Archive for the ‘WiMAX’ Category

Apple on location

by Kevin FitchardJanuary 16th, 2008

iPhone Maps JpegPerhaps Steve Jobs’ mock location demo wasn’t so mock after all. Tuesday at his keynote at MacWorld, the Apple CEO showed off the iPhone’s ability to pinpoint his location in Moscone West using information from the wireless networks the phone was linked to. Google has had this rather useful feature enabled for several months on all of its stand-alone versions of Google Maps , so the demo seemed to be old news as well as far-fetched, since cellular location isn’t that accurate.

But it turns out there was more to the demo than met the eye. The iPhone wasn’t just triangulating location from cell towers, but tapping into location data from the dozens of Wi-Fi routers that litter Moscone. Apple has contracted out with Skyhook Wireless to provide Wi-Fi location. Shyhook is one of several companies that have wandered around major metro areas with a signal sniffer, mapping the Media Application Control (MAC) addresses of every access point it can find. It doesn’t matter if a Wi-Fi network is private, the access point still reveals its address to the public, giving Skyhook hundreds of thousands of quasi-unique identifiers which it then maps to GPS coordinates. When the iPhone detects a signal, Skyhook knows where its owner is within the radius of the Wi-Fi router, and if it detects more than one signal, additonal software can pinpoint an approximate location.

According to Skyhook, cellular location can put as much as 1000 meters off from your location–not good for vehicle navigation–while Wi-Fi positioning is accurate to within 50 meters most of the time. The problem is, Wi-Fi may seem like it’s everywhere, but it’s not everywhere. Being in the middle of a convention center that is crammed with Wi-Fi, Jobs had no problems, but try getting it on the freeway or on a train or outside of a dense residential area. All it needs is a weak signal, but in some cases a weak signal is hard to come by. The other issue is that access points, unlike base stations, are fairly portable. They go online and offline, people move them about in a house or they just plain move. A MAC address registering in New York one week can wind up in Cleveland the next.

Skyhook adjusts its maps accordingly when a displaced MAC address is detected, but Jobs doesn’t appear to be taking any chances. The iPhone is using both Google’s cellular-location and Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning simultaneously. Not bad, but wouldn’t it have just been easier to embed GPS in the thing?

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Jobs keynote: New laptop but no WiMAX

by Kevin FitchardJanuary 15th, 2008

Apple CEO Steve Jobs dispelled the anticipation of a second major wireless announcement at MacWorld: the prospect of WiMAX-embedded Apple notebook computer. Apple did release a new laptop, and it has a new radio interface, but the new eco-friendly MacBook Air comes embedded with an IEEE 802.11n chip, the new high-capacity, long-range Wi-Fi solution that has yet to become fully standardized.

While the new laptop is definitely a win for Apple’s environmental critics (mercury- and arsenic-free in the housing, with caustic chemicals removed from the circuitry) as well as for the Draft N sector, the WiMAX industry might be a bit disappointed. (For more details about the Air and other up-to-the-minute updates and photos from MacWorld check out Gizmodo’s live blog.) But then again, the likelihood of Apple releasing a WiMAX laptop anytime soon was pretty slim. So far Sprint has only two live networks up and running and not a single commercial subscriber online while Clearwire still hasn’t migrated its networks to WiMAX. Apple supports new technology (well, with the exception of 3G), but it also has to have a market. So we can just chalk this one up to overly high expectations.

The iPhone is another story. Jobs announced that Apple has sold 4 million of these suckers now. That’s an impressive feat, and as long as he can keep milking the EDGE device for all its worth, he probably has little incentive to come out with the highly anticipated 3G version of the iPhone. Stay tuned for Associate Editor Sarah Reedy’s podcast with the Yankee Group’s John Jackson about the wireless implications of Apple’s new wares. Also, check back with Telephony Unfiltered for more analysis of the new configurable aspects of the iPhone.

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Apple expectations

by Kevin FitchardJanuary 15th, 2008

The Apple store is officially down for maintenance. That can only mean one thing: CEO Steve Jobs keynote, beginning as I type, will reveal new Apple products. The question is, will we just see a batch of new iPods or is today the fateful day Apple releases the 3G iPhone? The iPhone isn’t the only anticipated wireless product. Rumors have been circulating that Apple will release laptops embedded with WiMAX chips, a move that could be of massive significance to Sprint and Clearwire. Updates to come.

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CES: Intel and Moto’s WiMAX ride

by Kevin FitchardJanuary 11th, 2008

When I climbed into the SUV in the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot, Motorola Networks CTO Dan Coombes asked, “Got your laptop? Well, pop it open.” Moto and Intel had set up a demo WiMAX network around the convention center and Las Vegas strip, and they aimed to show it off. But instead of passively watching the typical demo, they invited me to try to push the networks to its limits while they carted me around the city. I love a challenge.

To set up some context, Motorola and Intel were taking a bit of a risk of here. We all know the rules of demos. Half the time they don’t work. Wireless demos are particularly cantankerous–which usually explains the Ethernet cord that snakes out from under the counter. So, to do a live demo in a moving vehicle during rush hour traffic in one of the most congested areas of the U.S. took some chutzpah.

Motorola and Intel have done this kind of thing before. In Chicago at WiMAX World, Motorola rented out a tourist boat and cruised it up and down the Chicago river, running two dozen WiMAX devices at full tilt in the process. There, however, they had a base station every quarter to half mile, each pointing directly at the wide-open murky expanse of the river. There was no way that setup wasn’t going to deliver. In Vegas, though, the situation was a bit more tenuous. Moto decided to set up a temporary network using Clearwire spectrum six weeks before the Consumer Electronics Show, and according to Coombes, they had to rig an awful lot of stuff together at the last moment.

The access points were installed about a mile apart in rough circle around the convention center. There are no 25-story casinos sticking out of the Chicago river, so in Vegas Moto and Intel had to show that MIMO really works. The modem that Moto used was its newly announced MIMO home gateway, a device that really isn’t supposed to be moving around at 40 MPH leaping from sector to sector, Coombes explained. To get it to work, Coombes’ engineers yanked off the MIMO antennas, and taped on two large plastic flanges that looked as if they had been just cut off the Venetian blinds in his hotel room. This contraption along with a Wi-Fi router was mounted behind the backseat, while the rest of the car was packed to the gills with Intel-powered gadgetry all connected to the WiMAX modem through Ethernet cables and Wi-Fi.

My hosts warned there would be dead spots, and dead spots there were. As we passed under the towering steel curtain of the Wynn Hotel–where we stayed trapped for 10 minutes–in gridlock traffic, the Internet radio stream cut off, the onboard navigation system stopped remapping and everyone’s browsers popped up error screens. Meanwhile the WiMAX modem went haywire desparately searching for a signal. But after passing out from under the Wynn’s shadow–and quick reboot of the modem–the network worked impressively.

Admittedly we were one of the only three cars on the network so capacity wasn’t much of an issue, but I did my damndest to overtax the bugger. I simultaneously played YouTube videos on my Wi-Fi enabled phone, previewing songs from the iTunes store on an iPod touch, and downloading the biggest honking files I could find on my laptop. Meanwhile the Internet radio was blaring, the in-car navigator was chirping away and live video feeds from the other vehicles were streaming over a peer-to-peer connection on another computer (Coombes, who I suspect was a bit bored after a full day of reliving same demo, was also checking his e-mail via Outlook). And during all this IP commotion, I managed to navigate my way TelephonyOnline.com without the slightest hiccup.

I figured it was time for a real test, though. YouTube is for bandwidth-challenged sissies. Could the network handle a DVD-quality stream of a feature-length movie? So I went to Netflix’s movie-on-demand page and selected a good three-and-a-half hour long movie for our in-car enjoyment. This may have been a little more than I bargained for. My computer didn’t have the proper software, so Netflix began downloading all 25 MBs of Windows Media Player 11, updated my codecs and made me restart my computer. But as we pulled in to the parking lot of convention center, the opening credits of Les Miserables began playing full-screen on my computer. I admit, I was impressed.

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Muni Wi-Fi nightmare

by Carol WilsonDecember 13th, 2007

The city of Philadelphia can be generally credited with launching the muni Wi-Fi craze, and is now seeing the down side of that trend. Earlier this week, the City Council held a hearing at which the status of its ambitious municipal network was examined, given the fact that the service provider, EarthLink, has stated it will no longer invest in municipal wireless networks.

EarthLink’s grand plans have run afoul of business realities, and nowhere is that more evident than in Philadelphia. The company said it has spent $20 million to build out Philadelphia’s network, which is still substantial but not complete, more than the $12 million to $15 million expected. The original contract between EarthLink and the city and its Wireless Philadelphia not-for-profit organization was hopelessly one-sided. As noted by the MuniWireless Web site, EarthLink is expected to pay $2 million to the city, $450,000 in inspection fees and rental fees of $2 per month for each streetlight used in mounting antennas, along with 3700 free accounts for city workers to access the network. The contract also calls for 23 free zones and 25,000 reduced price accounts for low-income families that qualify in WP’s digital inclusion program.

All of that, on top of the higher-than-expected cost of actually installing Wi-Fi citywide leaves EarthLink in no position to do anything but bleed red ink. Subscribership is not likely to cover those costs any time soon, if ever. The company did not attend the hearing, sending an unsigned statement claiming confidentiality, but it’s obvious that EarthLink is between a rock and a hard place here.

In a report also issued this week, the New America Foundation blames Wireless Philadelphia for handing its network over to a private concern. I didn’t read the whole report, but here’s a blogger who did and takes issue with it, for reasons I understand.

Rather than parsing out blame, however, it seems to be that some reasonable re-negotiation needs to take place that doesn’t leave Philadelphia’s ambitious plans for bridging the digital divide in limbo but also doesn’t bankrupt the company attempting to make those dreams a reality. The municipal Wi-Fi market has come a long way and much has been learned – the hard way – in the process. Philadelphia pioneered once, and it could do so again.

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