Eideard

Singapore topped the Networked Society City Index… The NSCI Index [.pdf] looks at how 25 major cities are using technologies to grow and manage themselves. The index shows that cities which put technology to use more effectively are the ones that have a better grip on “environmental management, infrastructure, public security, health-care quality and education.”

The study lauds Brazil’s Sao Paulo as an up-and-coming city that has used technology very effectively. The impact of mobile too cannot be underscored, the study finds.

They improve access to people, in particular family and relatives, but also help people make and save money. Mobile services, particularly in low-earning segments, enable people to become more entrepreneurial. They can increase profits by, for instance, cutting out middlemen when selling their harvests, and save money by avoiding lengthy travel…

It is part of a larger trend of putting technology to work outside the realm of corporations. The productivity revolution’s first beneficiaries were big companies, and now we beginning to see schools, consumers and even governments start to think about technology as a productivity enhancement tool.

While productivity in the business sense is about maximizing profits, productivity from a civic perspective is about better resource management. As we become more networked and our devices can generate data, we can start to look at a future where technology tries to reduce waste.

The process is a dialectic – or can become one when more than one side of the equation participates. There is a PBS special starting to appear this weekend which compares existing broadband in the Netherlands, the UK and the United States – and what the next directions of growth will be. Where there is the political will.

So, how fast are speeds growing in your neck of the prairie? What are your friendly neighborhood politicians doing to hasten access to really big internet pipes? Do they even mention expansion of business opportunities derived from real broadband?

It has been a long time coming, but now an average broadband subscriber in the U.S. can sign-up for a 100 Mbps broadband connection. Comcast, the largest cable (and broadband) company said Thursday it’s launching Extreme 105 across its entire footprint, which covers 40 million homes in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle; Chicago; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; and the majority of Boston.

To be sure, companies such as Cablevision provide 100 Mbps connections in its region (New York), but Comcast is making it available at a national level. Forecasts have indicated we could have 100 million homes with 100 Mbps by 2015, and with Thursday’s news, we’re pretty close to that target now. That should make the FCC pretty happy.

Now, it’s not cheap: about $105 a month for the broadband connection if you sign up for a triple-play plan, where other services cost extra. The standalone price is pretty darn steep — $199 a month — which I think is a shame. Comcast should have sold this at a more affordable price….A Comcast spokesperson says that their 250 GB cap applies to this super-fast broadband connection as well…

Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV, Spotify and Pandora make up most of my [Om's] digital content diet. When it comes to work, it’s now all in the “cloud” via Google Docs and Gmail. With higher bandwidth, the experience of all these services has improved for me. With Comcast making the higher speeds available nationwide, the upside is going to be for all these streaming services.I predict they will see a big bump in usage.

It’s a shame Comcast is initiating this service as if it was 2007 and the Great Recession hadn’t happened, yet. Anyone on a fixed income has been spending the last few years cutting back – not expanding their discretionary bump.

At the moment it feels like I have an increase in download/streaming speed with my much less expensive Comcast broadband. That may be a temporary side effect while they tune and tweak the changes they’ve made. I was getting upload speeds comparable to download for spell while they engaged their throttling system and that has settled down to a 5mbps maximum.

Swedish authorities say they are looking for relatives of a man who might have lain dead in his apartment for over three years with no one noticing.

The elderly man’s body was found when a broadband technician showed up to do an installation in the apartment building, the Swedish news agency TT reported.

It wasn’t known when the man died, but investigators said food in his refrigerator was dated early 2008. His advanced degree of decomposition indicated he had been dead about three years, investigators said…

The man’s pension was automatically deposited in his account and his bills were paid by automatic debits.

“It is very tragic,” said Asa Johannesson of the Flemingsberg police…

“He lived alone, but there are relatives. But they obviously had no contact,” Johannesson said.

Police said there was no indication of a crime having been committed.

My kind of family. A hermit – and people who don’t get along with hermits.

Republican version of broadband

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday will propose the first steps toward converting the $8 billion fund that subsidizes rural telephone service into one for helping pay to provide broadband Internet service to underserved areas, according to commission officials…

Most of the money under discussion involves a longstanding subsidy known as the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for through fees tacked onto most consumers’ phone bills and distributed among telephone companies to subsidize the high costs of providing service to rural areas.

Mr. Genachowski will propose phasing out the payments between phone companies, which he says create “inefficiencies and perverse incentives” that result in waste in the fund. The F.C.C. will also propose consolidating existing methods of paying for rural phone service into a new pool to be called the Connect America Fund, to be used for helping pay for making broadband available to underserved areas.

The current Universal Service Fund and its spending methods are “unsustainable,” according to a draft of Mr. Genachowski’s remarks prepared for Monday. “It was designed for a world with separate local and long-distance telephone companies, a world of traditional landline telephones before cellphones or Skype, a world without the Internet — a world that no longer exists.”

“At the end of this transition, we would no longer subsidize telephone networks; instead we would support broadband,” which then could be used for phone service, Mr. Genachowski plans to say…

So far, the F.C.C. has outlined efforts to expand broadband availability only though wired connections. But commission officials say that they will almost certainly look at whether it makes sense to try to use the growth of wireless Internet service as a spur to expand high-speed Internet access for underserved areas.

Whatever the mechanism, folks like me – living just a couple miles outside city limits into rural New Mexico – will support such a change. The operative word, once again, being choice.

I can have erratic and throttled, overpriced service from Comcast – or barely minimal DSL from Qwest. That’s my range of providers. Satellite service is even more expensive and has its own set of tech problems. Folks living another few miles further away from any sizable city or town – have no options. They get nothing, nada, broadband.

Technology that improves mobile phone reception indoors is starting to break into the mass market as operators struggling with network congestion have started to distribute these devices for free.

A femtocell is a small, low-power indoor base station for 3G mobile phone networks, enabling operators who struggle with network capacity to improve indoor coverage at a much lower cost than the alternative of adding more large mobile phone towers.

The emerging femtocell market has so far remained a small business partly due to the high costs of technology, but this year the wholesale price has dropped below $100, enabling operators to give them away for free.

Google-backed Ubiquisys — one of the top firms in the new market — told Reuters it expects millions of femtocells using its technology to be sold next year, compared with 2010 volumes in hundreds of thousands…

“There have been some launches since summer and a few operators have started giving them away free to customers, like AT&T in some cities,” he said…

In addition to Ubiquisys, major technology firms like Cisco , Samsung Electronics, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei make femtocells.

The devices are plugged into a customer’s broadband Internet connection, like a wireless Internet base station, and allow users to make calls or use data services with their regular 3G mobile phones.

With near $100 smartphones starting to hit the stores, and use of video on phones starting to proliferate, most telecoms operators around the world are struggling with network capacity.

Fearful of losing customers, only a few have publicly admitted to the problem of keeping pace with data traffic, but 63 percent are experiencing difficulties, a global survey of 30 operators by telecoms software firm Amdocs showed last week.

I’m not holding my breath; but, I guess I will call T-Mobile to see if I can wangle something like this out of them.

We haven’t had a landline in years. Mostly we use Skype. But, our T-Mobile cheapo Samsung phones are what we carry for use away from a computer or iPad around Lot 4.

A major CSIRO breakthrough in wireless technology designed to bring broadband to people living beyond the optical fibre network, is being unveiled in Sydney.

The first half of CSIRO’s Ngara technology will enable multiple users to upload information at the same time, without reducing their individual systems’ data transfer rate of 12 Mbps.

“Someone who doesn’t live near the fibre network could get to it using our new wireless system,” CSIRO ICT Centre Director Dr Ian Oppermann said.

“They’d be able to upload a clip to YouTube in real-time and their data rate wouldn’t change even if five of their neighbours also started uploading videos.

“But the really impressive part is the spectral efficiency our team has achieved…”

“Even with just half of our system completed, CSIRO is already helping define the future of wireless technology,” Dr Oppermann said.

Wireless Research Director for Gartner, Robin Simpson, said the most promising aspect of CSIRO’s Ngara technology is that it aims to re-use old analog TV channels.

“This means any rural property or business that can currently receive TV signals could in future connect to high-speed internet just by using a new set-top box,” Mr Simpson said.

CSIRO is currently completing the research and testing of the downlink part of the system, which will also run at 12 Mbps per user.

Bravo. Getting Web access to rural populations is always tough.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to release the first batch of unlicensed wireless spectrum in 25 years tomorrow, which could lead to “Wi-Fi on Steroids,” giving consumers, device makers, entrepreneurs and service providers more connectivity over wider areas.
 
The FCC is scheduled to vote tomorrow morning on a set of rules that will set the release of this so-called “white spaces broadband” into motion, giving device makers and others the guidelines on how they can use the spectrum. This could inject new competition in the wireless broadband space and provide a boost to technology companies hoping to connect more consumers. Just as Wi-Fi tapped unlicensed spectrum and untethered millions of consumers, white spaces could have a similar effect on a broader scale.

White spaces refers to the unused television spectrum that traditionally existed between channels as buffers or empty spectrum left over or vacated by TV stations through the transition from analog to digital TV. The FCC voted two years ago to approve the unlicensed use of whites spaces. Here’s what you need to know about white spaces.

Because of its lower frequency, white spaces can offer much broader reach and better penetration through walls than the current spectrum used for Wi-Fi…

The added range and performance could help connect rural communities, allow schools to light up entire campuses, help service providers relieve burdened cellular networks and could help with things like in-home video streaming and smart meter monitoring…

Since white spaces would remain unlicensed, the use of it could interfere with local broadcasters…so, of course…the National Association of Broadcasters has filed a lawsuit.

Though, no evidence of problems exists because the use of white spaces hasn’t yet started.

And here we are with the results of the vote and lots more detail.

Circulation declines and falling revenue for newspapers and magazines have fueled concern that Americans are replacing traditional offline news sources with online sources. However, a new study by the Pew Center for People and the Press that looked at time spent with different sources of news found that growth in online news consumption hasn’t come at the expense of traditional media such as newspapers and television, but rather has added to it. In fact, people are spending more time with the news than they have at almost any point over the last 15 years, according to the Center’s research.

While it’s true there’s been a gradual decline in the number of people who say they get their daily news from newspapers, magazines and television (with newspapers suffering the biggest decline in consumption), the Pew study found that some of this decline was being compensated for by the increase in numbers of people who were finding their news online, and many people were also adding online consumption to their existing news habits. This has caused the amount of time spent on news to actually increase over the past few years, the center’s research shows, to the point where overall time spent is as high as it was 15 years ago…

More than a third of those surveyed said that they got news from both digital and traditional sources, which the Pew Center said suggests that “instead of replacing traditional news platforms, Americans are increasingly integrating new technologies into their news consumption habits.”

I’d call this good news.

Wonder what sort of ideologue, pundit or pipsqueak would say otherwise?

President Barack Obama has announced nearly $800 million in loans and grants for the build-out of broadband networks to reach homes, schools and hospitals.

The grants and loans, which will be matched by another $200 million in private investment, is part of Obama’s roughly $800 billion federal stimulus package, which includes $7.2 billion for broadband expansion projects. Obama said the 66 new infrastructure projects will directly create 5,000 jobs and help spur economic development in some of the nation’s hardest-hit communities…

The departments of Agriculture and Commerce are administering a total of $7.2 billion in grants and loans for projects in 50 states and Washington, D.C.

Increasing broadband access to rural and low-income families and small businesses is a major part of the National Broadband Plan issued by the Federal Communications Commission earlier this year…

The projects Obama announced will include laying communications lines to homes, hospitals and schools and expanding computer facilities in libraries, community colleges and other public areas…

“Broadband can remove geographic barriers between patients and their doctors,’ Obama said. “It can connect our kids to the digital skills and 21st century education required for the jobs of the future.”

I’ve had some reasonably humorous discussions with county officials in my neck of the prairie. They’re pretty much headed in the right direction at trying to fill in the broadband gaps in a county that is 2,000 square miles – with about 100,000 people outside the limits of the one for-real city in the county.

Anyway, the two biggest problems the county has are [1] filling out all the bloody federal paperwork and [2] trying to keep our own solutions separate from whatever the city wants to do. Or not do.

Tea Party fears of Internet thought control

U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to free up airways would nearly double the amount of commercial spectrum currently available for wireless devices. The plan would make available 500 megahertz of federal and commercial spectrum over the next 10 years…

Freeing up spectrum would also create jobs by meeting the growing demand for mobile and fixed broadband, spur economic growth and raise funds to build an emergency network for public safety workers, the official said.

Some estimates suggest the next five years will see an increase in wireless data of between 20 to 45 times 2009 levels, reflecting the burgeoning use of smartphones, netbooks and other wireless devices…

“This initiative will catalyze private sector investment, contribute to economic growth, and help to create hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Larry Summers said in excerpts made available in advance of a speech to the New America Foundation.

Under the policy, most of the freed-up spectrum would be auctioned for mobile broadband use…revenues from the auction would provide funding to help build a nationwide mobile broadband network for public safety.

After Hurricane Katrina and other botched government responses, that mobile broadband network was proposed to the Republican-controlled Congress – and got nowhere. Not enough profit guaranteed for the Telco corporate giants – even though Bush would have given it away in lieu of more tax cuts.

The network is overdue. Greater access to broadband is overdue. Anyone think the crew in Congress will back up the memorandum from the White House with anything more than ennui and foot-dragging?