The Wireless Future Blog

Worksnug is an iPhone application that uses “augmented reality” to help you find the best place in a city to sit and do your work — i.e. a cafe with Wi-Fi, co-working spaces, and more. You use your iPhone to scan the surroundings and Worksnug superimposes comments on the screen telling you if the Wi-Fi works well, whether a cafe has a warm and welcoming atmosphere, etc. It is available for London and company’s website says it will soon be in Berlin, Madrid, San Francisco, New York and other cities. Here’s an article in the Guardian about Worksnug.

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(1) Guide to the WiMAX Band (2.5 GHz): the technology, license holders and future prospects

(2) The U.S. Mobile Web Market: Taking Advantage of the iPhone Phenomenon

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© 2009 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

A number of movie studios, record labels, and other copyright-holding companies (and their related trade associations) have also written a pro-ACTA letter to Congress, which I first saw posted on Ben Sheffner’s blog. Minus the bizarre “distraction” claim, it follows the same basic pattern—that ACTA will benefit IP businesses and do nothing harmful.

The evidence for this? Still absent. Instead, the letter reiterates that changes in technology require online copyright enforcement, and thus a section of ACTA covering the Internet.

This probably shouldn’t require repeating, but I’ll say it again. A solution has to be tailored to solve the problem. Is ACTA properly tailored to solve copyright infringement? No one can tell.

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It’s not a surprise that the Motion Picture Association of America is a supporter of the so-called Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a proposed international copyright and trademark agreement that the public isn’t allowed to see. What is surprising is how willing the MPAA is to dismiss calls for an open and democratic process as a “distraction.”

In a letter addressed yesterday to Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the MPAA endorsed ACTA and then went on to say this:

Outcries on the lack of transparency in the ACTA negotiations are a distraction. They distract from the substance and the ambition of the ACTA

This is a pathetic excuse for logic.

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Swindon (UK) is getting a municipal Wi-Fi network, thanks to a joint venture with a local firm. News reports say that the network will cost £1 million and require 1400 access points, but details are sketchy and there is skepticism about the ability of Swindon and the service provider to pull this off.

Despite that, The Economist felt compelled to weigh in with its own opinion about muni wireless:

Unlike many of the American municipal Wi-Fi schemes, which aim to bring the internet to the unwired poor, this one is explicitly commercial. The project is a joint venture called Digital City UK, split between the council, Rikki Hunt, a local businessman, and aQovia, a technology firm. Free access will be restricted to a few hours a day. Those wanting more can pay for an unlimited service that will be faster than that offered by mobile-phone companies. Mr Hunt reckons that bits of local government, such as the police force and the local NHS, will want to use the network, giving it a ready-made customer base.

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The Progress & Freedom Foundation
Presents

Let's Make a Deal: Broadcasters, Mobile Broadband, and a Market in Spectrum

Proposals to have television broadcasters return a portion of their spectrum for re-allocation and auction for next-generation mobile broadband and data services have been met with strong reactions from broadcasters. Is re-allocation of spectrum necessary to encourage broadband expansion? Would compensation for broadcasters be adequate? Will Congress go along with such a deal, or would it be blocked as contrary to "the public interest?" These and other policy issues will be discussed at " Let's Make a Deal: Broadcasters, Mobile Broadband, and a Market in Spectrum ," a Congressional Seminar hosted by The Progress & Freedom Foundation.

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Managing Policy Counsel

Today, here in D.C., we announced the preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning in YouTube, an innovation that takes advantage of our speech recognition technology to turn the spoken word into text captions. We also announced that if you have a transcript of your video, you can upload it to YouTube and we'll time the captions for you.

This is useful for anyone who is deaf or hearing impaired, but it will have broader effects as well. For example, YouTube captions can be automatically translated, making video more accessible across languages. And while we've had the ability to manually caption videos for a while, automatic captions and automatically timed transcripts lower the barriers and, we hope, helps open YouTube to everyone.

I was inspired to do a long article about Wi-Fi at conferences by Joel Spolsky’s article Wi-Fi At Conferences where he asks why Wi-Fi works so poorly at tech conferences. Muniwireless has organized conferences in the past and I won’t say that the Wi-Fi at our events has ben the very best either (however, it was better than at most events I’ve attended). You would think that by now, Wi-Fi access at conferences, especially tech events, would be something no one would even notice — that is, it should just work well. But that’s rarely the case.

The New America Foundation has published a report on broadband penetration and Internet use among Native American communities. As you might imagine, people who live on Indian lands have hardly any options when it comes to broadband, i.e. the vast majority don’t even have it. Where wireless broadband is available, it’s too expensive. But, until you read this report, you won’t realize just how dire the situation is. Download New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses, a two-part report that includes a survey of Native American technology use normed against other national surveys, and case studies of six successful projects.

Following the example of Finland, the Spanish government says that beginning 2011, everyone in Spain will have the right to buy broadband at speeds of at least 1 megabyte per second. The government recognizes that, like telephone service, broadband is now an essential part of daily life.

Any telecom operator that has a universal service contract has to provide reasonably priced broadband everywhere in Spain. At present, universal service obligations imposed on these operators include only fixed line telephony and directory service. The government is adding Internet access to the list of obligations.

I am quite shocked to read this because large parts of Spain are mountainous and sparsely populated — the Pyrenees, Basque country, the northwest around Santiago de Compostela, the Parque Nacional de Sierra Nevada in the south, also very mountainous, difficult terrain. I expect that the operators will have to deploy wireless broadband in those areas to meet the government’s mandate.

© 2009 MuniWireless. All Rights Reserved.

FCC Tackles Cell Phone Use/Texting While Driving

FCC has taken several actions recently to look into the controversial issue of traffic safety aspects of cell phone use. The previous management of FCC showed no interest in this topic.

Recent MBTA (Boston subway) accident that injured 49 people and
was caused by the operator texting while driving!

On November 20, there will be a staff workshop on "distracted driving". This will "explore technology innovations and applications that may eliminate or significantly reduce the problem of distracted driving as well as ways to educate the public about such dangerous behavior."