)

The competition was not too different (does that surprise anyone?).  Apart from delivering GPRS at similar speeds, Dialog was not capable even of delivering more than 80 kbps thorough its hotel wi-fi network – that too within selected hours with a weak connection breaking every 30 minutes or so.  There were long periods the network was simply down. Minimum prepaid charge is Rs. 250 + taxes, irrespective of the usage (less than 30 minutes in our case) and user satisfaction – er, dissatisfaction.

Perhaps it is the fault of King Parakramabahu. Taking into account the broadband needs of his descendents he could have moved the kingdom to a location near Colombo – where at least the last-mile conditions are not this pathetic.

Singapore’s free Wi-Fi service, which since December 2006 has covered almost all public areas, has been extended to the place it was most notably lacking: the terminals at Changi Airport. Users of the airport, including those at the new Terminal 3 and Budget Terminal, can now log on to wireless@sg and access the internet free of charge. The download speed, 512 kilobits per second, is fast enough for most needs.

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Because Mr. Staniaszek plugged his mobile phone with a PC and happily downloaded high-definition movies using the “unlimited” mobile internet plan.  Bell says its “unlimited plan” is applicable for browsing internet from mobile device only – not using the gadget as a modem and browsing the net from PC. Therefore, it has decided to charge Mr. Staniaszek $85,000 for every bit of data he has downloaded. 

Baffled Mr. Staniaszek has refused to pay and Bell Mobility has shrunk the mammoth bill to $3,243 as “goodwill”. Yet the angry customer is reluctant to pay the “reduced amount” and decided to fight instead. Read more. 

Points to ponder: A notebook enabled with Wi-Fi instantly accesses the internet. An external Wi-Fi device is needed to wirelessly link a PC with internet. It is purely a user’s discretion. Similarly Mr. Staniaszek has accessed to internet using his mobile phone as a data modem. Bell Mobility has made itself a laughingstock by dictating the customer the gadget it should use to avail the service. Hopefully the Canadian government will avoid being the co-star of Bell Mobility in this hilarious regulatory show.

“We have been warning for several years that commercial WiFi hotspots, especially in hotels and conference centres, are in danger of pricing themselves out of the market,” says World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck, who led the research. “And, now that a monthly subscription to a basic 3G service is cheaper than a few hours on most commercial hotspots, the chickens have come home to roost.” Raed more.

Municipal Wi-Fi | Reality bites | Economist.com

IT WAS supposed to democratise the internet and turn America’s city-dwellers into citizen-surfers. In 2004 the mayors of Philadelphia and San Francisco unveiled ambitious plans to provide free wireless-internet access to all residents using Wi-Fi, a technology commonly used to link computers to the internet in homes, offices, schools and coffee-shops. Across America, hundreds of cities followed suit. Yet many municipal Wi-Fi projects have since been hit by mounting costs, poor coverage and weak demand. This week Chicago became the first big city to abandon its plans for a city-wide network. “Everyone would like something for free,” says Chuck Haas of MetroFi, a supplier of municipal Wi-Fi systems. But the numbers do not add up.Most city governments did not want to build or run the Wi-Fi systems themselves, so they farmed the job out to specialist firms such as EarthLink and MetroFi. These companies initially agreed to bear all expenses, expecting to sign up 10-25% of each city’s population for a fee-based wireless service. In some places this was to have been supplemented by a free service at lower speed, or supported by advertising. Some cities also planned to subsidise access for poor residents.

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Nangi Village, where Mahabir Pun was born, rests high in the Himalayan foothills of western Nepal. Here and in surrounding Myagdi District live the Pun Magar, whose men have soldiered for generations across the globe as Gurkhas. Yet, their worldly careers have done little to change their sleepy homeland, so far from the traffic patterns that knit together the rest of the world. Indeed, Nangi is seven hours’ hard climb from the nearest road. No telephone lines have ever reached it. Despite this, these days the people of Nangi are definitely connected to the world outside. Wireless Internet technology has made this possible. Mahabir Pun has made it happen.

Pun passed his boyhood grazing cattle and sheep in mountain pastures and attending a village school that had no paper or pencils or books. Wanting more for his son, Pun’s father moved the family to Nepal’s lowlands, where, in Chitwan, Pun finished high school and became a teacher, working for twelve years to help his younger siblings through school. Finally, a timely scholarship led him to a bachelor’s degree at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Then, in 1992, after more than twenty years away, Pun returned home to Nangi, determined to make things easier for other youths than they had been for him.

Nangi’s leaders were busy establishing a village high school. Pun eagerly joined in. Once a month, he made the two-day trip to the nearest major town of Pokhara to check his e-mail and maintain his links to friends abroad. This led, in 1997, to the donation of four used computers from Australia. Powering them with hydro generators in a nearby stream, Pun began teaching computer classes at the high school. More computers followed, but it proved impossible to get a telephone connection to Pokhara and the Internet.

Pun e-mailed the British Broadcasting Corporation, asking for ideas. In 2001, the BBC publicized his dilemma and within a year volunteers from Europe and the United States were helping him rig a wireless connection between Nangi and the neighboring village of Ramche, using TV dish antennas mounted in trees. Some small grants soon led to the construction of improvised mountaintop relay stations and a link to Pokhara. By 2003, Nangi was online.

As word of Pun’s project bounced around the World Wide Web, backpacking volunteers carried more and more donated computers, parts, and equipment into the hills. Meanwhile, Pun expanded the wireless network to embrace twelve villages-distributing a hundred computers to local schools, connecting them to the Internet, teaching teachers how to use them, and then tinkering and troubleshooting until everything worked.

Today, connectivity is changing Myagdi. Using the district’s “tele-teaching” network, good teachers in one school now instruct students in others. Doctorless villagers use Wi-Fi to consult specialists in Pokhara. Village students surf the Net and are learning globe-savvy skills. Pun himself is using the Web to e-market local products such as honey, teas, and jams and to draw paying trekkers to campsites that he has outfitted with solar-powered hot showers. In parallel projects, villagers in Nangi have themselves added a library, a health clinic, and new classrooms for the high school.

Pun, now fifty-two, is both self-effacing and charismatic. “I’m not in charge of anything,” he says. Yet, he seems to be the driving force of much around him. Eventually, he says, the people of Myagdi District will have to carry on for themselves. In the meantime, he hopes to play his unique role indefinitely. “As long as I can walk,” Pun says happily, “I can do this.”

In electing Mahabir Pun to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his innovative application of wireless computer technology in Nepal, bringing progress to remote mountain areas by connecting his village to the global village.

http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Citation/CitationPunMah.htm

IPhone-Free Cellphone News – New York Times

It’s called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, and it’s absolutely ingenious. It could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, and yet enrich T-Mobile at the same time. In the cellphone world, win-win plays like that are extremely rare.

Here’s the basic idea. If you’re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you’re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.

But when it’s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always — you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features — but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.

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But as councils offer public wi-fi, questions are being asked about how much citizens will use them and how sustainable they are.

City-wide wi-fi is the obvious next step from wi-fi hotspots, bringing them out of cafes and hotel lobbies to provide ubiquitous coverage in a town.

But some analysts claim that few citizens are using public wi-fi while other call for more cautious rollouts.

Companies such as BT and The Cloud are partnering with local governments in the UK to build city-wide wireless networks offering councils enhancements to public services and giving citizens the chance to connect to the web from wi-fi enabled devices.

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BBC NEWS | Technology | Switch on for Square Mile wi-fi

But is there really that much demand for open-air surfing? After all, staring at a laptop screen in the sunshine is not a great experience – especially in an area where so many cafes have wi-fi access.

The network’s backers think one of the big attractions will be the ability to use wi-fi enabled phones to make cheap calls using Skype or other internet telephony services.

It’s hard to see why well-paid City workers would bother with the extra effort needed to make a wi-fi call – but the City of London Corporation believes it will prove attractive to migrant workers on construction sites.

Public wi-fi networks, free and paid-for, are spreading quickly, but there are mixed reports on just how much they are being used. Some believe the more advanced Wimax technology is the real answer to open-air internet access.

So the City of London’s network will provide a major test of whether the public really wants to surf on the move – and whether there is any money to be made from it.

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On continuing discussion of municipal wireless there is a great quote in here: ‘Using municipal Wi-Fi for residential coverage, [Sanjit Biswas] said, was “the
equivalent of expecting street lamps to light everyone’s homes.” ‘

Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers – New York Times

WiMax, which will be a high-power version of the tower approach, comes in two flavors: mobile, which has not yet been certified, and fixed, which is theoretically well suited for residential deployment. Unfortunately, it’s pricey. Peter Bell, a research analyst at TeleGeography Research in Washington, said fixed WiMax would not be able to compete against cable and DSL service: “It makes more economic sense in semirural areas that have no broadband coverage.”

An intriguingly inexpensive alternative has appeared: a Wi-Fi network that is not top-down but rather ground-level, peer-to-peer. It relies not on $3,500 radio transmitters perched on street lamps by professional installers but instead on $50 boxes that serve, depending upon population density, more than one household and can be installed by anyone with the ease of plugging in a toaster.