|
|
|
|
Small wireless firms
cry foul at FCC auction Small
wireless firms cry foul at FCC auctio
n Tiny wireless carriers fret that they could be shut out of a federal auction of airwaves slated to begin Tuesday because of rules that permit dominant companies to link with smaller ones. The auction of 422 licenses is largely expected to help big carriers, such as AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS, fill in gaps in some of the biggest and most lucrative markets. That should reduce the number of dropped calls and busy signals -- key consumer complaints. The auction could be the biggest in the FCC's history, fetching $10 billion to $18 billion from 87 companies. About 170 licenses have been set aside for 65 small companies. Each had to show that they had gross revenue of less than $125 million each of the past two years and total assets of less than $500 million. These entrepreneurs typically serve rural areas and other small markets underserved by major players. But FCC rules permit big companies to own large stakes in small ones as long as they don't have a "controlling interest" -- a vague standard that includes such criteria as who controls daily operations and makes policy. Allegheny Communications in Pittsburgh asked a Washington, D.C., court to suspend the auction, saying that the FCC did not check out bidders to ensure that they were not merely fronts for big partners. The court denied the request. Allegheny, which is not backed by a big carrier, fears it and other independents won't have a chance.
Oz Canada
formed for wireless apps A new company, Oz Canada, has been formed to develop GPRS and Third Generation wireless network applications. The company, based in Montreal, is a subsidiary of Stockholm-based Oz.com, in which Ericsson and Canada's Microcell own 20% and 9% shares respectively.
Stream offers
gigabit ethernet Stream Intelligent Networks now offers Gigabit Ethernet service in Toronto's downtown core. Price: 5 Mbps—$400/month; 1 Gbps—$20,000.
Iridium
owners optimistic about new satellite focus Iridium Satellite, the new company, plans to target industrial business markets, such as aviation and oil and gas exploration concerns, as well as government customers. The company last week signed a contract with the Pentagon to serve 20,000 U.S. Defense Department workers over two years, which cleared the way for completion of its acquisition of the old Iridium's assets. The company will begin service with the ability to offer data rates of just 2.4 kilobits per second (kbps). The company plans to offer Internet access at 10 kbps within six months of relaunching the service, with "short burst" messaging by the end of 2001. Executives expect wholesale costs of less than $1 per minute, which are likely to be sold at retail by wireless carrier partner companies for less than $1.50 per minute. The rates are far higher than most cellular and other wireless phone systems but comparable with those of satellite phone competitor Globalstar Telecommunications.
Vivace
Networks develops 12 million-gate ASIC chipset
Ericsson
spin off introduces open distributed service platform The OSGi specification, which complements virtually all residential networking standards, defines an open standard that enables multiple software services to be loaded and run on a services gateway such as a set top box, cable modem, DSL modem, PC or dedicated residential gateway. Gatespace has made products available that address secure messaging, platform and remote management, payment, dataflow and user interfaces for service gateways. The company is already participating in the commercial deployment of OSGi based distributed service platforms in cooperation with Ericsson and Telia Comhem, Sweden's largest cable operator.
Toshiba
hopes to spell profit with LCD Toshiba announced on 4 December that it will invest $90 million to purchase equipment to outfit two factories for the production of thin-film transistor liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels that can display full-motion color video. The facilities, which will begin production of the displays in early 2001, are expected to yield two million panels a month. Toshiba is moving to take advantage of expected growth in the LCD market, which analysts say will expand from annual sales of $1.8 billion (in 1999) to $7.2 billion by 2004 as demand for them increases with the introduction of third-generation wireless handsets. Matsushita Electric, which already makes LCDs, has announced plans to increase production from 400 000 to 1.1 million a month by the autumn 2001.
Where's the bill? Users will soon be able to surf the Web, watch a video clip, order pizza and pay for a bus ride by placing a simple phone call, for the price of a phone call. What's the price? For telecom operators, that's the multibillion-dollar, sink-or-swim question. But time is short: General packet radio service (GPRS), the front-runner of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), is coming on-stream within six months, yet mobile operators still haven't figured out a billing system for their services, analysts say. The issue has emerged after mobile operators in Europe pledged to pay top dollar for third-generation UMTS licenses and new infrastructure. But that money is paid for data services only, which means the telecom industry can no longer bill customers according to the time they spend on the phone. That's because a single Web page may take five or 10 seconds to download on a mobile phone, depending on network congestion, analysts said. People shouldn't have to pay more for a longer download -- in fact, they should possibly pay less, some said. With the mobile Internet, analysts agree, it's the information that counts. But figuring out how much to charge for it is no simple task. The new data billing systems need to work together with current voice billing systems, said analysts. The systems must bill only what they are supposed to bill, and then have scope to grow easily when transactions over the phone network mushroom. Unfortunately, no single company can do all of this, said Keith Brody, an independent consultant for the billing industry. "Nobody has a proven flexible, functional and scalable product," he said.
Groundbreaking
research in Swiss labs
Canada's
high-speed data market flourishes In addition, Canada has a high penetration rate with cable. Seventy five percent of Canadian residences passed had basic cable in Sept. 1999, according to Bill Allen, spokesman for the Canadian Cable Television Association (CCTA). As of May 2000, the U.S. basic cable rate had reached slightly under 70 percent, Paul Kagan Associates said. While high urban cable penetration gives Canadian operators a good foundation on which to deliver advanced services, investment is another necessity. Rogers Cable has upgraded 95 percent of its plant for two-way data, according to chief technology officer Nick Hamilton-Piercy. As of the middle of this year, Canadian cable providers claimed 670,000 broadband Internet subscribers, according to the CCTA. Convergence Consulting Group expects that number to grow to over 1 million by year's end, and to 2 million by the end of next year.
Microsoft
shows new web video and audio software Ballmer also unveiled the latest version of Microsoft's audio format, Windows Media Audio 8, promising it could deliver near-CD quality sound at a recording speed of 48 kbps, meaning that a song could be downloaded 60 percent faster than an MP3 file of similar quality, Microsoft said.
Palm's new OS The new version 4.0 of the Palm OS, which chief executive Carl Yankowski detailed in the opening keynote at the PalmSource developer conference here, supports 16-bit color, Bluetooth wireless connectivity, universal serial bus (USB) connections for easier PC synchronization, and offers support for wireless telephony. Palm chief technology officer Bill Maggs showed a demonstration of a Palm handheld computer dialing a cell phone using Bluetooth. Maggs also played a fighter pilot game against a game developer using a Bluetooth connection, although he conceded his opponent was better. Palm is trying to enhance its OS to maintain its lead over Microsoft in the handheld market by selectively adding more features. One of Palm's goals is to more deeply penetrate the corporate market, which likely will mean expanding the type of applications the Palm OS can handle. The company also is in the midst of a hardware migration. Palm has completed the initial effort to port its operating system from today's Motorola Dragonball chip, which is at the heart of its current handhelds, to chips based on designs from England's ARM Holdings. ARM processors run much faster than Dragonball chips and therefore will allow Palm devices to run more complex applications more smoothly.
Cisco
and Ciena test new optics technology Based on their testing of 10Gbps Very Short Reach (VSR) optics, Cisco Systems and CIENA claim that VSR can speed deployments of OC-192 links to scale Internet Points of Presence (POPs) while lowering connectivity costs by as much as 40 percent. The testing was done with Cisco's 12000 Series Internet Routers and CIENA's MultiWave CoreDirector intelligent optical core switching system using the open multi-vendor-developed VSR optical interface. The VSR protocol uses technologies developed for Gigabit Ethernet networking and uses a 12-element array of 850-nanometer lasers, each operating at 1.25 Gbps. VSR's proponents say its parallel optic interconnect technology provides the foundation for more affordable intra-office interconnections at 40Gbps and 80Gbps speeds. The test was performed over 300 meters of multi-mode ribbon fiber. The companies point out that current 10Gbps optical interfaces defined by SONET and SDH standards are designed for transmission distances of two kilometers or more, resulting in excessively high component costs when used for the very short distance requirements often encountered in intra-office applications.
Intel
promises 10GHz chips with tiny transistors Intel Corp. announced on
Monday, Dec11th, what it calls the world's smallest and fastest
transistor, promising microprocessors running at 10GHz. The Santa Clara,
Calif.-based chipmaker said in a statement it has built a CMOS transistor that
is just 0.03 microns wide. As a result Intel should be able to fit 400 million
transistors on a microprocessor. Today's Pentium 4 processors contain 42 million
transistors.
|
|
| |||
