Information Research Weblog

There's an interesting new report on municipal wi-fi available. Nothing much in the way of analysis, simply answers to questions from people involved in municipal wireless in the USA. There are, however, some interesting points.

The New York Times has an interesting article on Internet connection theft: one neighbour stealing connection from another, or even camping outside an apartment block to connect to an unprotected link. Personally, I seem to be surrounded by a wi-fi vacuum, almost; the local church has a wi-fi network but it's invisible from my study - and it is secured anyway.

An interesting from one of the newsletters I get - can't remember which, unfortunately. However, the gist of it is that a new report on municipal broadband suggests that:

As of Q1 2006, there were over 100 operational city and regional wireless broadband networks worldwide, more than 40 of which were in the US. At least 300 US cities are in the planning stages with wireless networks, and the number will double in 2006 and accelerate further, making Muni broadband a very real and significant trend beyond mere hype. Despite legal opposition and pressure from incumbent telcos and cable companies, Muni broadband is coming and is here to stay.

While small town rural deployments were the beginning of the wave, the tide is now embracing large urban metropolises. New York, San Francisco, Rome and Paris are among the major cities planning wide-scale deployments, and more will follow. By 2010/2011, the majority of cities and townships in the US will have a municipal wireless network in place. Find out how these networks will evolve and what impact they will have on the telecoms market by purchasing this report.

It would be interesting to hear from readers on the situation in their hometowns.

Thanks to Alistair Norman for drawing my attention to a Techdirt thread on municipal wi-fi systems. Some interesting debate and useful links.

I've seen a number reports on this topic, but perhaps the best is the BBC World item. It seems that the Republic of Macedonia (one needs to be specific to avoid confusion with the Greek region of Macedonia) is implementing a country-wide wi-fi network, funded, in part by USAID. The agency has invested in implementing broadband connection in the country's schools and the aim is to use these centres as nodes for further development.

Just drawn to my attention by a mailing from Gerry McKiernan is an article in DLib Magazine, in two parts, on "social bookmarking" - a very comprehensive piece from staff at the Nature Publishing Group. [Click here for Part II.]

An interesting short article on public Wi-fi in Portland, Oregon and advocated for New York city.

Very interresting. I think the comparison with cars is obvious. Sometimes I try to hide the fact that I have ("access to") a car to make sure I keep my "right" to take the train, the bus or even my bike. When people come to know that I have a car, they say: "Oh! So you can come anytime!" As for cellular phones, I'd like to keep my freedom not to use my car. But some people seem to think that, since you have access to it, then you want to use it anytime.

For those who do not suffer of francophobia: the entire French version of this article can be found at:

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2005/02/SCHILLER/11911

I posted a message a little while back about municipal broadband in the USA, noting that 'liberal' had become a term of denigration. Well, the hard right is having another go. US Congressman Pete Sessions is putting up a bill that would prevent state or local governments offering broadband services if private companies were already in the market. The news item notes:

Before winning election to Congress, Sessions spent more than 16 years at the Bell Labs in New Jersey, and served as a Southwestern Bell district manager for marketing in Dallas.

No conflict of interest there, then!

...and don't I recall that Bell Co. was a business monopoly that had to be broken up? So there's no danger of that happening again, eh?

There's a great discussion going on at C|Net about whether or not local municipalities should be offering "free" wi-fi coverage. If you want to understand the loony, neo-con, extremist rightwingers, take a look. In particular, one 'GraysonBuzz' is so far to the right that he makes George Bush look like a liberal.

Curious how in the USA, 'liberal' has become a term of abuse: just look at some of the OED meanings of the word:

• Free in bestowing; bountiful, generous, open-hearted
• Free from restraint; free in speech or action.
• Free from narrow prejudice; open-minded, candid.
• Free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favour of traditional opinions or established institutions; open to the reception of new ideas or proposals of reform.
• Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.

Apparently, these are now qualities that threaten "the American way of life" — well, they'd certainly threaten the neo-fascist state that Georgie would like to have!

Nokia has just announced its 770 tablet Internet device, intended for use wherever a wireless connection can be found. It's not a PC in any real sense, just a device for surfing the Internet, listenting to Internet radio and, promised, with RSS feed.

I can see this being the next "must have" toy - to be without one in Business Class airport lounges (not places I frequent much myself!) will be the same as being undressed - very embarrassing. It's quite tiny, however - 141 x 79 x 19 mm, which I translate as 5.5 x 3.125 x 0.75 ins. (approximately :-) ). (I wonder what it is about the old 3 x 5 catalogue card format that keeps it popular - does it follow the Golden Mean? Mmm. I've just checked - it does, the two numbers are side by side in the Fibonacci series. That must be the answer.)

I've never been particularly interested in the various standards battles that have taken place over the years - if you wait long enough someone wins and you can then start buying the gear :-) However, on the wireless Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) front there are a couple of contenders currently slugging it out, the WiMedia Alliance and the UWB Forum. WiMedia Alliance is a combination of two other bodies - WiMedia and the Multiband OFDM Alliance SIG (MBOA-SIG) and has recently announced that Microsoft has become a 'promoter member', while the UWB Forum includes big players such as Motorola, Samsung and Siemens. The goal of both is to set the IEEE standard for UWB but my guess is that industry standards will proliferate here as they do in so many other technical areas.

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.