Wireless – Page 3

Thinking about iPhone 2.0

In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices every 9 months – 1 year. So it’s not a bad speculation. What are we likely to see in terms of hardware? Faster wireless is for one thing. It’s a little early for solar-panel displays but we could reasonably see the camera gaining a hardware ‘button’ and a small camera mounted on the front of the device for video conferencing.

We’re also going to see the new iPhone operating system. The big news there is obviously the Application Store. Why do I want it? So I can play a couple of casual games while I’m not in a good network region. So I can read my RSS feeds while mobile without the clunkiness of the online readers. So I can twitter by only sending my data and receiving others twitter data rather than having to receive the text and graphics from pockettweets. It would be nice to be able to receive MMS messages and also to be able to forward the odd SMS but, to be honest, there are a lot more easy wins in this respect. Double-tap to zoom in a mail message for the idiots who keep sending me 800-pixel wide images as their email signature?

waffle writes some speculation about the 3G iPhone

“Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.”

Except that the bookmarklets on your home screen are just bookmarks – they’re not freeze dried copies of the web sites themselves. The renderer in MobileSafari over EDGE is quick enough to outpace the slower renderers on faster 3G networks so I think we can reasonably expect that if the EDGE limits are removed, we shall get much faster data and therefore faster rendering.

Lots to think about and only a week to go.

Co-Working

Andy recently posted that his efforts to build Co-Working Belfast have been bearing fruit as he gets QUB and Belfast City Council on board. For my part, I’ve pledged that Mac-Sys will buy a desk every month and put some loaner kit down there as well to foster mobile types into using it. Co-Working Ireland … Continue reading “Co-Working”

Co-Working Ireland started over a year ago and I was invited to blog about it. I wrote a few articles there

The Closed Door
Working anywhere you pitch a tent.
Coffee shops: spacial logistics

but not long after I changed jobs (long story) and being office based I’ve not really had the time or opportunity to blog more about it on coworking.ie though I have managed to put some stuff together here in my Bedouin and Co-Working categories.

I’ve got an article in the making for coworking.ie, a year after my last one. Woo-and-hoo!

Municipal WiFi failing again. Try FON.

I got this Businessweek link from DaringFireball this morning. “A few weeks after announcing it will shut down its municipal wireless network in New Orleans, EarthLink Inc. said Tuesday that it has notified its Wi-Fi customers in Philadelphia that it is terminating that network, too.” This is what happens when ideas are put out there … Continue reading “Municipal WiFi failing again. Try FON.”

I got this Businessweek link from DaringFireball this morning.

“A few weeks after announcing it will shut down its municipal wireless network in New Orleans, EarthLink Inc. said Tuesday that it has notified its Wi-Fi customers in Philadelphia that it is terminating that network, too.”

This is what happens when ideas are put out there without a plan.

I’m putting my faith in FON.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to get free/cheap Internet access for my iPhone when I’m travelling around the Baltic capitals in August and with BT’s data roaming charges of Â£7.50 a megabyte (about $15 – which is 1.5 cents per kilobyte), there has to be another way.

Have FON, will Travel

Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki are covered in FON points. St Petersburg, Talinn and Warnemunde much less so. MUCH less so. A bit like Belfast, Bangor and everywhere else in Northern Ireland. But the potential to be able to access WiFi points while travelling is simply too strong.

I’ve never seen a FON WiFi signal when I’ve been out and about so I reckon I should be a bit pro-active and do something about that considering that there seems to be no-one else working on it for Belfast and I don’t have the time!

So, this morning I bought two FON routers and I’m putting one in the house. Not sure where the second should go.

Wireless on the Choo-choo?

Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”? …getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has … Continue reading “Wireless on the Choo-choo?”

Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”?

…getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has been documenting those coverage holes on both the O2 and Vodafone networks and while O2 is the winner of his tests it’s clear that neither option is satisfactory.

Frankly, I do not believe for a second this is an opportunity to make a lot of money. While it may be convenient for those of us who do jump on the train and need to work for the 2 hours from Belfast to Dublin or the 3-4 hours from Dublin to Cork, it’s not going to be an earner.

Why?

Without some sort of mesh network, with a node every 100 m or so, protected from the hooligans and yobs on the way, there’s no way to ensure a connection the whole way. And it’s the yobs and hooligans who ruin it really.

IrishBroadband’s wireless broadband would seem to me to be the most obvious contender against the 3G networks of the carriers but then again, there’s no sense of competition there. If a 3G carrier could offer me broadband using a dongle with some reliability, I’d not use a landline based broadband!

The 3G network USB dongles available from most phone carriers would seem to be the cheapest way to go though when I tested one the other day, I got speeds that I would expect from GPRS which did not enamor me of their services: in fact, my iPhone was able to render pages faster than a dual-core laptop on 3G from Three (in a Three store). That’s pretty crap.

Anyone seen good speeds on a 3G network dongle?

SkyHook: WiFi geo-location

I got this link initially from MacRumors A new knowledgebase page from Apple: If you are using Wi-Fi on iPhone or iPod touch and you experience unexpected results when tapping the Location button in Maps, you can refer the respective wireless router administrator to the following URL to update information that Skyhook has about the … Continue reading “SkyHook: WiFi geo-location”

I got this link initially from MacRumors

A new knowledgebase page from Apple:

If you are using Wi-Fi on iPhone or iPod touch and you experience unexpected results when tapping the Location button in Maps, you can refer the respective wireless router administrator to the following URL to update information that Skyhook has about the wireless router’s information:
http://skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/submit_ap.php

This riffs off the last post. If you enter in these details, are you implying that you are permitting others to use the MAC/hardware address of your wireless router to help locate themselves.

Steal WiFi: 5 years in prison.

Darryl Collins, local poster-boy for entrepreneurship, writes about how nicking Wifi is bad. I caught this piece on Radio 4â€™s â€œYou and Yoursâ€ last Thursday. I was so incensed by the lack of balance they were giving the issue of people accessing open wifi networks that I went back and listened again. … The Home … Continue reading “Steal WiFi: 5 years in prison.”

Darryl Collins, local poster-boy for entrepreneurship, writes about how nicking Wifi is bad.

I caught this piece on Radio 4â€™s â€œYou and Yoursâ€ last Thursday. I was so incensed by the lack of balance they were giving the issue of people accessing open wifi networks that I went back and listened again.
…
The Home Office call it â€œtheft of bandwidthâ€ and that â€œstealing that internet space is potentially an offence under the Computer Misuse Act and Communications Actâ€

The penalty is up to 5 years in prison!

I think that Darryl agrees with me when I suggest that anyone running a Wireless network in 2008 should reasonably be expected to secure their network to their desires. I wrote about it here and here.

As I said:

Next theyâ€™ll be arresting people for illegally smelling the perfume and aftershave of people as they walk past. Or illegally hearing conversations spoken aloud in a public place.

The government are taking this very seriously of course and have assigned someone to look after all of this. He has to, of course, be utterly out of his depth when talking about technology. Days like this make me want to become a politician. But not that much.

Careful, Darryl, your blog could be considered an admission of guilt.

iPlayer on my iPhone

From TUAW: Hot on the heels of Auntie releasing a selection of videos for sale via the iTunes Store, we somehow missed yesterday’s sneaky revelation that the BBC is intending to release some form of the BBC iPlayer for iPod touch and iPhone ‘in the coming weeks.’ iPlayer is a mixed bag. For Windows users … Continue reading “iPlayer on my iPhone”

From TUAW:

Hot on the heels of Auntie releasing a selection of videos for sale via the iTunes Store, we somehow missed yesterday’s sneaky revelation that the BBC is intending to release some form of the BBC iPlayer for iPod touch and iPhone ‘in the coming weeks.’

iPlayer is a mixed bag. For Windows users you can stream Flash versions or download DRM-laden episodes of your favourite BBC content for offline viewing. For Mac users, there’s just the streaming option.

So what does this mean for iPhone/iPod touch users?

I reckon it means that they’ll do a Youtube and re-encode their iPlayer content into H.264 so that we can watch it over WiFi. I do not believe for a second that the BBC will re-encode and allow us to download content to our iPods. I’d certainly be more impressed with an iPlayer application for iPhone and would actually use it. In comparison, the Youtube player in my iPhone is seldom used because, frankly, Youtube is crap for anything other than showing people the “This is Karate” or “The Baron” sketches from Blunt.

Of course I don’t expect the BBC to do more than that but consider sitting anywhere there’s WiFi and catching up with last nights Eastenders or watching the so-far extremely compelling “Ashes to Ashes” (episode 2 expires today). This is why we pay our license fees, so we can have content on demand, over the t’internet, delivered to our desktops and handhelds.

Pushing for a Tech-Hub in Belfast

DavidJRice expresses some polite frustration at the number of potentially misguided approaches to government (central and local) funding of creative and technology industries. He’s right, of course. There is a disconnect between what is happening and what the “gubmint” thinks is happening. When you see people organising themselves for events because there’s a dearth of … Continue reading “Pushing for a Tech-Hub in Belfast”

DavidJRice expresses some polite frustration at the number of potentially misguided approaches to government (central and local) funding of creative and technology industries.

He’s right, of course. There is a disconnect between what is happening and what the “gubmint” thinks is happening. When you see people organising themselves for events because there’s a dearth of adequate direction from our governmental overseers, then you know there’s money being wasted. I was told categorically by InvestNI that the technology investment model they were pursuing was to invite large technology and creative companies over here to presumably fill the large empty warehouses they built a few years ago. That’s also effectively sounding a death knell to any SMALL companies that are looking for funding. This somewhat mirrors the experience I had with InvestNI the first time round where they told me they weren’t investing in IT-style companies at all, nomatter the service or business model. Ouch.

So, David, what do we need? We need a building or a room at least. We need broadband. We need light, heat, power. I’m less concerned on the creative industries because, frankly, they get enough help. I know one company funded entirely by the Arts Council. They’re unlikely to give an IT company anything 🙂

Let’s get a list, check it twice and see how much it costs. My company will pledge a percentage of the costs of a co-working space assuming we get that far!

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