Information Research Weblog

Enterprise VoIP Planet

There's a very interesting article in the February 2005 Le Monde Diplomatique, entitled "Why the World Went Mobile" by Dan Schiller.

Faithful to the style of this newspaper, it looks at the social context of wireless technology: why has it arisen and why is it so important to our age, what are the social problems and issues with this technology, and what are the structural weaknesses in the way we have implemented it.

The article is available on the website for subscribers only. I bought a print copy of the newspaper at my local newsagent here in the UK. It says the original article is in English and that Dan Schiller is professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and author of a book entitled "Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market Systems" (MIT Press, 2000).

Here is the article teaser: "The demand for the mobile telephone is not a mechanical outcome of technical progress, but the product of the balance of forces that shape society. It is an attempt to wrest a measure of personal control in a social world out of control".

It is definitely food for thought.

There's a good review of the convergence of mobile telephony and Internet telephony on the Wi-fi Planet site.

"Convergence also promises to deliver voice or data over the type of network that is cheaper, more optimal and, of course, available at a particular moment.

For instance, say you're talking to a friend on your smartphone while walking down the street. Enter a cafe with a Wi-Fi network, mid-call, and your mobile handset automatically switches to a VoWLAN connection, saving precious minutes and money in the process.

A number of companies and organizations have announced plans to help make Wi-Fi/cellular convergence and straight VoIP phone calling from handhelds more widespread."

VoIP

It looks as though VoIP is forging ahead, with Skype announcing a PDA version (Pocket PC rather than Palm, unfortunately), and also a deal with Motorola. Motorola comment:

With over 68 million downloads of their client in the last 18 months, we believe Skype is a natural fit with our vision of simple and seamless connectivity for our consumer customers around the globe.

FireFox

It is announced that Microsoft will launch Internet Explorer 7 as a separate package, and the suggestion is that the success of Firefox has got it worried, since the plan was to keep it integrated with Windows. Molly Wood - columnist for C|Net - suggests that this will kill off FireFox. I wouldn't be too sure. MSoft's reputation for producing insecure, buggy code, which doesn't satisfy W3C standards is unlikely to make people confident about a new browser, even if it has all the goodies that FireFox brings. But FireFox may find it difficult to maintain the momentum.

Check this out

There was a piece this morning on NPR about Skype and other VOIP companies. Here is a link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4488307


Laurie H. Hime

The news on wi-fi in libraries continues to increase:

• Today's FT has an article In the clouds over municipal Wi-Fi, which is on municipal use generally, but nods in the direction of libraries
• A PR press release on new developments in Kent.
• Hingham library tech trends for 2005, includes news on wi-fi applications.

And, as for Firefox's increasing share of the browser market - as a result of now having better log analysis on the University of Sheffield's servers, I see that the share taken by 'Netscape' - including Mozilla and Firefox, has gone like this, over October, November and December, 2004.

	Oct.	Nov.	Dec.
Internet Explorer	82.44%	82.90%	77.42%
'Netscape'	8.72%	9.61%	9.93%

It'll be interesting to see what the end of January brings.

The spread of wi-fi in libraries seems to be getting quite a lot of attention in the press in the USA—and much less in the UK (at least as far as my sources allow me to assess). One factor, I think, is the proliferation of local newspapers in the US, while in the UK these sources have declined considerably, often being replaced by free advertising-paid news-sheets such as Metro

Some examples of library news in the newspapers:

• Great Falls library goes wireless
• Chicago, San Diego, Miami-Date Libraries Offer Wireless Internet Access
• Wireless future sprouts at ‘hot spots' in KC
• Library system goes Wi-Fi
• Ossining Public Library Offers Wireless Internet
• Extreme makeover is complete at VSU library
• and there's competition, too: Old Town McDonald's offers wireless Web

Of course, it also happens in other places—Italy, for example: Italians fight ghost towns with wi-fi

News of what's going on in the UK seems to be more limited and there's an emphasis on what government plans to do in relation to wi-fi in public libraries, for example, from the BBC site: Libraries could get wireless web. Notice the 'could get'? With Tony Thatcher and the New Thatcherites still enamoured of big business and so-called 'public private partnerships' any government involvement is likely to be encouragement rather than money.

Visit the roaming librarians in South Lyon, Michigan.

Chicago Public Libraries are in the news as a result of installing a wi-fi network for users. The network partly uses the existing Ethernet network and cost $81,000 to implement—it will cost an estimated $14,000 a year to maintain. I imagine that these are relatively comfortable costs for the city of Chicago. The equivalent sterling rates are almost £42,000 and just over £7,000 and I imagine that these would be difficult sums for any major British public library to find.

Louisville Free Public Library is also in the news with the launch of wi-fi in its 17 branch libraries - the result of "the Friends of the Library, a nonprofit group that has raised nearly $5million for library computers and other technology in the past 10 years". Louisville is about the size of Birmingham in the UK and I found it difficult this evening to get any kind of response from the site, so I can't comment on what the state of technology is there. By contrast, connection with Louisville was pretty well instantaneous. One thing is certain, however, funding rarely comes, in UK libraries, from any body such as a 'Friends of the Library' group.

From Wi-Fi Planet:

By 2009, fueled by a skyrocketing increase in home wireless networks, consumers will require 57 Mbps for Internet connection speed—up from today's 3 Mbps—to meet the demands of an ever-growing collection of always-on home media devices.

The findings come in today's report from JupiterResearch (which is owned by the parent company of this site) and its first-ever look into home wireless bandwidth demands. Entitled "A Portrait of the Wireless Home in 2009", the study finds a shift toward wireless home networks and a growing reliance on digital media.

For tech-savvy consumers, the bandwidth requirement will likely be even higher, as much as 84 Mbps.

"today's 3 Mbps" - what? I don't know anyone who has a 3 Mb connection - ADSL is commonly provided as so-called 'broadband' at 512Kbps and getting even 1Mbps is likely to cost at least 50% more, 3Mbps would be a fantasy dream of the future in the UK!

The Weblog

It seems that my suspicions about the lack of general interest in the IR Weblog are confirmed :-) I've been contributing very little over the past month and so far no one has asked, Where are you?

New issue of the journal

The latest issue, Volume 10 No. 1, is now on the site. This one has the first batch of papers from the Information Seeking in Context conference, held in Dublin last month. The other half will be published in the January 2005 issue. I finally got round to checking on what logs were available on the server and discovered that, since, the 8th October (which is when the analysis software appears to have kicked in) there have been about 280,000 hits on the InformationR.net site - most of which are on the journal. This is considerably beyond my own estimates from the various counters. InformationR.net is the sixth most 'popular' virtual domain on the University's servers.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

VoIP appears to be building up nicely. I finally got round to using it, along with colleagues in the AIMTech research group at Leeds University Business School. The voice quality, using Skype, is generally pretty good - not quite as good as the best landline, but good enough considering that it's free. I've also tried the SkypeOut service, which connects to landline numbers pretty well anywhere in the world and to mobile phones in some. You can connect to landlines in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand for 1.7 Euro cents a minute (£0.0118 or $0.02129) - mobiles cost a good deal more. Connection with landlines can be variable - sometimes connection is lost and in one case there was no voice connection at all. No doubt, with the interest being expressed, these problems will get ironed out.

Of course, governments and the big telecomms companies get very edgy over VoIP - here's a communication process where they may not be able to make any money, unless they REGULATE. Naturally, it is the USA where these concerns are raised.

It had to happen: "Boingo, Vonage Sign VoWi-Fi Pact"

Google again

A couple of things about Google - first, you'll find a review of its e-mail service, Gmail, in the latest issue of the journal. Secondly, I'm also trying out its 'desktop search' program - this enables you to do a Google search on your hard disc. It also checks your hard disc when you do a Web search - useful for bringing to your attention those items you'd forgotten you'd ever written!

Thursday is the Online supplement day for the Guardian and today much of it is devoted to gaming and games machines - a thoroughly boring topic from my point of view. I've never seen the sense of spending hours trying kill one alien after another. Still, it takes all kinds to populate the world. Among the more interesting items:

Flaws in Wi-fi

'Hot' source blogs

UK 'competition' in broadband.

Is VoIP in or out? No sooner do we have commentators suggesting that VoIP won't hack it in the real world than we have companies with so many subscribers that they can reduce the monthly charge. This is the case with the US supplier Vonage, which, with 150,000 subscribers on the books, feels it can cut its monthly charge from $35 to $30 - it figures to cut again when it hits 450,000

"Wi-Fi pioneer Cometa Networks will announce today that it is suspending operations following a failure to raise additional capital needed to expand its service nationwide in the US."

From CNET news

Broadband again - in Thursday's Guardian Online, Victor Keegan pointed out that while Britain has wonderful, DSL-provided "broadband" running at half a meg, France has announced a programme which will start in Paris and roll out to the rest of the country - but twelve times faster. At 6Mb, customers will be able to have streaming video and Web-delivered films whenever they are prepared to pay for it. Does the government in the UK believe the hype or are they desperate to persuade the citizen to believe it?

Meanwhile, broadband is said to be set to boom in the USA.

Internet and taxes - it seems that the US Senate is determined to encourage Internet growth. It has just voted 93 to 3 to continue the ban on taxing Internet access for another four years. However:

McCain's successful compromise measure includes specific language that attempts to ensure nothing in the bill will affect state and local taxation of voice telecommunications services, VoIP, or other telecom services that are not purchased or used directly to provide Internet access.

Wi-fi in Westminster? - a story in The Register got me interested, but it turns out to be less exciting than it promised. Westminster City Council is to extend its Soho test to cover the whole of Soho - for its own purposes, however, not for general public access. That means wi-fi CCTV cameras instead of the wired kind and other Council applications; eventually.

A kind of Weblog is produced by the "Wi-Fi Guy", who appears to be travelling around the USA, discovering the state of wi-fi connectivity. Now that's what I call a true nerd!

Denmark takes the bacon: according to a survey by IBM and The Economist, Denmark is the leading country for Internet use. The top rankings are:

1. Denmark
2. United Kingdom
3. Sweden
4. Norway
5. Finland
6. USA

George takes an interest: in what you are doing on the Internet. ZDNet reports in FBI wants to watch you type, that that service would love to wiretap the Internet -

The FBI is trying to convince the government to mandate that providers of broadband, Internet telephony, and instant-messaging services build in backdoors for easy wiretapping.

Welcome to the police state!

Do we call it a wireless or a radio?

VoIP for real? I see that AT&T is determined to become the biggest provider of telephony through VoIP - it seems to be making a strong start with services operating in California, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Massachusetts.

Since getting broadband and connecting my computer to the hi-fi system, I've been enjoying Internet Radio - the sound quality is excellent and technical hitches are infrequent. I'm using the RealAudio free media player, rather than the Windows Media Player, since I find the latter rather unfriendly to work with. People complain about the difficulty of finding the free download on the Read Audio site, but you can get a copy quite easily by going to the BBC help page. Not that I've got anything against Real Audio making money by selling the 'professional' version - good luck to them in their battle to survive the Microsoft juggernaut.

My exploration of the Internet airwaves is far from complete, but some favourites are:

• BBC Radio 3 - for its classical concerts and related programmes and for its jazz and 'world music' programmes, like those of Andy Kershaw.
• Hober - continuous music with only the occasional 'station identification' message - usually whispered :-). Comes from Takoma Park, Maryland and sent out by what seems to be a Web design, hosting, etc. firm, for the benefit of those who want something to listen to while they do computer work. Folk, 'world music', etc.
• Grassy Hill Radio - linked from Hober - folk music old and new. Like Hober, continuous music. The big advantage of these stations, apart from the music, is the lack of inane chat that bedevils the usual DJ programme.
• Prairie Home Companion - the famed Garrison Keillor radio programme - wonderful archive of complete shows, nicely split into sections if you want that.

Let me have your recommendations and I'll post them on the log.

The Google news alerts are an excellent source of information on all kinds of things. I have two running at the moment; one for VoIP and the other for developments in wi-fi. Some items from the former may interest others:

One wonders if the powerful communications industry in the USA will actually allow this one to happen: "Legislation was unveiled Friday that would classify voice over Internet Protocol as an information service, releasing it from telecommunications regulation." (RCR Wireless News)

I mentioned Skype some time ago: here is a less than totally enthusiastice review from SFGate.com:

Trying it out, I found Skype to be a simple to use service that felt more like an instant messenger program with a strong integrated voice-over-Internet protocol functionality. But it's no substitute for a telephone.

And, finally, a useful account of what's going on from The Mercury News.

There's so much hype and counter-hype that it's difficult to figure out what the future may hold: my guess, FWIW, it that VoIP is on a roll and that the world of telephony is in for a revolution - a technological optimist would probably say two years, a telecomms exec. would probably hope for fifteen before it hits, so eight to ten years is probably a reasonable estimate for the time by which VoIP will have a significant share (say 30%?) of the market.

It's just what you've always wanted, isn't it? Instead of peering over the shoulders of those in front for a distant view of the in-flight film, you've always wanted Web access - instead of trying to drift off to sleep while crushed in your seat by the back of the seat in front and the extremely large gentleman on the aisle. At least he's supposed to be on the aisle, but he has a better view out of the window than you. Now it is consolation time - wi-fi in the sky.

The wires are buzzing with stuff about mobity and wireless. From IntelliSync comes the story of CeBIT in Hannover, with news of developments in wireless and VoIP - one intersting fact caught my attention:

U.S. long-distance calls cost 20 to 30 cents a minute. VoIP, at 3 to 5 cents, offers Americans a big saving. But that price is barely less than some German phone companies charge for regular calls nowadays, thanks to healthy competition.

However - what of international calls? It can hardly be said that competition in the mobile phone market has done much to bring down the cost of 'roaming'.

From the same source, there's a report on a survey carried out by the industry magazine, Computing, with the support of the mobile phone company, O2. The brief report concludes that,

IT managers do not believe a mobile data strategy is important for their organisations.

However, of those who had implemented any kind of mobile strategy at all (192 respondents), 76 per cent said that having a strategy was 'fairly' or 'very' valuable.

And in terms of investment, on the estimates of the survey's respondents, about 12 per cent of IT budget is ploughed into mobile technology of one sort or another.

A VNUnet.com report looks at the extent to which IT directors are taking mobility and wireless on board as part of their strategy - most regard laptops as legitimately 'company business', but are reluctant to view PDAs and smartphones in the same category.

An interesting item on wireless in the public library from LIS News.com

...and a longer piece on IT in public libraries from D-Lib Magazine

Turning to the University sector, I picked this up from Seb's Open Research - a couple of courses at Prince Edward Island University are using Weblogs as resource pages and communication. Here's one on 'Networking, knowledge and the digital age'.

And here's an interesting one! I initiated a debate on the JESSE list some time back on the extent to which Web citation was beginning to overtake journal citation as a performance tool. I then found that this had been picked up by a couple of researchers (Vaughan and Shaw, Bibliographic and Web citations: what is the difference? JASIST, 54(14), 2003, 1313-1322) and now ISI is getting together with NEC: Thomson ISI and NEC Team Up to Index Web-based Scholarship

PHILADELPHIA & LONDON & PRINCETON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 25, 2004--Today, Thomson ISI and NEC Laboratories America (NEC) announced their collaboration to create a comprehensive, multidisciplinary citation index for Web-based scholarly resources. The new Web Citation Index(TM) will combine a suite of technologies developed by NEC, including "autonomous citation indexing" tools from NEC's CiteSeer environment, with the capabilities underlying ISI Web of Knowledge(SM). Thomson ISI editors will carefully monitor the quality of this new resource to ensure all indexed material meets the Thomson ISI high-quality standards.

During 2004, Thomson ISI and NEC will operate a pilot of the new resource to receive feedback from the scientific and scholarly community. Full access to the index is projected for early 2005.

When fully operational, the new resource will be a unique content collection within ISI Web of Knowledge. It will complement the Thomson ISI Web of Science®, and provide researchers with a new gateway to discovery -- using citation relationships among Web-based documents, such as pre-prints, proceedings, and "open access" research publications

OK - that's enough for now - I've got to go off to talk with the people at Orange about mobile technologies.

WiMAX is actually an industry consortium, but its name has become shorthand for the standard it is promoting - IEEE 802.16 - for broadband wireless access. It comes to notice today because of trials by the BBC, which Yahoo! News reports as follows:

Four radio-broadband trials being conducted by BT in rural parts of the UK could be the prelude to a full-scale deployment of WiMax in Britain.

These trials involve broadband fixed access, with customers attaching a receiver to their houses, but the telco is very interested in the idea that more advanced versions of WiMax will support high-speed mobile broadband.

Ian Robinson, head of emerging products at BT Retail, said: "If the potential benefits of WiMax, such as voice services and portability, are realised, then there might be a case for rolling out a WiMax service more widely."

Here are three headlines from Computer Weekly, one after the other on the side-bar:

• Wi-Fi is ready for the enterprise, says Cisco
• Cisco warns of wireless security hole
• Wi-Fi still has a way to go, warns former Intel exec

Mmm. Let's look a little further:

• Wi-Fi is ready for the enterprise, says Cisco
  
  Consumers have been quicker to adopt wireless Lans than enterprises, but issues holding back enterprise adoption have been solved, clearing the way for businesses to hop on the Wlan train, a Cisco Systems executive said yesterday.
• Cisco warns of wireless security hole
  
  Cisco Systems has warned customers using its Aironet wireless access points about a security vulnerability that could allow attackers to obtain keys used to secure communications on wireless networks.
• Wi-Fi still has a way to go, warns former Intel exec
  
  Suppliers of wireless Lan equipment must work much harder to make their products more user friendly and to improve security features, a former Intel executive said yesterday.

So that's clear, then.

Apparently the day is coming when you will be able to take your laptop into a British public library and log on to the Internet through a wi-fi connection - this according to Stephen Timms the Minister for E-commerce. Amazing, isn't it, that a Minister can imagine that this is a novel development, when libraries in a number of countries already provide that possibility. UK governments since 1979 have been so far behind the curve in relation to braodband implementation that they are meeting it coming the other way. I often refer to Ian Mackintosh's 'Sunrise Europe', published in 1986, which set out a broadband strategy for the whole of Europe - had that been implemented, Europe would have had a broadband service similar to that of South Korea and e-commerce would certainly have been a bigger factor in the economy. But the politicians sat on their hands, business was not interested, and the European development money went into pointless projects that have wasted millions. Hey, ho, that's politics.

Broadband Britain is in the news again - this being Thursday and the Guardian Online supplement being out. Online has a couple of items on the subject. In the first, Paul Rubens reports on the problems of access in rural areas, and the currently available alternatives to ADSL and cable, which are only available in the more populated areas. The alternatives, of course, boil down to one - wireless, either from a mast on the land or from a satellite and both are more costly than the typical ADSL charge.

The other article is on the problems of getting wireless connection if you live in a difficult location, even in a city. Martin Wainwright lives in Leeds - he is the Guardian's northern editor - and he reports on the survey being undertaken by one of the wireless providers. Line of sight is the key issue - if you have it, connection is straightforward, if you haven't it's a problem. Wainwright is going to have to end up with a 2.5 metre pole strapped to the chimney of his Victorian house. Not quite as problematical as another customer who, "connects with a mast through his house walls, both main stands at Leeds United's Elland Road stadium and a hill"

An interesting account of Forrester's predictions for broadband in Europe, which puts Britain in the second tier, behind the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. The reason? Cost, of course - and that is down to BT's continuing assumption that you make more money by charging fewer people more, rather than charging a lot of people less. They'll never learn!

Long live Mozilla? With AOL's abandonment of Netscape, and the laying-off of fifty Netscape coders, it looked as though Mozilla would also go down the plug hole. Apparently not. Up rises the 'Mozilla Foundation'. Elsewhere, doubt is cast on the ability of the new Foundation to make much of a dent in IE's dominance. However, as always, time will tell.

Browsing around that last topic brought me to another Weblog, which has a couple of interesting short notes on Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firebird browser. The author, Joel Spolsky, suggests that Firebird meets all of his browser requirements and, with a download of only 6.8 Mb, it's worth taking a look at. I shall report later.

Teleworking has been around a long time as a concept, but the numbers of people who can be defined as teleworkers has never seemed to grow sufficiently to fulfil the promise - mainly, it seems, because people like the social interaction that work brings. However, that may be due to change - a report from AT&T reports that 80% of companies survey now say that they have people who regularly work away from the office. 'Working away' means at least 20% of the time - which I guess means that every senior manager and every salesman is a teleworker. A more rigorous definition of, say, 75% of a person's time, would clearly knock that overall proportion down a bit. On that basis, I'd claim to be largely a teleworker these days. AT&T's press kit also includes Ten Telework Tips.

This from the BBC's technology news:

A group of internet enthusiasts have given a new meaning to the expression of surfing on the beach.

They have set up a wireless network in the English seaside town of Brighton so that you can browse the web or read your e-mails while you soak up the sunshine.

The service, called PiertoPier, is being offered free to anyone who has the right gear and relies on volunteers and donations to keep it alive.

Given the sunshine in the UK at present, this is clearly the way to go. However, I have yet to meet the laptop that can cope with such sunshine!

"Research Firm Says Wi-Fi Will Go Bye-Bye" is the headline of a story from 802.11 Planet to the effect that wi-fi using the 802.11b standard is likely to give way to "ultra-wide band" (UWB). UWB is known in the USA as the "garage door spectrum" and is used for garage door openers, portable telephones and baby monitors. Its advantages over 802.11b are low power requirements, higher bandwith and that walls and partitions don't affect it.

And I've just installed a home wi-fi network! Well - it will be at least five years before UWB comes along so...

A fascinating article in today's Online supplement to the Guardian (or the Grauniad as Private Eye insists on calling it - although I think its propensity for typos has diminished in recent years). The topic is 'software radio' - i.e.:

Instead of specialist radio hardware, a software radio uses a simple receiver to throw the entire contents of a range of frequencies into computer memory, where software - and not hardware - does the signal processing. Vanu Inc, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took an ordinary, off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard iPaq personal digital assistant and, using only a simple radio receiver and an upgrade to the Linux operating system, was able to demonstrate the device working as an FM radio.

That should make a hole in the market for electronic radio components!

An earlier item in the log drew attention to the MyZones idea of having communities of wi-fi users, with people drawing on their neighbours connections.

The idea gets a boost in New York, with the suggestion (on 802.11 Planet) that the city is not making the maximum use of its big fibre network. Wireless networking for the 'last mile' could change things.

An item on the BBC technology news site gives a new meaning to the word 'community' in its report on a start-up wireless broadband outfit. MyZones is fostering the idea that anyone with a wireless home network can offer access to the Internet to their neighbours.

A nice idea in some ways, but I imagine that, if the idea spreads, it could degrade performance on whatever ISP network one was using.