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January 30, 2005 |
WTVN Radio • Columbus, Ohio Sunday morning from 8 until 9 |
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WiMaxNot everyone has access to high-speed Internet connections. An acquaintance lives in Chicago and, because of the lousy telephone wiring in his apartment building, can get only about a 20Kbps Internet connection. The wiring won't support DSL and cable isn't an option for him. Another acquaintance lives in eastern Ohio, several miles from a small town. Cable isn't available and isn't likely to be anytime soon. He's too far from the telephone company's central office for DSL to work. He's not interested in satellite. So his best connection is about 28.8Kbps. For someone who routinely has access to a 2Mbps (2000Kbps) connection, 28.8Kbps is hard to imagine, even though I remember the days when that was considered impossibly fast. But the promise of the Internet is lost on those who live in rural areas or who live in urban areas with bad telephone lines and no cable. There's a solution waiting in the wings. It's related to "WiFi" and it's called "WiMax". Maybe you've popped in to a Starbucks or a Panera Bread to surf the Web over a high-speed wireless connection. Or maybe you've seen this kind of connectivity in airports. What if you could have that same connection on a city bus or in your house? That's WiMax. WiMax is similar to WiFi but it has a 10-mile range instead of the typical WiFi 150-feet range. And the companies providing WiMax service don't have to string miles and miles of expensive cable between some central office and your home. WiMax can deliver high-speed Internet access to small businesses, homes, and bus riders for whom cable and DSL aren't feasible. Intel has already shipped WiMax chips to equipment manufacturers. We'll see full deployment in 2007 if the 50 or so 50 WiMax tests around the country prove successful. Most of the phone and cellular companies are members of the WiMax Forum (about 150 members so far) because they see the technology's promise (and they understand the technology's threat to the still pitifully slow "G3" cellular technologies.) WiMax effectively solves what technicians call the "last mile" problem. It's easy and profitable to create high-speed connections from central office to central office, but it's difficult, expensive, and not profitable to provide that same kind of connection speed from a central office to a home or business. The jury is still outWiMax is new technology, but it's not a new idea. Sprint experimented with "fixed wireless" services in the 1990s and found that line-of-sight issues, expensive hardware, and other problems made the service far more expensive than expected. Sprint no longer offers the service. Whether the latest iteration is the one that succeeds is probably less important than knowing that someone, sometime will develop the wide-area wireless LAN technology that will succeed. If WiMax is the one, that's great! If not, we'll see some other solution someday. Sooner or later. And I'm betting on sooner. The process is startingEarlier this month, Joe and I talked about predictions that nearly 50% of US homes will have broadband access by 2007, which is about double the percentage of homes that have access now. We know that access won't be by cable (too expensive) and that it probably won't be by DSL (technical limitations). Satellite service is available, but it's expensive and not really fast enough. WiMax would do it, though. I had already written most of this report by then, but felt that I should add to this report a message that I received after the January 9th show. Roger Williams graciously gave me permission to quote his comments:
It was small, local companies that provided Internet service initially – long before the national providers showed up and either bought out or took over the business. That may be how this plays out in the long run, but it's good to see that the build-out has finally begun. Until high-speed access is available at a reasonable price to everyone who wants it, the promise will not be fulfilled. How much is that WiFi in the window?If you have a Windows computer with Centrino WiFi built in or an Apple Powerbook with AirPort built in, you can connect -- more or less effortlessly -- with wireless local area networks (WLAN) in Starbucks coffee shops, Panera restaurants, some libraries, some college campuses, and some office buildings. But short of dragging your computer out of its case and turning it on, how do you know if a signal is present? You could buy a signal sniffer -- a device that checks the frequencies used by WLANs. It would tell you if a signal was present. But the early devices weren't particularly sophisticated. All they could do was tell you if there was a nearby signal on the frequencies used by WiFi. But not every signal these devices could see were indicative of the presence of a WLAN. And even if it was a WLAN, you didn't know if it was open or closed. That's changed recently with the arrival of a pocket-size detector from Canary Wireless. Their Digital Hotspotter is different in that it has more than a light-emitting diode. There's an LCD display that tells you not only the name of any WLANs it happens to find, but also what channel they're operating on, the signal strength, and whether they're open, closed, or masked. I wish I'd had one of these when I stopped at a Giant Burnt Coffee Company location in New York's Penn Station. Many of the company's locations provide free WiFi access, but that store's access point wasn't working. I didn't know that until I'd bought a cup of burnt coffee and sat down at a table. (Yes, I could have just sat down at a table without buying a cup of burnt coffee, but I figure that if I'm going to use their facilities, I should at least play the game.) By the way – if you travel to New York City and would like free high-speed Internet access, try stopping at a library. Most branches of the New York Public Library have WiFi access points.
In that regard, the device could be used for "war driving", which is what people call the "sport" of driving around to look for open WLANs. If you have a wireless LAN, you really should be running it in secure mode because you never know who might drive by and decide to take a look at any shares that might be available on your home LAN. The Canary Wireless device isn't designed for war drivers, though. Those folks have even more sophisticated (and much larger) hardware. This device is mainly designed for people who travel and would like an easy way to find out if there's an accessible WLAN nearby. Speaking of which -- if you're staying in a hotel that charges a lot for telephone time to connect (slowly) to the Internet or that charges even more for a moderately fast broadband connection, are you obligated to use it if you happen to find an open WLAN nearby? How about an analogy: If you're thirsty and you see a hose that's connected to a spigot that's on the side of a house and the hose is unattended, hanging on a white picket fence and dispensing water into the street, could you reasonably use it? You'll have to decide that one. But even if you use the Canary Wireless WiFi Hotspotter for nothing more than confirming the presence of a WiFi signal in an airport, coffee shop, restaurant, college campus, or office prior to breaking out the computer, you'll be happy. If you travel -- even infrequently -- this $50 tool is a pretty cool device to have in your bag of tricks. Before you go ...It doesn't hurt to see what resources might be available in your area. When I travel to New York City, I usually stay in one of several Harlem bed and breakfast locations because they're inexpensive (for New York), quiet, and close to the subway system. But they don't offer high-speed Internet access. It's easy to check, prior to a trip to any city, to determine where you should look for nearby WiFi access.
Try all of them. You'll get some duplication, of course, but none of the finders knows about every hotspot and new ones pop up all the time. If you find yourself in a town and you haven't been able to check out the resources in advance, sniff around the local library branches, Starbucks, and Panera Bread.
DVD CD Plus Minus Dual RAM ROM dual ... aaaaagh!You can't tell the players without a program and maybe not even with a program. The ROM-RAM fight was largely settled several years ago (RAM won) and the Plus/Minus battle is essentially done (Plus won and even Apple is moving that way). Now there's the dual-layer kerfuffle.
The drive supports DVD-R/-RW, DVD+R/DVD+R DL/+RW - DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, CD - CD-DA, CD-ROM (XA), CD Extra, Video CD, Photo CD(additional software required), CD Text, multi-session. That's just about anything you'll want to read or write -- at least for the immediate future. And this $130 drive is no slouch when it comes to reading or writing:
Sustained data transfer rate: 16.2 MB/s max. (12X DVD-ROM) Average access time: 135 ms (DVD 16X), 140 ms (CD 48X) The Sony DRU-710A comes with Ahead NeroVision Express DVD video editing and authoring software, Ahead Nero Burning ROM CD/DVD mastering software, Ahead InCD drive letter recording software, Ahead Nero Showtime soft DVD player software, Ahead Nero BackitUp backup software, black front panel replacement kit, ATAPI cable and mounting hardware, and a user's manual. Nerdly NewsApple corpsMissed this last week -- not enough time. Apple is having trouble keeping up with demand for the Mac Mini. Big surprise? Not around here. If you want one of these little (tiny?) computers, give Apple the extra $100 to double the disk size and increase the processor speed a bit. The Mac Mini isn't the right choice if you're a video or graphics pro, but it's a great way to find out what makes Apple tick. Speaking of small stuff, there are reports that Apple will soon ship a larger Ipod Mini. Seagate is reported to be the supplier for 1-inch drives with a 5GB capacity. Until now, Apple has used Hitachi's 1-inch drives, but Hitachi's limit is currently 4GB. Hitachi is working on larger capacity drives and hopes to ship 8GM and 10GB 1-inch drives by the end of 2005. That's news in its own right: can you imagine a 10GB drive that's an INCH wide and about the thickness of three credit cards? If you're old enough to remember 10MB disk drives the size of washing machines, this might be a bit difficult to comprehend. Sources say the next generation Ipod Mini will be silver (like the PowerBook). And speaking of PowerBooks -- there's a chance that Apple will ship a G5 PowerBook later this year. That should be a real lap warmer. The G4 PowerBooks get too hot to be held on the lap, so one has to wonder what will happen when there's a G5 processor in there! Where all the children are above averageIf you're familiar with Garrison Keillor, you know that all the children in Lake Woebegone are above average. If you've ever spoken with a bad driver who caused a wreck, you've probably been told it was "the other guy's fault." Should we be surprised by research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that says 92% of Internet users feel they are confident about their ability to use search engines even though only 38% are able to tell the difference between paid and unpaid results and less than 20% of search engine users can always tell which results are paid and which are not? Actually, I am a bit surprised. It makes me wonder how many people who listen to WTVN are unable to tell the difference between the drivel Joe and I put forth and the advertisements people pay to have played ... how many people can tell the difference between "Entertainment Tonight" and a commercial for Buddy's Carpet (well, OK, maybe that's a bit of a stretch) ... or how many people can tell the difference between an editorial in the Dispatch, news coverage, and ads. This week I received a forwarded message from a highly intelligent professional who fell for a hoax that's been around the Internet since the mid 1990s. It's one that could easily have been checked and debunked with a 30-second trip to the Urban Legends website. The lesson? Caution. Don't assume that just because it appeared on a website that it's true. Don't assume that just because someone you consider to be intelligent sent something to you that it's true. There's a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. If the nation is to survive, we need more skeptics. Oh, by the way, have you heard -- they took "gullible" out of the dictionary! Let us know what you think. Write to:
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NINE CATS: It's so easy that even one of my cats could operate it and they don't even have opposable thumbs. If you can press a button you can use this device and, while the cats wouldn't understand the display on the LCD screen, you will because it's written in more or less plain English. You'll know, without having to take out your computer and have it search for a nearby network, whether you're in range.
What's surprising is this: Drives that can handle all of the formats are surprisingly affordable. I haven't looked at one of these yet, but consider the under $130 DRU-710A from Sony. The specifications say this is an internal "combination" drive "DVD-R/-RW, DVD+RW/+R/+R DL, CD-R/RW Drive." Whew! 
