Wi-Fi-to-Cellular Roaming Still on Hold



“The billing issues are going to be pretty significant,” said Bob Hafner, an analyst at Gartner Inc., in Toronto. “If I get flat-rate billing, then the savings I get for moving between Wi-Fi and the cellular network is going to be lost anyway.”



Just an update on the Wi-Fi & VoIP dream, gents. A frustrating update, to be sure, but an update nonetheless. Link via Gizmodo, who says that it “may be more realistic to cheer on Verizon and other carriers to offer high-speed cellular networks like EV-DO and EDGE.” We’ll see. 4G is predicted for later this decade, so we may be up for a VHS-Betamax type competition.

“If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal. Besides, when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn’t already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that’s a good reason right there to vote for Bush.”

Thanks to Perry de Havilland at Samizdata.

“Scientific progress best left in private hands.” And it mentions NASA! Don’t worry, anxious readers, my thesis will be available online soon enough.

I mentioned Reason’s convention blog - but OxBlog is doing an entertaining job as well.

Arthur Chrenkoff points out that the celebrity athlete Carl Lewis has an opinion on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Says Mr. Lewis: “It is funny or ironic that we boycotted the 1980 Games in support of Afghanistan, and now we’re bombing Afghanistan.” Yes, funny or ironic. Either of those two things.

He gets to have an opinion, of course. (I am in no position to criticise uninformed opinions - I blog.) But just because he is a celebrity doesn’t mean he is any more insightful on matters of international and electoral politics than anybody else in the entire world.

Chrenkoff provides him with a well-deserved rebuttal.

Jeff Jarvis on Michael J Copps, the Democratic member of the FCC, in the New York Times.

“First, is it in the public interest to air the conventions? Well, I’d say that the public is in the best position to judge what is in its interest … and the public doesn’t watch conventions! So who the hell are you, Copps, to tell us what is in our interest?” (here)

How fun is politics as of this weekend? Howard calls the election just in time for the Republican National Convention, providing perhaps one idea for an editorial in The Age!

Anyway, as of last convention, Reason’s convention blog is probably the best read if only because it has an Australian, Tim Blair. Everything goes better with Australians - its like we’re the world most popular minority.

It will be interesting to watch how successfully the convention bloggers pull it off this time. The DNC (Doesn’t DNC mean D. National Committee?? Damn it.) was not as good as it could have been, for a number of reasons. For bloggers, the whole thing was a logistical nightmare. Its not looking better with the RN..C either, see this post by Matt Welch. Without a floor fight, there isn’t much for the 10,000+ journalist army to do, so they filled in their time by interviewing the bloggers. The bloggers really would have preferred to interview them. Hopefully blogs will be old news by this convention, and journalists can do what they are good at, and bloggers can criticize them for ignoring things. Each to their own.

The latest Space Review is online - check out Taylor Dinerman on the need for a global, persistant space surveillance system.

“No one knows where the next major crisis will break out. Ten years ago, few people in Washington had heard of the Darfur region or Kosovo or Najaf or Kandahar. Ten years from now, places like Urumchi or the Chittagong Hill Tracks or the Djado Plateau or Karaganda may be just as important. The expense and difficulty of trying to constantly shift intelligence gathering assets to cope with new crises cannot be met with traditional “inside the atmosphere” systems. Integrated space-based global surveillance has got to be a medium- or long-term national goal.” (here)

The article goes into depth on the proposed and functional systems involved.

“78% of Korean households subscribe to broadband, the highest penetration rate in the world and well over twice that of the U.S. While broadband via standard cable modems and digital subscriber line (DSL) services are available for about $27 a month, households paying about $52 a month receive lightning fast 20 mbps VDSL service — connections sufficient to receive live high-definition TV. In short, the apartment dweller in Korea enjoys the same level of Internet service as the largest corporate customers in the U.S. All this in a country of 48 million which, in 1979, had just 240,000 phone subscribers.

Circle back to the government’s original goal: introducing local phone competition. It flopped, at least in the way regulators expected. While minutes of use on KT’s phone network declined by a stunning 12% last year, the primary reason is intermodal competition as consumers switch to mobile phones (with 36 million subscribers) and Internet substitutes. Given ubiquitous broadband, voice traffic is migrating to “Voice over Internet protocol” (VOIP) and e-mail.”

Fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal about Korean broadband services and the US ‘forced access’ regulatory policy. (Can you guess which method we chose? Can you?) Link via Technology Liberation Front.

This doesn’t just mean that Koreans can all download The Eminem Show quicker, or even that more people use VoIP. The government is able to streamline a great deal of its day to day administration onto the internet. Korean companies can experiment more fully with moving their operations online. If everybody has broadband, more people can work from home or on the move, decreasing the need to purchase expensive real estate. As the article notes, a 20 mbps service can provide realtime HDTV, but it also provides for smooth videoconferencing.

Anyway, its all just communications. But the internet is the holy-grail of communications - easily able to incorporate any communication medium. And broadband is what allows the internet to reliably do this.

Fantasy: If Telstra was allowed to monopolise the ADSL market by restricting use of their own lines, don’t you think that other companies would start laying cable - even fiber-optic cable? It would be harder to do of course, but the profits would be much, much greater. The regulation that is supposed to protect the consumer against the evil monopoly instead has merely slowed a great deal of innovation. ISPs now think that they can merely compete with the existing product on price alone, rather than improving the product itself. Is this an argument for not having privatised Telstra? Perhaps. I’m tired.

In undergraduate studies of American history and politics, at least in Australia, one of the first topics you study is the comparative religiosity of Americans. I was watching the MTV video awards this morning (I think that’s what it was) and the most striking event was Kanye West performing “Jesus Walks” to an enormous, screaming audience. It was two worlds combining - the worshipful gospel music and the ultramodern hiphop, and the audience loved it.