Australia Connected

wi-fiplanet.com | Australia Readies Gov’t-Backed Broadband | By Eric Griffith | June 28, 2007

Alvarion is happy to report today that the Australian government is pushing WiMax as a tech for its Federal Government Broadband Connect project. The initiative aims to provide broadband service to everyone in the country, even in rural areas. OPEL Networks, a joint venture of Optus and Elders (a rural service provider), will be running the project.

Israel-based Alvarion is happy with the news because it is likely to be the equipment provider for the project; it was involved in 18 months of evaluation with OPEL, in trials used to win the bid.

The network is called Australia Connected, and is expected to cost AU$1.9 billion (US$1.6 billion), with the government splitting the cost with OPEL almost 50/50 (the government will pay $958 million). Eventually, the network will stretch across 638,000 square kilometers (246,333 square miles), over all of Australia’s territories, consisting of 1,300 WiMax sites, each covering 20 km, in addition to a lot of ADSL2+ installations. That includes 15,000 km (9,320 miles) of fiber-optic backhaul. OPEL is promising speeds around 6 Megabits per second to users, to be upgraded to 12 Mbps by 2009. Optus and Elders will separately sell the broadband service at retail. (...)

T-Mobile Wi-Fi/Cell Phones

T-Mobile Wi-Fi/Cell Phones Go Nationwide
By Eric Griffith

June 27, 2007

Amid all the iPhone hype this week, T-Mobile USA (part of Deutsche Telekom (Quote)) has something to say as well: mobile phones don’t have to break the bank, when you can make calls over both cell towers and Wi-Fi routers -- and, delivering on a promise made years ago, those calls won’t be dropped as you switch between networks. Homes with poor cell coverage can still make calls if Wi-Fi access is made available.

That’s the gist of the company’s Hotspot @Home service, which is going nationwide today after several months of trials in the Seattle area. With this service and a dual-mode phone supporting both T-Mobile’s GSM/GPRS/EDGE network and Wi-Fi, users can make unlimited calls by adding $10 a month, or $20 a month for up to five lines on a family plan, to an existing T-Mobile phone account. The "unlimited" part only includes the VoIP calls made via Wi-Fi, of course – except if the call started on the Wi-Fi side. If the call then roams to the cell network, it remains unmetered.

Investor research firm ThinkEquity calls this fixed/mobile convergence (F/MC) launch by T-Mobile “the most important architectural shift in cell phone technology since the introduction of digital GSM in 1992.”

(...)

Related



Wednesday, June 27, 2007 | Your own little cellular tower: T-Mobile phones ride your wireless router | By Associated Press

Djurslands.Net

govtech.com | Djurslands.Net: A Wireless Project Where Sharing Knowledge, Not Technology, Matters Most | Jun 1, 2007, By Indrajit Basu

(...) "Cities are an exception on earth," says Bjarke Nielsen, the maverick founder of this project who remains the main driving force of what many are now calling a movement. "Most of the surface of the earth is rural districts. And among the things they have in common is that it is often too expensive to deploy enough broadband infrastructure coverage so that everyone living on Earth can be part of the global ICT society. Thus the divide between life in cities and countryside is widening with catastrophic ramifications."

To believe that market forces -- commercial telecom companies -- will expand to bridge a digital divide of this magnitude would be sheer naivety. Amongst many other things then, adds Neilsen, DjurslandS.net most importantly serves as a showcase of how all local societies in rural or poor areas around the world can establishment of their own free (or cheap) high-speed wireless community network to access the global information society. (...)

LANdroid

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) is soliciting proposals for LANdroids, a new program to develop intelligent autonomous radio relay nodes that exploit movement to establish and manage mesh networks in urban settings. The goal is to create small, inexpensive, smart robotic radio relay nodes that dismounted warfighters drop as they deploy in urban settings. The nodes then self-configure and form a mesh network – a temporary infrastructure that establishes communications over the region. As the situation changes, the nodes will adapt the network, such as self-healing if nodes are destroyed by the enemy. Through movement and density, the LANdroids will enable effective communications in complex non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments like those found in urban settings – dealing with phenomena like fades and shadows through strategic self-placement and chaining of the relays.(...)

Register article here

Darpa pdf here

Peter Cochrane's Blog: Wi-fi really is everywhere

Peter Cochrane's Blog: Wi-fi really is everywhere
It's far more pervasive than the mobile phone network
Published: Wednesday 10 January 2007

(...) I think we can now safely assume the world of wireless micro-cells has arrived, is growing much faster than the old world of mobile phones and now dominates all data communication connectivity. Incredibly the mobile operators have been eclipsed in less than five years by a network that has no central organisation, no plan, no investment bodies - just people doing their own thing!



Peter Cochrane's Blog: Wi-fi London
Just how many hotspots are there in the capital city?

Published: Wednesday 31 January 2007

zdnet | A rational debate on Net Neutrality

June 4th, 2007
A rational debate on Net Neutrality
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=512

The subject of Net Neutrality has become so politicized that it’s almost impossible to have a rational debate on the subject. Even the term “Net Neutrality” has become a political slogan that is often deliberately vague to hide its true meaning. Is it even possible to have a rational debate on Net Neutrality? That’s what I’m going to try and do here and this won’t be your typical Net Neutrality article that takes one side or the other because it will slap down the villains on both sides of the debate. I’m going to try and step back and share with you my thousand foot view of the whole war on Net Neutrality.(...)

Documenting the City: Art and Society in Newport

Documenting the City: Art and Society in Newport | John Wilson, Guest Curator | Newport Museum and Art Gallery, 2007


Online resources

• Project web-pages: Documenting the City
• Online gallery and archive: art_newport on flickr.

Exhibition Opening

• The official opening of the exhibition Documenting the City at Newport Museum and Art Gallery by Paul Flynn, MP | 11 May 2007 | View video here

Press

• 31 May 2007 | South Wales Argus | Gilt behind the scenes | By Mike Buckingham.
• 28 April 2007 | southwalesargus.co.uk | Internet opens up art hoard | By Jenny Brentnall.