Verizon-AT&T battle over LTE heats up
Matt Hamblen, Computerworld, 3/9/2010
The nation’s two largest wireless carriers, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, have started what is already becoming a testy, prolonged battle over who will have the first—or best—4G network using LTE technology.
For average consumers, and even for IT managers, much of the rhetoric is bound to be confusing.
Just yesterday, Verizon reminded users that it expects to be running LTE networks in 25 to 30 cities by the end of 2010. The company also disclosed yesterday that field trials in Boston and Seattly have already produced faster than expected average LTE speeds.
After those results were announced, a spokesman boasted that Verizon expects to beat AT&T into the LTE business by 12 to 18 months.
AT&T promptly repeated earlier statements that it plans to begin trials this year and begin deployment of the technology in 2011 when LTE network equipment and devices are expected to be widely available.
“Just because a competitor is in a hurry, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are ahead,” an AT&T spokeswoman said in an e-mail to Computerworld . She noted that AT&T offers its customers “the best of both worlds” with 3G upgrades to faster HSPA 7.2 while LTE develops.
AT&T last week issued 12 separate press releases about 3G upgrades currently underway in four states and various cities. The projects are part of an AT&T plan outlined earlier to spend $19 billion in 2010 on 3G upgrades, 10% more than was spent last year.
For example, one of the 12 AT&T press releases included an announcement that the New York City area will get 40 new cell sites (including some towers) and upgrades of 70 existing cell sites to 3G. AT&T officials had earlier said that parts of Manhattan needed 3G upgrades .
The burgeoning LTE battle expands upon the one played out in recent months via TV ads in which both Verizon and AT&T bragged about 3G coverage.
Based on subscriber numbers, Verizon Wireless maintains a lead over AT&T with 91 million subscribers. AT&T is nipping at Verizon’s heels with 85 million customers.
Meanwhile, third-ranked Sprint Nextel, with about 48 million customers, has started referring to its emerging Wimax network as the nation’s first 4G network.
For average consumers and even IT managers, however, many of the claims about network superiority and the future of 4G, likely means little at this point—could even be downright confusing, analysts said.
“Carriers want to differentiate themselves, but I think all the carrier claims about network superiority are hopelessly confusing,” said Carl Howe, an analyst at Yankee Group. Added Kevin Burden, an analyst at ABI: “It’s even a confusing message for people like me who make their living in this field every day.”
In fact, both analysts said the marketing efforts of both firms appear at least partly to be “purpose-driven confusion” designed mostly to keep customers from switching carriers. The confusing claims don’t let customers realistically evaluate whether one vendor’s network is truly better than the other’s.
The truth is that average customers, and even IT managers who closely monitor such things, can’t easily determine whether billions of dollars spent by a carrier on network upgrades can significantly improve their own use of the network.
Effective wireless reception is governed by how many people are using a single cell tower nearby at a given moment, along with a single phone’s reception capability and nearby obstacles, analysts said. Also, how a phone is used impacts reception greatly—sending e-mail doesn’t really require 3G or 4G speeds, while video streaming and videoconferencing definitely require upgraded wireless networks.
At the end of the day, mobile phone users mostly care about whether their network serves their needs at home, at work, and in between. They don’t care about far off cities that have been upgraded, Howe said. “There’s no research data that shows that consumers buy a wireless network because of its speed, but they do mostly worry if they can place calls and will the calls get through,” he added.
Burden added that most mobile phone buyers, even those using them at large companies, rely on a carrier they have already used and trust when it comes time to buy a new device or renew service.
Therefore, carriers must work to keep their subscriber base intact. Exclusive deals for certain popular phones, like AT&T and the iPhone, have changed the traditional approach to customer retention, giving carriers offering exclusive devices the chance to steal away competitor’s customers, Burden added.
Howe said the recent TV ads claiming the largest 3G network (Verizon’s ads) or the fastest 3G network (AT&T’s ads) probably foretell the company’s plans to sell their LTE deployments. The basic purpose of such marketing efforts is to create an impression that a competitor’s network isn’t as good, he said.
“If you look at this competition rationally—and not a lot of consumers act rationally—so much of the network marketing doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Howe said. “We had a war of the 3G network maps and even maps on top of reindeer. It’s memorable, but does it make sense? No.”
But Howe added, “people don’t buy rationally, and we shouldn’t pretend such marketing doesn’t work.”
In: Mobile Technology · Tagged with: 3G, 4G, AT&T, HSPA, LTE, Sprint, Verizon, WiMax
Android native development kit updated
Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 3/9/2010
OpenGL ES 2.0 added to package enabling developers to build performance-critical parts of an app in native code
Developers of the Google-backed Android mobile application platform have released revision 3 of Android NDK (Native Development Kit), which complements Android SDK by enabling developers to build performance-critical portions of an application in native code.
Release of NDK r3 was noted in a posting on the Android Developer Blog on Monday.
Version 3 includes OpenGL ES (Open Graphics Library for Embedded Systems) 2.0 native library support. Also featured is a sample application making use of OpenGL ES 2.0 vertex and fragment shaders.
“[OpenGL ES 2.0] brings the ability to control graphics rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs using the GLSL shading language,” said David Turner, a member of the Google technical staff, in the Android Developer Blog.
Native libraries in Android NDK can be used on devices running the Android 1.5 platform or later, because toolchain and ABI-related changes made native libraries incompatible with 1.0 and 1.1 system images.
“Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows you to implement parts of your applications using native-code languages such as C and C++. This can provide benefits to certain classes of applications, in the form of reuse of existing code and in some cases increased speed,” according to an Android Web page.
With version 3, toolchain libraries has been refreshed with GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 4.4.0, to generate more compact and efficient machine code, Google said.
Compiler support is featured for ARMv5TE machine instructions. System headers are featured for stable native APIs, documentation and sample applications.
“The NDK will not benefit most applications,” according to the Android developer page. ” As a developer, you will need to balance its benefits against its drawbacks; notably, using native code does not result in an automatic performance increase but does always increase application complexity. Typical good candidates for the NDK are self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don’t allocate much memory, such as signal processing, physics simulation, and so on. Simply re-coding a method to run in C usually does not result in a large performance increase. The NDK can, however, can be an effective way to reuse a large corpus of existing C/C++ code.”
Downloadable from the Android Web page, the NDK features compilers, linkers and other technologies to generate native ARM libraries on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms.
In: Android, Mobile Technology · Tagged with: API, Linux, SDK
Cisco ‘forever changes internet’ with…a router
Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Register, 3/9/2010
322 Tbps of bandwidth (not quite) here
How will Cisco “forever change the internet“? With a new router.
Which raises the question: What the hell is wrong with technology companies?
When networking giant and server wannabe Cisco Systems sent word that today it would “make a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments,” it set the bar pretty high for an earth-shattering revelation. Cisco has plowed $1.6bn into carrier router development to bring the CRS family of products to market, but this is still a router announcement. That’s nothing to be embarrassed about, or there’s no reason to oversell it like a politician or a snake-oil salesman. (If there’s a difference between the two).
The new Carrier Routing System from Cisco, dubbed the CRS-3, will offer telecommunications and service providers who build the IP networks that voice and data traffic rides upon with a factor of three in bandwidth improvement, which might just mean that all of these handheld devices with broadband links won’t absolutely crash networks. The top-end box has a whopping 322 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth, compared to the current CRS-1 router that Cisco announced six years ago that is rated at 92 Tbps.
This is a lot more bandwidth, and because telcos and service providers need to keep their customers happy as they try to use higher definition multimedia, often streamed through the Internet, they are going to have to shell out billions and billions of dollars to upgrade their networks and will use core routers such as the CRS-3 as the foundation of the next rev of their backbones.
By changing the world, what Cisco apparently meant is that network providers will now have enough bandwidth to allow for true video conferencing for the masses, not just for businesses that want to avoid travel and lodging expenses and use telepresence services (sometimes from Cisco) to hold virtual meetings.
“Video is the killer app,” explained John Chambers, Cisco’s chairman and chief executive officer. “It brings things to life.”
With the CRS-1 carrier router launch six years ago, voice over IP was the killer app, and Chambers slammed critics who said at the time the company would only sell about a dozen of these high-end routers, since they had enough bandwidth in a single box to support over 1 billion phone calls simultaneously. Today, Cisco has 300 customers using the CRS-1 routers and over 5,000 systems are installed.
Chambers reiterated, as he always does, that Cisco feeds on market transitions and has a habit of calling technology changes correctly. Meaning that if you are thinking that the network providers are not ready for something as hefty as the CRS-3, which can handle over 1 billion video streams in a single box, you are wrong. People want to have video links instead of phone calls and service providers want to charge them for the service, so it is inevitable.
Of course, video phones have been inevitable for more than a century; Alexander Graham Bell predicted a little something called the electrical radiophone back in 1891 and added that at some point, such a device would evolve so users could see each other as they talked.
AT&T’s Picturephone from the 1960s never took off, and only with the ubiquity and bandwidth available through the Internet is it even possible for video services to go mainstream. It would be great for everyone to have 1 Gbps links into their homes and over wireless networks to make video ubiquitous. Unless you like to do all kinds of other things when you are talking to people or listening to people on the telephone.
*The new network math*
Building the foundation of a new network with boxes like the CRS-3, which Cisco says has three times the bandwidth of its nearest competitor, is the beginning of that process. And once this capability is available, it changes a lot of the mechanics of how people interact. Cisco’s internal telepresence network hosts 8,000 meetings a week, and presumably, it saves Cisco a lot of money.
(It is conceivable that telepresence just brings more people into meetings and away from useful work, just like the commercialization of the internet made some work much easier – gathering up information – while at the same time providing an endless variety of distractions that get in the way of work).
You can take this too far. For example, the data sheets for the new CRS-3 core routers are in a video format. Which is perfectly idiotic. Thankfully, they are also available in text, where you can take in the data you need in seconds, not minutes. Or, if you are Google, you can just build your own 1 Gbps network, which Chambers didn’t think was a very good idea.
“Google is a wonderful company,” Chambers said referring to the request for information that Google put out in February to get cities and states to join in a 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home trial that the search giant will pay for so it can goad the telcos and service providers into acting. “But our strategy is really how we bring this thing to life.”
Chambers said that when it came to partnering with telcos and service providers, Cisco is cognizant of the word “and,” as in Cisco and AT&T partnering. “We love anybody who loads networks, we love Google, and we love Apple.” But Cisco was never going to compete with its telco and service provider partners.
Of course, one wonders what Cisco was saying ten years ago about servers.
On a call with Chambers announcing the CRS-3, Keith Cambron, president and CEO of AT&T Labs, said that the AT&T network handles 19 petabytes of traffic each day, triple the volume of three years ago (and thanks in no small part due to that exclusive deal with Apple for iPhone connectivity). The AT&T backbone is seeing traffic grow by 40 to 60 per cent per year, but video traffic is growing at 80 per cent and mobile broadband (of which AT&T carries half of the traffic in the United States, according to Cambron) had increased at 5,000 per cent in the past three years. Clearly, AT&T needs some bigger boxes to handle the load.
In fact, AT&T is testing the new CRS-3 switches in Florida and Louisiana as part of an upgrade of its backbone from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps. AT&T upgraded its network to 40 Gbps in 2008 using Cisco’s CRS-1 carrier routers, and now, it’s using multiple 40 Gbps drops to cope with heavy loads. Despite the network bandwidth constraints, AT&T still expects it to take a year or two to upgrade its backbone to 100 Gbps. Why this will take so long when Cisco will be shipping the CRS-3 in the third quarter is unclear. Ma Bell moves in mysterious ways.
The heart of the new CRS-3 core routers is a six-chip chipset called the QuantumFlow Array. This runs Cisco’s IOS XR, which the company calls a “self-healing, distributed operating system.” Aside from the extra bandwidth in the boxes, the CRS-3 has two new features that Cisco hopes network providers will be very excited about.
One is called Network Positioning System, which Chambers said was like a GPS for network traffic at Layers 3 through 7, which would help devices and data find the best paths to link to each other on the network. The other is called Cloud VPN. This will take Cisco’s converged Nexus switches, Unified Computing System blade, and rack servers and combine them with the CRS-3 carrier routers into a giant, virtualized network of computing, and network resources (with EMC as the key storage partner, no doubt).
This will allow the core switch to automagically provision network connections between data centers and cloud computing facilities and get users to the applications they need – even if that means working with UCS servers to provision applications on new boxes in a different data center. Cloud VPN was also being pitched as a means of enabling pay-as-you-go utility computing for compute, storage, and networking, but Chambers did not elaborate on how this was done.
The CSR-3 core routers use the same chassis as the CRS-1 machines did and come in the same configurations: a four-slot single shelf (rated at 1.12 Tbps), an eight-slot single shelf (2.24 Tbps), a sixteen-slot single shelf (4.48 Tbps), and a multi-shelf system with a whopping 1,152 slots rated at 322 Tbps. Pricing for the entry CSR-3 system is expected to be $90,000.
One final question: What happened to the CRS-2 routers? ®
In: Mobile Technology · Tagged with: AT&T, Cisco
Malware discovered on HTC Magic phone
Jeremy Kirk, ComputerWorld, 3/9/2010
An employee of a software security firm discovered three malware programs on a recently purchased HTC Magic phone when it was plugged into a Windows computer.
Upon further investigation, Panda found that the employee’s phone contained three malware programs: a client for the now-defunct Mariposa botnet, the Conficker worm as well as a password stealer for the Lineage game, said Pedro Bustamante, Panda Security’s senior research adviser.
The malware programs were on the phone’s 8GB microSD memory card, which mounts as an external drive when plugged into a PC, Bustamante said. When plugged into a Windows PC, the Mariposa botnet client would automatically run, Bustamante said.
Mariposa was at one time one of the largest botnets responsible for denial-of-service attacks and stealing banking credentials until it was shut down by security researchers in December after they disabled its command-and-control servers. Spanish police have since arrested three men affiliated with the botnet.
Mariposa’s autorun configuration may have overwritten Conficker’s autorun capability, Bustamante said. Conficker is a worm that still infects millions of machines worldwide despite an aggressive campaign by security experts to eradicate it. The password-stealing program would not run automatically unless someone double clicked on the file, Bustamante said.
A Vodafone spokesman said the company is looking into the situation but that it appears to be an isolated incident. “We will obviously fully investigate this and make sure that any necessary changes to our security policies are put in place,” he said.
The HTC Magic phone has been on the market for more than a year, so it’s unlikely that the malware programs were installed at the factory. “It would have popped up earlier,” Bustamante said.
What is more likely is that the phone was purchased by someone else, the microSD card became infected after the phone was plugged into an infected PC, and then the phone returned to Vodafone.
“It was probably returned to Vodafone and sent to another person without flashing it or restoring the memory of the phone,” Bustamante.
Many phones can be reset to their factory settings by pushing a couple of buttons, which would have erased the malware and reset the phone, something that should be standard procedure before selling a refurbished phone, Bustamante said.
“The question is why wasn’t it done,” he said.
Vodafone is tracing the phone, which was ordered in Spain, to see which warehouse it came from, Bustamante said. Vodafone distributes the phone in the U.K., Spain, Germany and France, he said.
Panda, which has published a blog post with screenshots, also plans on purchase two or three more HTC Magics for investigation.
In: Mobile Technology · Tagged with: HTC, Malware, Vodafone
FCC considering spectrum for free wireless broadband
Phil Goldstein, FierceWireless, 3/9/2010
The FCC may release spectrum for “free or very low-cost” wireless broadband service to boost wider broadband adoption. The proposal is one small part of the commission’s national broadband plan, which it will formally present to Congress March 17.
The commission did not offer details about the proposal, including how it will be funded and how many people it will impact. The commission has been dribbling out information about the plan in advance of its release, and increased spectrum for wireless broadband is a key part of the plan.
The agency last month outlined an effort it said could free up 500 MHz of spectrum over the next decade for mobile broadband use. The plan would allow current spectrum licensees, including broadcasters, to voluntarily give up spectrum in exchange for a share of auction proceeds. A separate part of the FCC’s broadband plan calls on Congress to allocate $12 billion to $16 billion over 10 years to help build an interoperable, pubic-safety broadband network.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski repeatedly has acknowledged the need to free up more spectrum for mobile broadband. “Spectrum–our airwaves–really is the oxygen of mobile broadband service,” he said in a speech in February. “Without sufficient spectrum, we will starve mobile broadband of the nourishment it needs to thrive as a platform for innovation, job creation and economic growth.”
In: Mobile Technology · Tagged with: FCC
Palm webOS PDK Public Beta Is Available Now
Mark Wilson, Gizmodo, 3/9/2010
Palm’s complement to their SDK, the webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK), is available in beta form now. Download it here.
Palm webOS PDK Public Beta Now Available
Palm Demonstrates New Games at Game Developers Conference
SAN FRANCISCO, Game Developers Conference (GDC), March 9, 2010 – Palm, Inc. today announced that a public beta version of the Palm® webOS™ Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) is now available at the Palm Developer Center (developer.palm.com). Palm is demonstrating new games from early PDK developers in its booth at GDC (No. 2016).
The PDK complements the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK), letting developers use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK and mix them seamlessly within a single app. The PDK enables new functionality, including immersive 3D graphics, and gives developers who have built games for other platforms an easy way to bring their titles to the webOS platform. Developers can download the beta PDK and start developing today, but distribution of games built with the beta PDK will require functionality provided in an upcoming Palm webOS update.
“Palm webOS is the go-to platform for great games on two of the three leading carrier networks,” said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. “We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world-class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it.”
At CES in January, Palm introduced 12 games built by four leading developers with early access to the PDK:
• “Asphalt 5″ (Gameloft)
• “Brain Challenge®” (Gameloft)
• “Glyder 2″ (Glu Mobile)
• “Let’s Golf!” (Gameloft)
• “MONOPOLY” (EA Mobile™)
• “Need for Speed™ Undercover” (EA Mobile)
• “SCRABBLE” (EA Mobile)
• “Sudoku” (EA Mobile)
• “Tetris®” (EA Mobile)
• “The Oregon Trail” (Gameloft)
• “The Sims™ 3″ (EA Mobile)
• “X-Plane” (Laminar Research)Since then, more than 20 exciting webOS titles have been launched by these early-access developers:
• “Apollo” (Laminar Research)
• “Assassin’s Creed™ – Altair’s Chronicles” (Gameloft)
• “Brothers In Arms®: Hour of Heroes” (Gameloft)
• “Castle of Magic” (Gameloft)
• “Deer Hunter 3D” (Glu Mobile)
• “Dungeon Hunter” (Gameloft)
• “Earthworm Jim” (Gameloft)
• “Gangstar: West Coast Hustle” (Gameloft)
• “Giant Fighting Robots” (Laminar Research)
• “Guitar Hero 5 Mobile” (Glu Mobile)
• “Hero of Sparta” (Gameloft)
• “Real Soccer 2010″ (Gameloft)
• “Real Tennis” (Gameloft)
• “World Series of Poker: Hold’em Legend” (Glu Mobile)
• “X-Plane Airliner” (Laminar Research)
• “X-Plane Carrier” (Laminar Research)
• “X-Plane Extreme” (Laminar Research)
• “X-Plane Glider” (Laminar Research)
• “X-Plane Helicopter” (Laminar Research)
• “X-Plane Racing” (Laminar Research)• “X-Plane Space Shuttle” (Laminar Research)
“The Palm webOS PDK is extremely powerful and far-reaching, as evidenced by the number of titles we’ve been able to bring to the webOS platform in a very short time,” said Baudouin Corman, vice president of publishing, Americas, Gameloft. “It’s quite difficult to make a great phone that’s also an outstanding gaming platform; Palm has been successful delivering both.”
More information about the beta PDK is available at the Palm Developer Center (developer.palm.com). More information about games for Palm webOS is available at www.palm.com/applications.
In: Mobile Technology, Palm · Tagged with: SDK, WebOs
iPad will lack some standard iPhone apps at launch
Dave Caolo, TUAW, 3/9/2010
Wired’s Brian X. Chen noticed that Apple’s iPad press release touts “12 new innovative apps designed especially for the iPad.” The twelve apps: Videos, iPod, Maps, Photos, Mail, Safari, App Store, iTunes, YouTube, Contacts, Calendar and Notes are available. That means a few apps that ship with the iPhone — Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos — are missing.
Thus, the mystery begins. Where are The Final Five? Chen suggests that they’ll be released as free apps in the App Store. John Gruber believes that design problems caused the team (specifically, Steve Jobs) to withhold the apps. I agree with John and Brian.
Consider the calculator app. It looks great on the iPhone, as the iPhone is about the size of a pocket calculator. If it were simply “blown up” to accommodate the iPad’s screen, it would resemble one of those dollar store calculators with the enormous buttons for older folks. Definitely not what Apple is after. Also, the press release says, “… designed especially for the iPad” (emphasis mine). The five missing apps haven’t yet received that loving attention, at least to Steve’s satisfaction.
As for getting them on the iPad, I bet they’ll be a part of the next OS release and in the App Store from then on. That way, Apple won’t be tied to the OS whenever they want to update those apps, and they’ll have time between now and then to get them just right.
In: Mobile Technology, iPhone · Tagged with: iPad
Cisco promises to ‘forever change the internet’
Wireless Watch, The Register, 3/9/2010
Today will see Cisco making an announcement that it claims will “forever change the internet”. The stock market certainly believed it, sending the IP giant’s shares to their highest level in more than a year ($26.34) yesterday. Given Cisco’s heritage and product strategy it has more likelihood than most of delivering on its claim, but remains tightlipped about the details – sparking rumors from a gigabit wholesale network to an extended wireless core play to a set-top box.
Most analysts’ money is on a combination of these, adding up to a blueprint for an end-to-end wired/wireless strategy. This would see Cisco’s products moving more deeply into the home as well as the enterprise and the cloud servers. At the consumer end, the company is expected to build on its gradually increasing activities in home devices for broadband access – set-top boxes, via its acquisition of Scientific Atlanta, Wi-Fi routers and home gateways from Linksys, and femtocells, through its partnership with ip.access. Many are looking forward to an AppleTV-like cable set-top box, marketed directly to end users rather than to cablecos, like existing Scientific Atlanta products. This would combine digital video recording, web video streaming and access, wireless connectivity and telepresence, as well as acting as a home media hub.
It remains uncertain whether Cisco is best advised to go up against the consumer giants in offering the end points that hang off the vast networks powered by its routers. But it has certainly been part of the firm’s plan to expand its revenue streams into areas related to its core IP business – it has even been rumored to be planning its own smartphone. Telepresence has been a key element of the growth strategy for the past few years, and may now be moving into the home as well as the enterprise.
Given Cisco’s recent pronouncements about 100Gbps Ethernet networks, it could also be emulating Google in not just providing the hardware for such systems, but partnering with service providers. Both companies have invested heavily in the technologies that will bring high speed broadband access to everyone, and have hinted at creating networks that would then offer wholesale capacity to innovative applications providers. However, Cisco says, at this stage at least, that it wants to partner with existing carriers rather than increase the challenges to their entrenched models. For this strategy, its recent acquisition of packet core provider Starent is vital and Cisco needs to enhance its core network offering still further to fend off Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper.
Analyst Rod Hall of JPMorgan initiated coverage of Cisco stock with an ‘overweight’ rating ahead of the announcement, saying that the expansion of mobile data usage would benefit Cisco, as would the virtualization trend. He said investors are pricing in 3.8 per cent year-on-year revenue growth for Cisco indefinitely. “Given the positive trends Cisco participates in, we believe that this is overly pessimistic – even in a scenario in which the economy continues to decline,” he wrote, putting a $28 price target on the stock for December.
Copyright © 2010, Wireless Watch
In: Mobile Technology · Tagged with: Cisco, Cloud, Femtocell, WiFi
Intel sees 2012 deployment for mobile WiMax Release 2
Dan Nystedt, ComputerWorld, 3/9/2010
Chip giant Intel, a major backer of the movement to provide mobile WiMax wireless broadband to Internet users around the world, expects the next major release of the technology to be deployed starting in 2012, an executive said Tuesday.
“Standards work will be completed by the end of this year,” said Rama Shukla, a vice president and director of the WiMax program office at Intel, during a news conference in Taipei.
The new Mobile WiMax standard, 802.16m, will replace 802.16e and offer far faster download and upload speeds. The new technology will provide users 170M bps (bits per second) download speed and 90M bps upload speeds, according to Intel data, and will be fully backward compatible with 802.16e. Users will be able to use the service even while traveling at speeds up to 350 kilometers per hour, he said.
Current WiMax network operators are offering service packages for 16Mbps download and 4Mbps upload on networks using 802.16e technology.
Shukla said that this year, estimates for the number of global WiMax subscribers range from around 6 million to 10 million, led by users in the U.S., Russia and Japan. Most of those users are turning to mobile WiMax for laptop computer use. “We see very strong momentum [for WiMax] in notebook PCs today,” he said.
The earlier 802.16d version of WiMax is not called mobile WiMax because it was made for devices in fixed locations, not devices on the move such as smartphones in hand or laptops inside a moving train.
WiMax is competing with mobile phone-based wireless standards such as HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) and LTE (long term evolution) for wireless data services. WiMax is currently at a disadvantage because networks are just now being rolled out in many places and do not yet cover a significant part of the globe, unlike mobile phone networks, which cover much of the world’s population.
In Taiwan, for example, WiMax wireless service provider Vmax Telecom covers Taipei, but its network does not extend outside the capital city. Meantime, Chunghwa Telecom, the island’s largest mobile phone service provider, offers HSPA throughout Taiwan. WiMax promises download and upload speeds significantly faster than those on a mobile phone network in the future, but the mobile phone industry is also hard at work boosting performance to maintain its edge.
In: Mobile Technology · Tagged with: HSPA, LTE, WiMax
Android coders get high-speed graphics ability
Stephen Shankland, CNET news, 3/8/2010
Want better games on your Android phone? They may be coming sooner now, at least for Android 2.0 models.
Google has let programmers tap directly into mobile phone graphics power by releasing a third version of its Android Native Developer Kit (NDK) on Monday.
Android applications typically run in a variation of the Java programming environment, a move that aids in making applications that move more easily from one hardware system to another. But Google also lets those applications bypass the Java layer for some direct communications with the hardware through the NDK interfaces. And the big change in the third revision, or r3, is support for a standard graphics interface called OpenGL ES–in this case version 2.0, the same technology supported by newer iPhone 3GS.
“Applications targeting Android 2.0 or higher can now directly access OpenGL ES 2.0 features,” said Android programmer David Turner in a blog post.
Supporting OpenGL could help programmers who’ve already written games using the technology move more easily to Android and maintain high performance.
But it’s not just for games. Mozilla is bringing its mobile version of Firefox to Android using the NDK, and one programmer on the project, Vladimir Vukicevic, welcomed the OpenGL ES move.
“Official support for GL ES 2.0 is very interesting; we’re planning on switching our rendering on Android to go through an OpenGL path soon, and full ES 2.0 support will allow us to accelerate that even more,” he said in an e-mail interview. “It’s great to see that ES 2.0 is a core part of the Android 2.0 platform, so that we can rely on it always being present,” he said, adding that isn’t the case for some the mobile phone designs Mozilla is aiming to support.
And, he said, OpenGL ES support also could help with another project Vukicevic has been working on, WebGL, which provides a 3D interface Web applications running in a browser can use.
In: Android, Mobile Technology