Tech Talk

Last night at the AT&T store on East 86th Street in Manhattan, a woman had trouble getting some answers to her questions. It suddenly became clear to her what the problem was. She was a T-Mobile subscriber; their store is just down the block.

Mobile customers are confused, and it's not just the tech-naïve.

Don't answer "no", because I'm going to write one anyway.

By way of introduction, I'm Harry Teasley, and I most typically write on sister-blog The Sandbox when I'm not developing games. Though a relative luddite for my first couple of decades, professional software development turned me into a technophile gadget freak for my latter two decades. Thus, June 29th (my birthday) found me standing in line outside an AT&T store in Tampa, FL, waiting to pay a lot of money for a small black box of The Future.

We are one week into said Future. Let's see how things are going.

I'm going to be on Science Friday today (approximately 2:00 pm in New York City and at various times on NPR affiliates around the country) to talk about the upcoming auctions of spectrum in the 700 MHz band. In preparation of that, I've started an FAQ, which I'll be expanding from time to time. Here's the first cut. -- Steven Cherry

If you use a Blackberry, Treo, or iPhone, you know the addictive satisfaction of having access to e-mail and the Web anywhere. Instead of scouring the countryside for Wi-Fi hotspots, you just fire up your device wherever there's a phone signal, which is pretty much everywhere these days. For me, using an iPhone on AT&T's outdated EDGE network has whetted my appetite for faster data rates. So it was particularly disappointing to read a recent story in the Washington Post dissing the rapid development of one a true broadband cellular network.

Here at Spectrum we're used to the breezy way the general press writes about complex technologies, but the Post's treatment of an important story - Sprint's bold move into mobile WiMAX - does a great disservice to both that project and the underlying technologies.

Nokia just doesn't get much attention in the U.S., both for better and for worse.

While the whole world is watching the iPhone (and blogging about it; we're as guilty as anyone), Nokia keeps quietly charging ahead. Some analysts are forecasting Q3 sales of 1 million for Apple's $500-$600 iPhone, but let's put that in context. In Q2 this year, Nokia sold 1.5 million N95 phones at about $750 each.

What does satellite radio have in common with high-end organic supermarkets? Well, for one thing, most people seem to find them both overpriced.

Have you ever wanted to write an article for the business press? It's never been as easy as it is today. Take a top headline topic and find a way to mention the iPhone, even if you have to search desperately for a source or invent the connection itself — and even if it's preposterous on the face of it. It's that simple.

At the beginning of the TechCrunch conference today at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, conference organizers held up an iPhone and asked members of the audience to please turn off these devices. He was not talking about cell phones in general; those of us with old-tech phones just switched them to vibrate. It's the WiFi connectivity that's the concern. At a conference in which nearly every attendee is tapping on a laptop, looking for supplemental material on an interesting presentation or checking email during a boring one, good wireless network access is a must. But conference organizers designed the network here for a thousand laptops, not a thousand laptops plus a thousand iPhones, and iPhone WiFi was bringing the network to its knees.

When I heard this plea to turn off iPhones for the first and second times, I thought the organizers must be kidding, just an excuse to wave their cool new gizmos in the air. But strolling through the aisles during the morning break, I realized that indeed, there are an awful lot of iPhones sitting on the tables. Definitely an iClog.

In the Web 2.0 world it’s getting easier and easier to build all sorts of applications. But just because you can build the application doesn’t mean it should be a company.

Falling into that category at Demofall 07, is MixGet. The premise is simple. Since cell phones can make sounds, and a lot of cell phones in a room can make a lot of sounds, why not orchestrate a piece of music by assigning “parts” to the different cell phones? The lead cell phone acts as the conductor, all parts are synchronized, and bingo, surround cell-sound.

My guess was that the inventor of MixGet, from Moscow’s RedSquare Ventures, got the idea while sitting in a meeting, perhaps, or a crowded bar, when, coincidentally, a number of cell phones rang at once. But I was wrong. Company founder Sergey Tatarchenko told me that he was sitting at home with two cell phones. He got a call, they both rang, and bingo, he thought (OK, not bingo, but I don't know the Russian equivalent), I could make a business out of this.

He’s a nice guy, so I’m sorry to say that I don’t think business success is likely anytime soon. But here’s the demo, what do you think?

Tuesday night, at the WiMax World 2007 conference, Motorola herded a hundred customers, staff, press, and industry analysts last night onto a cruiseboat on the Chicago River. The scenic ride, replete with beer, wine, and appetizers, was more than a junket—the company claimed it was the first public demonstration of a fully mobile WiMax network based on IEEE 802.16e, the current version of that standard.

An open and free mobile platform would allow the same kind of 3rd party innovation we've benefited from in computer software, paving the way for customized phones that go beyond the sixteen possible buttons on an iPhone. Now that the gPhone hype bubble has burst bloggers, journalists, and telecom insiders are trying to dissect what it all means (except those still waiting for an actual gPhone).

Companies outside the alliance (conspicuously including American carriers AT&T and Verizon) have tried to brush off importance of the announcement. According to the Times Online, Arun Sarin, the head of Vodafone, asked, “What is it that is missing in life that they [Google] are going to fulfill?”

Over at Salon.com, the Machinist Blog has a good answer:

At the moment your phone is a jail cell. It could be, depending on your model, a very nice jail cell -- the Apple iPhone is like Martha Stewart's jail cell. Still though, you can't get out. You can't do what you want. You're locked in by carriers, by handset manufacturers, and by software companies to using only approved programs in an approved way.

Worse than that, there aren't many things to do on the phone anyway, because there isn't really a software industry devoted to building programs for such devices. Why should there be if all the users are in jail?

Back in August, IEEE Spectrum’s Steven Cherry expained Google’s hope that the 700 MHz band would “require that any owner allow any device onto their network, and that any application be allowed to run on those devices.” It sounds like the Open Handset Alliance will be the next step towards those goals.

Microsoft and GSMA, the trade association of GSM mobile phone operators, are pushing PC manufacturers to roll out a new line of low-end notebooks that can connect to the internet through mobile phone networks. They just released the results of a joint survey that suggests a potential market for 70 million laptops, worth about $50 billion, targeted at mainstream users.

The two parties are basically arguing that PC designers and manufacturers need to rethink how they approach potential buyers of low-end laptops. To capture more first-time buyers, Microsoft and GSMA are championing the inclusion of hardware that enables notebooks to connect to the internet through mobile phone networks—a move that is thought to make the existing technology of data access through mobile broadband much simpler for mainstream computer users. “We need to show the PC industry that they need to innovate and push hardware design, because the needs of those buyers is not the same as the typical road warrior,” says Ken Pawlak, Microsoft’s director of mobile operator PCs.

Is the Internet about to collapse? Or merely become as slow as molasses?

When headlines range all over the place, from concerned to apocalyptic, the obvious conclusion is that someone has the hype engine running in overdrive. The guilty parties here are Nemertes Research, who "predict that demand for bandwidth will outpace capacity by 2010," and the Internet Innovation Alliance, a shadowy group that co-funded the research.

When you put more than 100 000 professionals and marketers together for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, the convergence of telecommunications and consumer electronics can show itself in unusual ways. Home automation turns out to be one example.

The Ford Motor Company had an impressive demonstration of its Sync system last night at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. Impressive, but in the long run, Sync has some serious limitations.

The weekly public radio program “On The Media” had another great show last Saturday, as usual, except for its story on the Internet’s domain name system. The occasion was nominally the grudging acceptance by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, of new top-level domains for non-Roman alphabets, specifically Chinese and Cyrillic ones. In reality, the OTM story was inspired by a confused story in the UK paper The Guardian, “Kremlin eyes internet control ...,” back on 3 January.

On the Media presented a single “expert,” Tim Wu, who is a lawyer and academician, not a network engineer or scientist, and one known for iconclastic views, to put it mildly. Worse, OTM host Brooke Gladstone let him assert without further questioning that having multiple alphabets or multiple root servers could fracture the Internet. If you’re not going to present an alternative view, Brooke, you have to at least ask how the one causes the other. It may seem obvious it will, but it isn’t. And it may not be true.

The convergence of car culture and Internet culture was one of the more interesting themes at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, where Spectrum associate editor Josh Romero and I demo'd Sync, Ford's answer to GM's Onstar. Josh's excellent videoblog entry, here, goes through the features.

As it turns out, Sync, which is in some ways a step up from Onstar, may itself be leapfrogged by new developments at Chrysler.

For the third time this week, a vital cable routing Internet service between Europe and Asia has been severed. On Wednesday, two lines running under the Mediterranean Sea were cut off the coast of Egypt, most likely by anchors dropped by mooring ships. And today, a third high-capacity cable off the coast of Dubai has been damaged, also likely caused by ship activity. The combined disruptions have put a severe strain on network services across the Middle East and South Asia, according to numerous media accounts.

In a report today, BBC News relates that the latest blow to the regions came when the FALCON undersea cable, operated by U.K.-based FLAG Telecom, was severed 56 kilometers from Dubai in the Persian Gulf. It was the second major underwater accident for the FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe) system in less than 48 hours. Two days earlier, its FLAG Europe-Asia cable was sliced 8.3 km at sea from Alexandria, Egypt.

Also damaged at the time of the first accident, the SEA-ME-WE 4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4) cable line, running parallel to FLAG Europe-Asia lost service. SEA-ME-WE 4 is operated by a consortium of companies throughout Europe, Africa, and Southern and Southeast Asia. Both fiber-optic systems connect providers and users from Western Europe to Eastern Asia directly.

As the pace of repair work picked up on three Internet cables in the Middle East this week, word that more damage has occurred to nearby undersea fiber-optic lines in the last 24 hours arrives. The slew of slashed cables has caused a frenzy of speculation on their causes in the blogosphere. As of today, Egyptian officials still had no explanation as to the cause of the damage to the first two lines, slashed a week ago, but they said there was no evidence that ship's anchors caused the breakage.

The two new damaged lines being reported are to some of the same systems as were cut recently, namely the FLAG Europe-Asia and SeaMeWe-4 networks. Landline and satellite connections have ameliorated some of the outages in the Middle East and South Asia regions, but it is estimated that some 85 million Internet users have been adversely affected. According to one report, nearly 90 per cent of Internet traffic is routed through undersea cables in these parts of the world.

Officials for the cable operators predicted that engineers working on repair ships at sea should be able to restore service in approximately one week for the earlier incidents. FLAG Telecom, operator of two of the damaged cables, told the Associated Press today that it is laying an entirely new "fully resilient" cable that will be able to withstand harsher treatment in underwater conditions.

"We are still treating this as a crisis," a FLAG spokesman told the AP. "But the new cable will provide a diversity in routes and be more resilient."

[See our earlier entry, "Internet Problems Mount for Asia/Europe Connection" for more details on last week's cable outages.]

Michael Robertson has something interesting to say about the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, still on hold, but likely, in the view of many observers, to eventually be consummated.

Robertson is a pretty sharp guy. He founded MP3.com, which was bought by Vivendi Universal for a whole boatload of money in 2001, right before the dot-com crash. He founded Linspire, a flavor of Linux with a user interface that was inspired, if that's the word, by a very familiar one. I won't say which, except that the software's original name was Lindows, which I mention mainly to retell one of my favorite comments ever by a federal judge. When Microsoft sued Robertson's company over the name, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour said,

Although Lindows.com certainly made a conscious decision to play with fire by choosing a product and company name that differs by only one letter from the world's leading computer software program, one could just as easily conclude that in 1983 Microsoft made an equally risky decision to name its product after a term commonly used in the trade to indicate the windowing capability of a GUI.

Anyway, here's what Robertson has to say about the merger, predicting Microsoft's eventual success.

Update: Service has been restored to "most users"--according to prominent media accounts such as this one--but the cause of the BlackBerry service malfunction has not been disclosed.

As of 3:30 pm EST, BlackBerry wireless communications service in North America has gone dark, according to a report from the Associated Press. Service provider AT&T told the AP that the outage is affecting all wireless carriers.

The Reuters news agency reports that Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian maker of BlackBerry smart phones, has sent e-mail to its customers that its service had experienced a "critical severity outage" on Monday.

"This is an emergency notification regarding the current BlackBerry Infrastructure outage," RIM support account manager Bryan Simpson said in the e-mail message, according to Reuters. He added in the note, that the service interruption affected users of the highly popular service throughout the Americas.

As of 6:00 pm EST, RIM had yet to post a statement on its company website.

The Reuters report notes that the e-mail note sent by RIM's Simpson made no mention of the cause of the outage or when service might be restored.

A similar service interruption occurred last April, leaving thousands of BlackBerry users without access to wireless e-mail. There is currently no information from RIM, either, as to how many of its customers are affected by today's disruption.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has organized a call for a U.S. “science debate.”

UCS is working with all three National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and scores of universities nationwide to hold Science Debate 2008—an initiative to hold a presidential science policy debate in April in Philadelphia before the Pennsylvania primary.

There couldn’t be a better place. Philadelphia was the home of one of the first electrical engineers—Ben Franklin. It was the birthplace of many of the oldest computers ever built.

And there couldn’t be a better time. Some of the biggest political questions facing the United States either are scientific issues themselves, or cannot be settled without good science.

Citing a need to upgrade its communications infrastructure, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam said today that it's ready to join the satellite club.

According to numerous sources (Associated Press, Reuters, and others), Vietnam has purchased a specially-built satellite from Lockheed Martin for US $200 million and will spend an unreported amount to launch it into orbit next month aboard an Ariane 5 rocket built by ArianeSpace SA, of Evry, France.

The satellite, known as VINASAT-I, has the transmission capacity to handle 10 000 voice/Internet/data channels or 120 television channels, according to the Vietnam Posts and Telecommunication Group (VNPT) and has an expected lifespan of 15 to 20 years.

A spokesperson for the state-sponsored group said the country will also build a pair of ground stations to work with VINASAT-I, in northern Ha Tay province and southern Binh Duong province. These will bring the total price tag of the project up to $300 million, a sum the Communist government hopes to recoup over the next decade.

The legendary futurist who first proposed orbiting satellites be used as telecommunications relays passed away earlier today in a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was 90 years old. Sir Arthur C. Clarke will remain a legend to millions who came to know of his farsighted ideas through his many works of fiction, nonfiction, and even movies -- such as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sir Arthur was kind enough to grant us a long-distance interview last October as part of our coverage of the 50th anniversary of the launch of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I (please see "Remembering Sputnik: Sir Arthur C. Clarke").

His last in-person interview may well be the one conducted by our correspondent Saswato R. Das at his bedside in the Apollo Hospital in Colombo in January (an account of which will be published in our pages online tomorrow). An audio copy of this final interview is available now on Spectrum Radio, "Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Final Interview".

We wrote this of him in October:

To some readers, an introduction to Sir Arthur C. Clarke may be necessary. To others, no introduction will suffice.... Although he is more revered for his role as an author, Clarke has well deserved the title of futurist for his groundbreaking thinking on space exploration. In October 1945, he published a paper in the magazine Wireless World called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” In it, he predicted that geostationary satellites would soon become the basis of global communications. And in his 1979 novel, The Fountains of Paradise, he describes a space elevator that would ferry passengers and cargo to a docked space station, a concept that is currently undergoing its first primitive implementations.

The U.S. space agency has posted a memorial page on its Web site to honor the legacy of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who passed away Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at age 90. It notes on the page that "Clarke's work resonated deeply with NASA and its employees."

In a prepared statement issued Wednesday, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said: "With the passing of Arthur C. Clarke we in the space community have lost yet another legendary pioneer of early spaceflight. In Sir Arthur's case, this loss uniquely spans two communities. He was among the earliest of those who developed and promoted serious space mission concepts, both for human exploration of the solar system and for utilization of near-Earth space for immediate human benefit."

Motorola announced today that it would split into two companies, one for handsets, the other for, well, everything else. You can be forgiven for not knowing which of those two parts isn't doing well -- it's the one you see every day in people's hands as they walk down the street making phone calls. The everything else part, which Bloomberg (“”Motorola to Split Into Two After Phone Sales Slide”) summarized as "network equipment, cable TV set-top boxes and two-way radios," is doing fine.

Handset manufacturing is the most visible part of Motorola, but it's hardly the biggest.

Motorola's handset business will probably have a value of $1.69 a share next year, while the other divisions could be worth $7.49, Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Tal Liani in New York said today in a note to clients.

The handset business lost $388 million last quarter. The networks and set-top box unit had a profit of $192 million on 11 percent sales growth, while the unit making radios and scanners had a profit of $451 million and a 35 percent revenue increase.

Motorola hit a home run in the super-slim Razr in 2005, but there are no real home runs in telecommunications manufacturing. Within a year or so, competitors like Samsung had their own super-slim phones. Everything that looks like a home run is really a ground-rule double, and you need to keep them coming.

What's really happened are two things.

As we ease into an era of Internet telephony, is it getting easier to wiretap a phone? Frankly, it seems like it just couldn’t get any easier. That’s the lesson that comes out of a star-studded, revelation-filled court case in Los Angeles.

It’s the trial of Anthony Pellicano and four other defendants, accused of 79 counts of wiretapping, and it included enough Hollywood names to start a new studio. Among them: Silvester Stallone; the comedians Garry Shandling and Kevin Nealon; superagent Michael Ovitz; TV executive Brad Grey; John McTiernan, director of the Die Hard movies; and Michael Nathanson, one-time head of MGM.

But it’s the sordid technology-related details of the trial that interest David Halbfinger, as he details in an article in today’s New York Times.

Downtown Palo Alto boasts the ninth oldest Apple store in the country, opened in October 2001. From the beginning, the store encouraged kids to hang out; a low round table, surrounded by appealing round seats, held computers with games for the younger kids, the multimedia applications running on computers on taller tables drew the teens. And in the early days, before every kid had a cell phone, the staff generously let kids call home when they needed to tell their parents that they were running late. I used to have to haul my youngest away from the skateboard game running at the kid stations when he was a toddler; the Apple store has been a hangout for my 16-year-old and his friends since they were in grade school.

Basically, it’s a place that, for Palo Alto kids, feels like home. So it really freaked out four local teens—some friends of my son’s—last week when they were messing around at the Apple store, as they’d done so many times before, and suddenly got into huge trouble. In fact, store management told them that they were banned for life. From every Apple store. Everywhere in the world.

Daniel Fukuba, Eric Vicenti, and Noah Rogers were hanging out downtown last Saturday, killing time before meeting up with another kid, and went into the Apple store to play with the iPhones. Fukuba showed his friends how to download third-party applications onto one of the phones, specifically, a racing game called “Raging Thunder.” (Apple originally discouraged adding such applications, threatening that they wouldn’t be compatible with software updates, but has announced that it will be changing that policy soon.)

A store employee, Vicenti says, came over and asked what the boys were doing. “We said that we were just playing around with the phones,” he says, “which is exactly the truth. Sure, it is slightly evasive, but that was the whole point.” The store manager also checked up on the boys, and then walked away. The fourth teen arrived, and the group left the store; they were half a block away when the store manager caught up with them and demanded that they come back to the store; the manager called the police. An

Yesterday, Sprint announced the official debut of its first WiMax city, Baltimore, five months and one city behind schedule. Frankly, that’s not a bad show of it. In some respects, the service lives up to Sprint’s promises, and—in part because of the delay—in some ways, exceeds it. And in other ways it falls short.

I’ll get a better sense of whether Xohm is living up to its promise on 10 October; Sprint is having an invitation-only press event in Baltimore that day. My main question will be about the network coverage. Xohm bills itself as a mobile broadband service, with the speed of DSL, and the mobility of your cellphone. But a spot-check of Xohm’s coverage map suggests that there are large dead zones, far larger than you would tolerate from your cellphone service provider.

I arrived in Fiji on Wednesday and was immediately greeted by an unexpected tech story. A taxi driver drove me from the airport to Suva, the capital, through hyper-green lushness, behind which farmland stretched out to the horizon. Tucked between the broad-leaved trees were one-story houses, some of them balanced on stilts to avoid flooding during the rainy seasons.

As we entered downtown Suva at 8 in the morning, dozens of teenagers and twenty-somethings thronged on the sidewalks, all massively perky and clad in bright red shirts. They were booster temporarily hired by Digicel, a Jamaican mobile phone company, to hype up the launch of the company’s Fiji-wide GSM network that day. Dance music pounded throughout the central downtown area from the backs of Digicel pick-up trucks, a prelude to the all-day party the company was throwing for itself. Two Digicel minions jumped in front of our car at a stoplight and started wiping down the windshield.

Thousands of Fijians stood in line in front of the flagship Digicel store throughout the day. In Fiji, the incumbent carrier, Vodafone, has long had a virtual monopoly (another company also offers services, but it piggybacks off of Vodafone’s network) and charged prohibitively high rates, according to a few locals I approached.