Treo saga

I'm on jury duty today...so while I've not had computer access today, I've had mobile phone access with my Treo and Goodlink software...except..for maddening problems with the basic phone itself! I was finally happy with the RSS reader for palm and the good software, and then my phone had the following symptoms:

- constantly thought it was going in and out of service. No matter how many bars of digital coverage I had, the phone kept shutting down indicating "no service".

- worse, when service returned (seconds later) I'd try to place a call. sometimes this worked ok, but other times the phone would dial the number, and then the seconds would begin tracking call time when suddenly (sometimes after 2-3 seconds, sometimes longer) the screen would freeze completely and the call would drop.

So, after putting this off, I called customer care. The first call was a good CSR who had me do a "factory reset". On the Treo600 this means holding down the "K" key and the "<-" (backspace) keys simultaneously while pressing in the reset hole with a paper clip in the back of the phone. That was fun, but, still the dropped calls....whereupon I was transfered to Betty (CSR#2) the data phone expert. sometimes I think these 'data phone experts' are actually just CRSs with more tenure. She had no good ideas, but did have me do the OTA programming (*228) followed by "additional programming":

#*#000000

this gave me the typical cell phone parameters (MIN, MDN, ESN (Hex), SID) that she had me read to make sure "I had the correct phone". huh? This made no sense at all, but it was another step. I then was transfered to "tom". he did not take too much time. Asked me a few other questions and then made sure my address was correct. So this time on Wednesday I expect to be using yet another Treo 600. I suppose I shouldn't complain - a friend of mine is on his third.

MOT, WWiSE and 802.11n

Motorola and QC on different sides (again) of the 802.11n standards debate. Will this get stalled? will it make it out of standards purgatory next year? Glenn Flieshman's piece describes some details.

clearwire's european vacation

According to Unstrung, Clearwire is taking their nextnet "sumo sized" home gateways to Europe. Is this the real play?

and in unrelated news, more "pay for play" broadband popping up; still in Europe. Answering the question, "why should the average user pay for the guys who use 100GB/month?". Who could disagree? This is not the Universal Service Fund so frequently in the news these days, that's subsidized (or in the case of the recent news, not subsidized) by the public.

Carrier Grade?

Carrier Grade?

Well, I won't take side on the metro-network issue. I don't really think it's fair to take taxpayer money to invest in something that people may already be paying for, but if it helps spread the wireless industry, why not. Of course with rock-solid/carrier grade installations like this one - people will soon learn the value of an always-on connection.

Ding Dong the witch is dead

Everywhere, it seems, people are talking about the Carly Fiorina's departure from HP...including her $21M parachute. As if she needed it. Well, at least they had the nerve to fire her. What if she had played a big role in founding a company based on a business model that was "bubble-based": it would only survive under conditions of extreme overvaluation? I'm not talking about pets.com, but some telecom companies that blew through billions and left shareholders holding the bag. Most of those guys got the boot they deserved. Most got lots of cash though. The sick part is that some are still in executive positions in the very same companies that forced millions of losses on others. That's criminal.

To be continued...

TiVo to go...On the Air

TiVo to go...on the air

At last...why did this take so long? was it DRM? People were hacking their series 1 tivos to do this awhile ago. Strange.

Over my (now obsolete) 802.11b connection from the tivo box, it took about 40 min to transfer the 1.3 GB recording of last night's daily show (30 min). It looked great on media player 9.

SK Earthlink - cool?

In today's Washington Post there was another SKEarthlink story. In it, the new US leader (Dayton) said this revolutionary network...

will offer "cool" multimedia services not yet available in the United States, he said, using cutting-edge handsets and behind-the-scenes technology pioneered overseas by the South Korean operator.

"In South Korea they are watching television on their cell phones, they are doing video conferencing, they are finding their friends with location-based services," Dayton said. "If you ask people in Santa Monica how they use their cell phones, they say 'I make calls' or 'I have pictures of my dog"

Hmmm...you could subscribe to vcast, or, you could send short videos last year on sprint's network..which, according to press reports, is what SK earthlink is going to be using anyway.

Play Station Portable

Want to drive mobile broadbnd with something other than porn or voice? Once the PSP gets a WWAN interface you've got game. ArsTechnica picked up on this today..it's been awhile coming. First announced a couple years ago, we excpected this last year. looks like fun...now if only they had Halo II

Sextel - did it kill Flarion?

They're not giving up. After the Nextel/Sprint announcement it sounded like bad news for this RedHerring cover band, Flarion. But, onward they innovate. This week's announcement is intriguing. One of the tag lines for Flexband seems to be "1 GB for $10", or 1 cent sale for MBs. This is about 1/3rd of what the classic "cost/MB" projected metric was in 2000:

Based on our analysis, in a capacity limited environment with 5 MHz available for data traffic, the network cost to deliver data traffic will fall from several dollars per megabyte utilizing 2G technologies to less than $0.03 using [3G]

source (pdf file)

WLL - Oxymoron

Wireless Local Loop = Fixed Wireless = Oxymoron

My old boss used to say, "Fixed Wireless is an oxymoron". Not that there's anything wrong with that. Yesterday, Mark Evans wrote:


The concept of fixed-wireless broadband service has been a dream since AT&T rolled out its much-ballyhooed "Angel" project five years ago. With all the talk about Wi-Fi and Wi-Max (see Om Malik's posting on how the market is slow to develop), you would think fixed wireless is poised to make a huge comeback.

Like voice recognition, fixed wireless never really took off, making a comeback rather a longshot. QUALCOMM tried it in India in the mid -90s with CDMA. In somewhat of a coverage miracle, more than 50% of Dehli was covered by a single CDMA cell atop the Hyatt Hotel (Bhikaji Cama) at 65 meters radiation center. Not a good design for a high capacity network, but the coverage was awesome.

Outside of the U.S. licenses are often granted for "fixed use only", so you'd think whith THAT sort of regulatory help the market would have really exploded. Nope. Once people are untethered, well, they move. Have a look at the photo above from 1997. Note that the taxi driver, with this "fixed" terminal is driving around Dehli.

Mark's right of course, Fixed Wireless is back, in the press anyway. But it's chance of success will reamain only if it's truly a trojan horse for mobile wireless.

SK Earthlink, Part 1

SK-Earthlink (boingo) - This is a MVNO from a Korean carrier and Earthlink. Now this is an interesting combo. SK, the sumo-class CDMA carrier from Korea, getting together with serial entrepreneur Dayton and Earthlink to run on...Verizon's network? Sprint's network? SK could bring quite a lot to the party (besides money). Each of the JV partners is putting in $220M. And, as an MVNO, it's not for the network. gotta love the enthusiasm for mobile broadband in the U.S. by these two groups.


We don't see the market as being crowded, we see the market growing, Cole said. We?re not proposing these awful companies you see in Europe?these low-cost discounters. We're talking about guys who are adding value. For the moment, the U.S. market is massive, and it is still embryonic.

Here here!

Glenn Fleishman has a good overview of the new business. In his view, Matthew Maier from Business 2.0 points out that extreme segmentation (thinner slices) will be needed to succeed. Which begs the question, is Earthlink a thin slice? It's hardly the MTV phone, or the NFL phone, etc. No, it's rather the geek market that earthlink goes after.

Think of SK-EarthLink as the wireless carrier for the geek squad. When it launches later this year, it will target what Dayton calls "Internet-savvy early adopters"

This smells like the DoCoMo/AT&T JV (I mean, the failed DoCoMo/AT&T JV). Without about 5% of the ingredients that DoCoMo had with i-mode this was bound to fail in the U.S. This JV makes more sense and one hopes they make their $440M back.

It's also curious how the Korean strategy with TDD and WiMax plays into this, if at all. the licenses were just issues, and SK (naturally) has one of them. At WCA last month, Hanaro presented a presentation (sorry about my messy notes) that pitched WiBro that described a path that demonstrates WiBro this year, has Seoul up in 2006 with 1-3 Mbps and by 2008 has a fully mobile network delivering 2-20 Mbps "everywhere".

Here's a flashpaper verision of a WiBro oveview from Samsung.

Euro Broadband

Broadband explosion in Europe

Multi radio Mesh

Mesh Dynamics releases multi-radio node...news flash. Is there any other way to reliably have a working mesh node? At Intel's Mesh seminar a year ago that seemed to be the consensus. Good Idea.

Now, VoIP over Mesh? the "kiler app"? We know that voice is THE killer app of the last century, and the beginning of this one, but come on - with Mesh? How many hops? I suppose that's what his multi-radio mesh node is supposed to solve.

MeshDynamics CEO Bob Osann sees VoIP as the "killer application" for mesh networking. "When compared with cellular, Structured Mesh solutions offer more than a 100x advantage in cost-per-minute-per-user when supporting dense VoIP. Compared with conventional mesh solutions, our cost-per-Kb-per-user exceeds 10x for an entire deployment, given realistic traffic levels.