A new player has appeared in the WiFi market in Agatal.  (full article). They've got an interesting twist in targeting two specific markets, hospitals and high density housing (HDUs) such as apartment blocks. Both these have some common characteristics. in that there is often a common owner and they pack a large number of potential customers into a small area. The aim is to provide broadband access site wide by leasing a conventional high speed T1 line into the site and then distributing internet access via WiFi. This works out dramatically cheaper for both customer and owner than running lots of broadband ADSL direct to each outlet or by running Cat5 everywhere to wiring closets. [from: JB Wifi]

Taj to offer wireless broadband service : HindustanTimes.com The Indian Hotels Company is planning to equip it's 60 most prestigious in India with WiFi. [from: JB Wifi]

A little while ago I blogged an entry here about an article in The Times about Internet access in hotels. There was a reply yesterday saying that The Thistle Hotel group intended to provide broadband access in hotel rooms in 400 hotels round Britain. There's just one catch, the cost is 50p per minute with a ceiling (£25?) per day if you use enough. Now either I'm hopelessly out of touch with the bright world of expense account travel or this is extortionate. Working purely from memory you understand, it would seem therefore that 10 minutes internet access in your hotel room is roughly equivalent to one unimaginative soft porn movie on the pay-per-view. A bargain then ;) [from: JB Ecademy]

Seems as good a time as any to remind people of William Burroughs' Thanksgiving Prayer.

CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 : An article loosely based (ahem!) on an interview with Consume.Net's James Stevens. I loved this bit. Wireless networks use microwave radio adapters, known as WiFis, which can be arranged to form a continuous "cloud" of connectivity. This loop goes by the pan-European name "elektrosmog." Elektrosmog. Right.

There's also a picture that rivals the BBC's efforts. It's the Pope looking at what appears to be a Dell laptop with the caption "A broad church: More and more people are logging on" :)
[from: JB Wifi]

For those of you who run a GPRS PDA, Do you run a firewall (like Zonealarm) and can you access TSL/SSL secured sites ? Just curious. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's an interesting web service: PGP Keyserver Service - WSDL v1.1 This service allowes you to query the PGP key domainserver for keys and retrive the result in XML. You can also retrive keyblocks from the server and submit new ones. Bet you can think of interesting things to do with this one. [from: JB Ecademy]

ZDNet |UK| - News - Story - London opts for WLANs : A poll of 20 big-city organisations has revealed that half are deploying wireless LAN networks over the next 12 months Companies in the City of London are increasingly using wireless LANs for high-speed data networking but the "perceived lack of security" is still the main barrier to their uptake, according to the latest research. A poll of 20 IT security managers at financial services and energy-related organisations in London's financial centre showed half are deploying WLANs over the next 12 months.

Ninety percent of those polled said security will be as good as today's wireline LANs over the next three to five years but replacing the crackable WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) security standard -- encryption software which ships with most 802.11 WLANs -- is still a factor for IT managers.

The first half is good news. I find the the second half deeply questionable. I don't believe that WLAN privacy will be as secure as a wired LAN any time soon. And any IT security manager at a large financial services company in the city who's relying on the inherent security of the network ought to be fired. And if you've installed strong security on top of the network, why does it matter how insecure the network layer is. [from: JB Wifi]

So what exactly is 4G mobile networking? See here. 4G (i.e IP-based cellular systems)
huh? [from: JB Wifi]

New get your war on.

East of England Wireless broadband trial : Using wireless broadcast technology, each mast has a range of up to 25 miles and can deliver speeds of up to 1.5Mbps. I'm curious to know what technology they're using that can get 25 mile coverage from a single tall mast. I tried to find the press release on the EEDAs website but without success. [from: JB Wifi]

Sifry has created Technorati: Web Services for bloggers. It's a site that uses various web services from Google and others to data mine the blogosphere. Try this one for instance to see who's linking to Ecademy. [from: JB Ecademy]

It's been a while since I was following a "hot" area of technology and I'd forgotten how stupid the analysts predictions can be and just how many "news" sources there are that do nothing but repeat them. It seems like every day there is a report that the X market will be Y billion dollars big by Z (some date roughly 5 years in the future). This then gets picked up by the news wires and repeated verbatim by roughly 50 technology news columns or magazines world wide. If you use something like Moreover or Google news to track the area, you get swamped with stories for a few hours that all have the same headline, same content and precisely zero added value.

So if you want to know what's really going on, you need to follow the blogs and the very few journalists who actually write something original.

I guess the good side of this is that since there are constant stream of analyst reports about WiFi, it must be important! [from: JB Wifi]

Telia, BT Form WLAN Pact Telia and BT Openzone have linked up to provide a roaming agreement for each other's WLAN hotspot networks. This gives BT Openzone users access to 480 sites around Europe.

Expect to see more of these roaming agreements between WISPs. [from: JB Wifi]

I'm not sure if this is an Ecademy story or a WiFi Ecademy story. 

 Network World, quoting Vocaltec CEO Elon Ganor: "The vast majority of experts said by 2006 50% of the world's (voice) traffic would be using VoIP. I talked to carriers, the large carriers, and I can tell you that their view is about similar." [thanks, Werblog]

The key to this is pervasive, always on, high bandwidth. The combination of Broadband and WiFi is making this available. Once we have that we need services that are easy to use and hardware/software packages that are as familiar as the phone and cellphone. Here's some comment from Clay Shirky on the Boing Boing guest blog on the current state of the art. 

I have been experimenting with Voice over IP, and to my surprise, its just about ready for to prime time. I have been testing Vonage's VoIP service, and it comes close to the critical mix of simple, useful, and cheap. The key difference between Vonage and previous "You computer is your phone!" models is that now your phone can be your phone, thanks to Cisco's Analog Telephone Adapter, a box that takes a phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back and does pretty much exactly what you would expect a box that takes phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back would do.

The voice quality is good (though doing big file uploads in the background can make things get choppy, which takes some getting used to if you are in the habit of making calls while during long up/downloads.) Getting voice mail on the web is cool, being able to get a 415 number while living in 203 is cool, etc, but price is the killer app: $40/mo for an unlimited number of unlimited length calls in the US. Flat rate telephony at last.

The phone companies don't realize how close consumers are to treating voice as just another application on a data network.

A flat rate subscription for unlimited calls to anywhere in the world is a pretty radical change for the voice comms industry. [from: JB Ecademy]

BT Openworld blocks personal mail servers What they've done is to block port 25 on all the residential and business services that use a dynamic IP. Now of course the way to route round this is to set up your SMTP server to use another port such as 465 (for SMTP with SSL).

There are two issues here. First, one of the principle reasons for running your own SMTP server is so that you can send email from anywhere you find yourself. Like someone else's house, office or a public WiFi hotspot. If BT supplied a secure SMTP service that was available everywhere, then you wouldn't need to do this.

Second is the principle of the thing. Why should BT care what service you run from your connection? I can understand having an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that says things like no spamming, port scanning or porn. But why do we have to have "no servers" rules as well? Believe me this is the thin end of the wedge. If this carries on, pretty soon we'll have blocks on all incoming ports. The really bad news about this is that it stifles innovation and is killing the future where we begin to take advantage of always-on high-speed connections with applications that we haven't yet thought of.

A broadband connection is NOT just a way of shipping content to consumers in more volume. It's a way for customers to participate.

I don't know what we do about this except to express our displeasure by complaining long and hard and in public and to vote woth our feet by switching to ISPs that are more friendly.
[from: JB Ecademy]

O'Reilly Network: Web Services We'd Like To See. [November 26, 2002] In a recent CNET article, Margaret Kane reports on Google and Amazon's success with Web services. After Google and Amazon, probably the widest deployed and successful web service is the Blogger API. Then there's all the other Weblog systems like weblogs.com. I can't really count RSS as a web service, although with >10,000 feeds it's probably the most widely implemented XML format. Anyway. In the article, Timothy Appnel suggests a few other companies that ought to expose their core systems as publically accessible web services. eg eBay, PayPal, FedEx, UPS, MapQuest, Yahoo. I bet we can think of a few as well. How about Alexa, IMDB, MSN? [from: JB Ecademy]

The five biggest myths about Web services.  (I like no.2!)

Myth No. 1: Web services is brand new.
Fact: Web services is the distillation of knowledge and experience gained from decades of working with distributed technologies.

Myth No. 2: Web services has so many shortcomings, such as security, that it will prove to be a disruptive element in an organization's IT efforts.
Fact: Actually, organizations are moving toward Web services because IT operations can be so disruptive so much of the time today.

Myth No. 3: Interoperability will never happen. We've all got to have the same operating system to make Web services work best.
Fact: Web services exists because interoperability is not only possible; it's happening on IT systems every hour of every day.

Myth No. 4: Getting Web services means getting rid of all your current software and developing new programming languages to handle the Tower of Babel you're going to face.
Fact: This is no more true than Myth No. 3. When we log on to the Internet for personal use, we don't think about whether our software will be compatible with whatever is on the other end of our web browsers.

Myth No. 5: Web services is the endgame--the goal we're aiming toward.
Fact: That makes as much sense as saying in the 1920s that a propeller-driven airplane that could get us across the Atlantic nonstop should be the goal of aviation.

  [from: JB Ecademy]

If you have a PC with a webcam, a PocketPC PDA and especially if you have a cam on the PDA, check out Microsoft Portrait It's an experimental package from Microsoft Research mainly aimed at turning internet connected PDAs into videophones. [from: JB Ecademy]

Cantenna is a commercial antenna styled and designed after the famous Pringle's can design but rather better made than most homebrew attempts. There's a discussion on WABUG about whether it is legal in the USA to sell these things as they do not appear to have been FCC certified with specific WiFi cards, APs and cable setups. It appears that for consumer electronics WiFi gear to be sold in the USA it must be certified as a complete setup including the antenna. This perhaps explains why so few Cards and APs have an antenna socket as standard and also why perhaps brand name antennas are fairly expensive.

Does anyone know the corresponding legal restrictions in the UK? Is it legal to:-
- Build and attach your own antenna
- Mix and match electronics and antennas from different manufacturers?

Of course, now we've got the legalities out of the way, we'll all just ignore them and do our own thing on the basis that we're highly unlikely to get caught. But even with WiFi's relatively short range, it's important that you have a little clue about what you're doing as particularly if you get into power amps and overdriving the output stages, it's fairly easy to generate large amounts of interference. [from: JB Wifi]