Tag Archives: wireless networks
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FCC seeks comments on net neutrality
The FCC has engaged Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to study net neutrality and its impact. Here is the draft report. Most of the highest-ranking countries use net neutrality policies, under which the incumbent carriers have to allow competitors to lease capacity on their networks and offer their own services, the Berkman report said. By contrast, the U.S. stands out for having instituted such rules in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 but backed away from them early in this decade, the report said. Interestingly, the report finds wireless broadband policies are more complicated and more difficult to draw conclusions from. Now the commission has invited comments on it by November 16.
India eases sharing rules for wireless operators
India on Tuesday allowed telecoms operators to share transmission systems, radio access networks and antennae and simplified the approval process for building mobile towers.But radio spectrum, or air waves used for wireless networks, cannot be shared.
Telecoms operators in India were earlier permitted to share only passive infrastructure such as mobile towers, buildings and power backup facilities.
Sharing infrastructure reduces the operating costs and capital expenditure of wireless telecoms operators, allowing them to maintain margins in a competitive market that has call rates as low as 1 U.S. cent a minute.
“The guidelines are aimed to reducing the input costs on telecom access providers… (and to aid) reduced tariff and increased tele-density in rural areas,” the telecoms ministry said in a statement.
Read the full stroy in Reuters here.
Liberalisation key for next billion Internet users: OECD
An OECD report, Global Opportunities for Internet Access Developments, says that the next billion Internet users will be very different from the first billion and governments in developing countries, where these users will come from, must adapt strategic regulatory and investment policies to lower access costs.
“The characteristics of these new Internet users will be vastly different from the first billion users,” the report concludes, adding that the majority of the new Internet users will be accessing the Internet on wireless networks and will have incomes of less than US$2 per day.
While the report sees encouraging signs from developing markets that have adopted market liberalisation and who are now starting to enjoy the employment, micro- entrepreneurial and social development benefits of increased competition, there remain many countries that need to catch up.
According to the report, “more than 70 countries still have monopolies over international gateway services,” which “raise the prices for accessing international capacity, far beyond costs, and reduce the affordability of Internet access for end-users.” Read more.
Friedman on rural outsourcing
If I.T. Merged With E.T. – New York Times To appreciate that potential, look at how much is being done with just car batteries, backup diesel generators and India’s creaky rural electricity grid. I traveled to a cluster of villages with a team from the Byrraju Foundation — a truly impressive nonprofit set up by B. Ramalinga Raju and his family. Raju and his brother Rama are co-founders of one of India’s leading outsourcing companies, Satyam Computer Services. The Hyderabad-based brothers wanted to give back to their country, but they wanted it to be a hand up, not a hand out.
So besides funding health clinics and computer-filled primary schools in villages in their home state of Andhra Pradesh, they tried something new: outsourcing their outsourcing to villages.
Here in Ethakota, amid the banana and palm groves, 120 college-educated villagers, trained in computers and English by Satyam and connected to the world by wireless networks, are processing data for a British publisher and selling services for an Indian phone company. They run two eight-hour shifts, but could run three — if only the electricity didn’t go off for six hours a day!
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The Chinese are coming
The stunning impact of the Chinese telecom equipment manufacturers observed in South Asia in as early as 2005 is now being observed in the balance sheets of the old established equipment suppliers.
Telecoms-equipment makers | Toughing it out | Economist.com First, the market for wireless networks is beginning to mature. After years of bumper profits, telecoms operators are facing more competition and are having to cut costs. In America carriers have delayed purchases, which explains much of what went wrong for Alcatel-Lucent. In Europe operators are increasingly renting their networks out to virtual service providers and are sharing capacity. That has allowed them to delay network upgrades which would otherwise have boosted Ericsson’s and other telecoms-equipment firms’ earnings.
Second, Western firms face competition from two Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE. In 2006 Huawei had revenues of $8.5 billion, up 42% from the year before. ZTE has grown even more quickly, and had revenues of $2 billion for the first half of 2007. The firms’ low cost bases allow them to offer prices up to two-fifths lower than their Western competitors’.
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Reducing environmental impact of mobile networks (as well as costs)
I was asked to write something for world environment day in Montage, a local news magazine, and I wrote about how mobile could reduce the need for travel (in the long run) and thus postpone the inundation of the Maldives. It appears I did not cover all aspects of the problem . . .
Is your mobile network green? – Developing Telecoms Mobile network energy consumption currently stands at 61 billion kWH worldwide, with each of the many millions of base stations producing almost 10 tonnes of carbon emissions every year. How can there not be room for improvement?
Conservative estimates project that this consumption will double by 2011, totalling 449 billion kWH over this five-year period, at a cost in excess of $US42 billion. Actix, to its credit, is hard-hitting: the largest mobile network operators produce more carbon per year than some of the largest car rental companies, with the top 20 carriers worldwide accounting for almost 40% of total emissions by wireless networks.
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Regulations hampering wireless infrastructure deployment in developing countries
The low-cost and quick deployment time of wireless technologies give them the potential to connect communities and regions that are currently disconnected. However, governments in many developing countries have not unlicensed the use of spectrum that is necessary to deploy wireless networks like Wi-Fi. In many countries, transmission of data using unlicensed spectrum over public areas is prohibited, which makes connecting villages, for example, impossible. In some countries like the United States, telephone companies are actively lobbying against unlicensed use of the spectrum. These were some of the key issues that came up at the Air Jaldi wireless infrastructure summit held in Dharmasala.
Vic Hayes, Senior Research Fellow at the Delft University of Technology, one of the nodes in the LIRNE network, attended the Summit and also made a keynote presentation. Vic Hayes is considered to be the father of Wi-Fi having chaired the IEEE WLAN working group that developed the Wi-Fi standard. His trip report can be downloaded here [PDF].
Mobile networks to be powered by Bio-fuels
The GSM Association (GSMA) has announced on Wednesday that it has teamed up with Ericsson and telecoms group MTN to establish bio-fuels as an alternative source of power for wireless networks in the developing world.
Ecology and economy is equally critical for mobile phone coverage in the less lucrative emerging markets. Diesel generators energise the base stations at remote locations. Supplying fuel across the unfriendly terrain is also a logistical nightmare. Such expensive exercise, however, inhibits the operators to invest in the low-yield regions.
These grueling problems have prompted the three organisations to set up a first of its kind pilot project in the world. They hope that bio-fuels may replace diesel as a source of power for mobile base stations located beyond the reach of the electricity grid.
Wireless: Seeking a voice in future of WiMax
By Eric Sylvers International Herald Tribune Published: October 9, 2006
MILAN A battle is brewing that may well decide how Europeans connect to the Internet using cellphones, laptops and other portable devices in the coming decade.
Mobile phone companies, chip makers and manufacturers of wireless networks are pushing their sometimes conflicting cases for how the limited amount of radio frequencies should be used to beam data from the Internet to mobile devices and back the other way, a decision that generally is left to national governments.
Read the rest of the International Herald Tribune article HERE
WiFi in the Valley
A consortium of technology companies, including I.B.M. and Cisco Systems, announced plans Tuesday for a vast wireless network that would provide free Internet access to big portions of Silicon Valley and the surrounding region as early as next year.
The project is the largest of a new breed of wireless networks being built across the country. They are taking advantage of the falling cost of providing high-speed Internet access over radio waves as opposed to cable or telephone lines.
The project will cover 1,500 square miles in 38 cities in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Santa Cruz Counties, an area of 2.4 million residents. Its builders, going by the name Silicon Valley Metro Connect, said the service would provide free basic wireless access at speeds up to 1 megabit a second — which is roughly comparable to broadband speeds by telephone — in outdoor areas. Special equipment, costing $80 to $120, will be needed to bolster the signal enough to bring it inside homes or offices.
Not enough demand for city WiFi?
What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It? – New York Times
“Despite WiFly’s ubiquity — with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population — just 40,000 of Taipei’s 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.
That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.
Like Taipei, these cities hope to use their new networks to help less affluent people get online and to make their cities more business-friendly. Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and P.D.A.’s.”
UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP) Releases ORDIG Policy Brief and Input Paper on Internet Governance 7 June 2005
Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations:
After almost ten months of research and activities, UNDP-APDIP’s Open Regional Dialogue on Internet Governance (ORDIG*) has produced a two-part report entitled, “Voices from Asia-Pacific: Internet Governance Priorities and Recommendations” – consisting of 1) the ORDIG Policy Brief and Executive Summary, and 2) the ORDIG Input Paper for the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
These documents stem from months of consultations involving stakeholder groups from the public and private sectors, as well as civil society.
ORDIG consulted over 3,000 stakeholders through sub-regional meetings, jointly organized with UNESCAP and others; a region-wide online forum that allowed for open and candid discussions on the issues; and a region-wide, multi-lingual, issues-based online survey that looked at the Internet governance priorities of the region.
The resulting two reports are the synthesis, consolidation, and reading of the voices from the Asia-Pacific region. They outline the principles and dimensions that make up the framework for building recommendations, which are provided in the documents at two levels – general and specific recommendations.
Issues and recommendations covered in the Infrastructure dimension are access costs, VOIP, and wireless networks. Issues and recommendations ..read more
Intel to Join in a Project to Extend Wireless Use
The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by samarajiva AT lirne DOT net.
By JOHN MARKOFF, SAN FRANCISCO,
In an effort to create a global wireless alternative to cable and telephone Internet service, Intel said on Monday that it would collaborate with Clearwire, a wireless broadband company, in developing and deploying the new technology. The companies said that Intel would make a "significant” investment in Clearwire, which has begun building long-range wireless data networks around the world. Clearwire, founded by Craig O. McCaw, a pioneer of the cellular industry, said in August that it had raised $160 million from 23 investors in a private stock transaction. The companies are betting that a new wireless technology called WiMax – which is intended to extend the reach of Wi-Fi wireless networks by permitting a single transceiver to connect hundreds or thousands of customers to the Internet over distances of many miles – will succeed where other long-range wireless data technologies have failed in the past.
Intel is spending $150 million to jumpstart WiMax technology by creating a series of new chips designed to support the WiMax standard. Clearwire recently began offering wireless Internet service in Jacksonville, Fla., ..read more
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