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> That is just plain not true (16e being restricted only)

I may have oversimplified, but let me explain. There are two components to this: the standard as defined by the IEEE, and the profiles as defined by the WiMAX Forum. The former describes the components of the MAC and PHY layers. The latter describes the frequencies, channel bandwidth, number of tones for the OFDM signal, and other parameters. The IEEE standard 802.16e-2005 is not defined for unlicensed spectrum. The profiles defined by the WiMAX Forum are defined by the Mobile Task Group (MTG), and there are several major profiles:

  * 1A: 2300 - 2400 MHz, 8.75 MHz channels (otherwise known as the WiBro profile)
  * 1B: 2300-2400 MHz, 5/10 MHz channels
  * 2A/B/C: 2305-2360 (corresponding to the WCS spectrum in the US), 3.5/5/10 MHz channels
  * 3A: 2496-2690 MHz, 5/10 MHz
  * 4A/B/C: 3300-3400 MHz with 5/7/10 MHz channel bandwidths
  * 5A/B/CL: 3400-3600 MHz with 5/7/10 MHz channels
  * 5A/B/CH: 3600-3800 MHz with 5/7/10 MHz channels

In the U.S. 2.3 and 2.5 GHz are defined as allocated spectrum (similar for Canada, except with the addition of 2.5 GHz). However, for the last one, this does encompass the 3650 MHz license exempt range in the U.S., but because of the way the FCC defined the rules, it isn't clear how existing 3.5 GHz 16e equipment being sold for licensed spectrum in Canada and Europe will be adapted to the frequency.

> And I would not call 16d "old." It's what most people are using.

16d (or to use its formal name IEEE 802.16d-2004) was ratified in 2004, while the 16e (IEEE 802.16e-2005) standard was ratified in 2005. So it is correct to call 16d the older standard. 16e offers many improvements over 16d, including the ability to scale the number of OFDM tones with the channel bandwidth, support for turbo coding to improve the link budget, and significantly improved authentication methods.

> Every company that I've dealt with is a fixed provider and has bought 16d equipment.
> I don't know any mobile providers yet (they are coming, but I don't personally know of any).

You're correct that in terms of deployed WiMAX today, it's all 16d equipment; 16e equipment is still in the market trial stage, happening all over the world. It is expected that starting in 2007, 16e deployments will dwarf 16d deployments, with 16e growing to 10x the size of 16d. Almost all 16d equipment vendors are announcing plans to try to convert their equipment to 16e, since that's the direction the market is going. The major wireless infrastructure vendors who are doing WiMAX (Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Nortel, Nokia Siemens, etc) are all adopting 16e. This is because the major holders of spectrum in North America are planning on moving to 16e, with the largest being Sprint Nextel. Similarly, note that BellSouth is testing 16e as well. The consensus in the industry is that 16e will be the basis for broadband wireless access, with 16d (as well as the proprietary variants) relegated to niche deployments or going away.

The first version of @acronym{UNIX} was developed on a PDP-7 which was sitting around Bell Labs. In 1971 the developers wanted to get a PDP-11 for further work on the operating system. In order to justify the cost for this system, they proposed that they would implement a document formatting system for the AT&T patents division. This first formatting program was a reimplementation of McIllroy's roff, written by J. F. Ossanna.

"Alcatel 5900 AmigoTV and Alcatel 5900 MyOwnTV"

http://www.home.alcatel.com/vpr/vpr.nsf/DateKey/03 102005_1uk

it will come...

New company name to be determined at a later date

Geez... Alcatel is French allright, but what does that really means ?

CGE/Alcatel is not a Government Owned Company since 1987. (http://www.alcatel.com/apropos/history/index.htm)

This is a Public Company. Grantrd the board of director seems mainly French, but if you want to now who really owns or control a multinational like that, you need to be a financial detective.

France used to rely on Governement Owned Company for critical infrastructure and defense industries, because thats the only way to keep control. The US has never done that (except maybe during FDR's New Deal) so why should it be more worried now ?

Once we start assuming that a company is a person, things get confused.
A company is like a person, whose mind is controlled by real people. The nationality of the company doesnt really matter, mostly what you should be worried about is the intentions of the people owning the company.

Do you really think the intentions of a French Capitalist are so different that the intention of an American one ?

You forgot "make exceptionally good high end routers". Service routers that can work at layers 2 and 3, excellent HA capabilities that are ideal for building large MPLS clouds. Having had the pleasure of testing these babies, they rock! And they sell pretty well too.

Yes, because SaskTel is a US company, and so is Alcatel.

It all seems so clear to me now :)

Sure, there are some equipment costs, but if these types of connections are used on just the primary backbones that still would provide a LOT of bandwidth.

Look at it this way. Is your Internet access slowing down steadily as more people go online? Not likely. If we were using all available capacity it would be. Requests would get queued up and delayed.

If Hong Kong can offer 1 Gbps Internet access for $215/mo and Japan can offer 100 Mbps access for around $40/mo or less, I certainly think Verizon could manage to NOT need to change teired rates on 3Mbps lines.

Probably all working for the Chinese

Alcatel: The parent company is based out of France, with close ties to the government. Probably pro-open source.

Ericsson: Sony owns them. This won't last. Sure, they've got a good track record, but...

Motorola: they're in it to make money, acquiring open source companies and selling linux-based phones.

NEC: They jumped on Itanium for their cluster platform, so they joined OSDL two years ago, probably to make sure their investment paid off.

Siemens: Just barely joined the OSDL. Siemens Communications is primarily a hardware company; from my POV they're just trying to push their profit margin.

Nokia: they seem pretty secure as a cell phone company; I think they're into OSS genuinely to benefit the community. Take a look at what they're Open Sourcing.

Their contributions to open source notwithstanding, it looks like they want to:

1. Form alliance, apply magic words "Open Source"
2. Post article on slashdot, improve public image
3. Wait for OSS community to write their software
4. Sell COTS hardware to upgrade cell networks
5. Profit!

Of course, maybe they're working on Carrier Grade Linux just so they don't have to buy Micro$oft products any more.

Who cares about downloading their TV crap-o-rama? I want to upload my own reality show crap-o-rama! SHAZAM!

Sounds like you need Personal Broadcaster [warning: PDF].

Cassiny/Huygens isn't a US/UK mission, it's a work of collaboration between NASA and ESA, and it says here that the European contribution is led by Alcatel Space, a French company. You can find more details regarding each agency's contribution here.

Checking out this article, it says the South Korean government instituted an aggressive policy to bring broadband to more areas. The United States doesn't have this, the United States broadband speed runs at the telecom companies willingness to increase speed. If they can extract X dollars for Y Mbps speed and make a nice profit, why spend a ton of money to extract 2X dollars for 5Y Mbps speed (meanwhile your profit margin shrinks) for customers without your government giving you money and saying "do it now". Just get the US Federal Government to pull money from defense spending and pour it into public works like broadband. If the government helps to pay for the cost to do the massive overhaul, that will lower the average customers bill because the money would come out of your taxes and not your monthly bill. I personally don't care, my 4Mbps is just fine for my uses. There's more problems in the world today than if my broadband speed is 4Mbps or 25Mbps.

The DVD format will be nothing more than a flash in the pan, according to the chief executive of Alcatel.

Hello? He's the CEO of http://www.alcatel.com/, NOT the CEO of Universal/ Sony etc. You might as well have asked the CEO of Cisco if they think video data will be delieverd on disks or as data streams over networks.
These guys have a vested interest in saying "Hey invest in us because we are the way of the future"

http://www.alcatel.com/ http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_02 /b3865705.htm *ahem* I don't think this really needs discussing any further. People have interests, these interests are financial - people will say things to support these financial interests. Obviously the CEO of a NETWORK company would like to convince people that physical storage of data is a thing of the past.

All those examples of deployed service are based on Alcatel OMP. Alcatel pretty much owns this space with the exception of a bit of noise from the likes of Microsoft (who have yet to actually launch something that works)

According to this http://www.home.alcatel.com/vpr/vpr.nsf/DateKey/28 072004_1uk/ the manufacturer of the HiRes camera is Alcatel. It seems that they have similar equipment on spot 5 (http://www.spotimage.fr/html/_167_238_.php?group= 0104/). However, It might be a if you want 1m satellite images!) Sorry for the formatting...

Yeah, like there are none already...

In other parts of the world, wireless carriers had been forced to implement number portability, years before it was decided in the US.

Telecom equipment vendors have been offering standardized solution packages to allow number portability. Some examples: Ericsson, Alcatel, Siemens.

One site shows pics and says they have at least prototyped a flat panel c-band antenna:
http://www.skygate.bg/skygate/Acivities/SampleProd ucts.htm They are a Bulgarian company with Dutch backing partnering with AlcaTel I might be a bit difficultto buy one from them however.

Who makes these things ... the main players nowadays are Alcatel , NEC and Tyco but there are others.

I work for Alcatel Belgium (I work on the SMC 5735 RADIUS Proxy, a part of the 5020 SoftSwitch), and I can assure you that quite a number of products run on Linux, for example our OmniPCXOffice products. And you might find even more in the future (can't comment on that).

Other companies provide Linux based solutions too. And why not ? It's just an operating system. The fact that the Telecom companies are choosing Linux just proves that Linux is very stable. The actual fact that it's free has nothing to do with it (the cost for a license would be an extremely small part in the TCO).

And no, it can't be downloaded for free, just because it's Linux. That the first question my friends alwasy ask. Most of the software is propriety, and often written for special hardware. And also extremly expensive ofcourse, otherwise who would pay for all those hundreds of engineers that are developing them ?

I work for Alcatel Belgium (I work on the SMC 5735 RADIUS Proxy, a part of the 5020 SoftSwitch), and I can assure you that quite a number of products run on Linux, for example our OmniPCXOffice products. And you might find even more in the future (can't comment on that).

Other companies provide Linux based solutions too. And why not ? It's just an operating system. The fact that the Telecom companies are choosing Linux just proves that Linux is very stable. The actual fact that it's free has nothing to do with it (the cost for a license would be an extremely small part in the TCO).

And no, it can't be downloaded for free, just because it's Linux. That the first question my friends alwasy ask. Most of the software is propriety, and often written for special hardware. And also extremly expensive ofcourse, otherwise who would pay for all those hundreds of engineers that are developing them ?

Hopefully IHNBT, but here we go anyway.
I think I would like to end up like South Korea.
Alcatel notes:
Spurred by aggressive government policy, South Korea has become the uncontested champion of the world in broadband Internet. Over half the country's 48 million citizens regularly log onto the Net, and 85 percent of new subscribers purchase high-speed service.

Mmm...broadband...

Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Sagem, Alcatel, Symbian.
The list could go on. Many, many of the big players in the mobile phone market (phones, network technology, software) are located in. Europe. Europe is a huge market. Not only Italy or Finnland, but also the other big and small countries (DE, FR, GB, ES) have a penetration beyond 60%. There are approximately twice as many mobile phones in Europe as in the US.

And the younger generation wants to do more than just phone someone. SMS, Games, even the number of ringtones or display colors is a very important factor for many customers here.
I believe that while EMS (enhanced message service) was useless like WAP, MMS (multimedia message service) will be used widely. Many people (especially nerds) laugh about these uses but you shouldn't underestimate how much they are accepted by other people. Mobile Multimedia Instant Messaging willl later (with the help of GPRS and UMTS) bring the Internet into the mobile world:
EVERNET. It's not just a marketing hype! If the price is ok (and even if it isn't -> SMS), the (European) customers will use it, because it changes their life so much. For all these features you need software, capable delivering these "services":
You should take a closer look on the Symbian OS v7. It's a well engineered OS with a bright future. One day, at some places in Europe, it might be used more frequently than MS Windows.

We will see who will win this war. One could even call it a war between continents... but this would perhaps be too flamebait. My guess: At the end everyone will find their niche!

Alcatel made my DSL modem and seem to be in the market of making data communication products.

When using a mobile while on the move, one frequently finds oneself changing from cell to cell. In order to ensure that the conversation is not cut off, GSM mobile phones detect the nearest antennae and automatically trigger the changeover from one to the next, according to what is known as a "hand-over" mechanism. This transfer uses up more energy than an ordinary call. If many such hand-overs are called for, because the caller is travelling at high speed, there is a risk that the battery will wear out quickly. Not only that, but the risk of being cut off increases with the number of hand-overs, of course. In addition to that, when travelling at over 300km/h, this mechanism is more complex than at 50 km/h. In order to overcome these problems and to ensure that cover is efficient in high speed transport, a specific version of the GSM standard has been created, called GSM-R (R for Railway). Most high speed rail links in Europe are already fitted with this system, which is in fact a network specific to the rail line in question and which is a complement to the network which covers the whole of the area through which the train runs.

There are several vendors building hardware in this space. For example, a bunch of my friends and former Packet Engines coworkers started World Wide Packets, which builds boxes that amount to the same thing. They're a two year old startup that is waiting for a market to appear for their hardware. Their stuff rocks, but they only make equipment and don't control the deployment.

FYI Packet Engines was acquired by Alcatel in late 1998. They managed to bungle their way through the acquisition of several companies in a short time, completely crushing out of existence some very promising technology through truly appalling corporate stupidity during what was the biggest boom time in history for ethernet and IP routing infrastructure manufacturers.

Alas, Packet Engines and nearly all of the others are now almost completely gone.

Alcatel has products in this market too. Take a look at the
Alcatel 7340 Home Optical Network Terminal for details. It also has POTS, CATV, DBS, and 10BaseT.

I sure hope that the phone companies do a better job of rolling out FTTU than they have ADSL.

1) The fiber is configured for OC-x services as TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) which basically means each copper phone circuits (DS-0) has a specific timeslot in the muxed OC-x circuit back to the phone switch. This works fine for alarm circuits, T1, phone lines, ISDN ... Anything that fits into the DS-0 building block of the phone company. The Internet is packet based and typically ATM (cell switched) is used for feeding information to DSLAMs (DSL Access Multiplexors). The fiber feeding your circuit would have to be reconfigured to handle the packetized data.

2). The copper from your home is terminated on the litespan. The DSL needs to originate from the litespan. The maker of the litespan (Alcatel, Inc.) needs to make a linecard which supports DSL.

I think all this technology exists, or is in late stages of development. I have been told by my Verizon reps (I resell Verizon DSL) that they are looking to support DSL over fiber sometime later this year. They will start with IDSL which is 128k/128k and fits nicely in the DS-0/OC-3 TDM network that is already in place.

Basically, it is coming, you'll just have to wait. Right now Verizon can't keep up with orders on areas they can easily serve (high density copper served locations direct from CO). Once that market saturates, They will be looking at the fiber fed markets.

"Now, I hope and pray that I will, but, today I am still just a bill"

Can't they place the DSL termination (DSLAM) in the curb box ? Well, the answer is flatly no.

Really? You might want to check with Alcatel or Lucent or AFC or NEC or Nortel about that.

(Maybe they don't go into curb boxes, but they do go into the neighborhood DLC remote terminal....)

Originally, POTS (plain old telephone service) was delivered out of COs (central offices) with a twisted pair going to each customer. This is known as the local loop and typically covered a 3 mile radius from the CO. As switches became saturated and neighborhoods/businesses sprang up further from the CO, the question of how to deliver POTS to these outlying areas came up. Building more COs at several million $ each was not cost effective.

This dilemma was very much like the xDSL problem the telcos are faced with today with DSLAMS that extend 15-18 kft. The solution to the original local loop problem is also the solution to the xDSL loop limit. In the case of POTS, DLCs (digital loop carriers) are used to extend the reach of the CO by placing remote terminals just about anywhere -- as long as you can feed that terminal with copper or fiber (and their inherent distance limitations).

DLCs have evolved into an alphabet soup of features and acronyms (NGDLC, MSAP, IMAP, etc). The current IMAPs (integrated multiservice access platform) deliver nearly any type of analog or data service over copper, fiber, and RF.

So, with an IMAP, VZ can deliver that xDSL service (which is ATM-based) over copper or fiber or RF. In this configuration, the DSLAM is pushed out to the remote terminal. There's no reason ATM traffic can't be transported over copper -- it happens all the time! The challenge is having the equipment to handle the conversion between electrons and photons (among other things). If you can put that equipment (hardened) in a remote terminal, then the sky's the limit as long as the customer is within the range of the remote terminal.

If you want to know more about this, check into SBC's Project Pronto. SBC has selected two DLC/IMAP vendors (AFC & Alcatel) to provide equipment for a digital overlay. Verizon is reported to be very interested in AFC's xDSL solution (essentially a DSLAM on a card), as well. Another good source for the technically curious is WebProForum.

If you go to the Alcatel site http://www.alcatel.com/consumer/dsl/security.htm you see that the original Alcatel .doc file was posted April 12th (12/4/01), yet the Alcatel file downloaded from their site was modified April 16th (you can check this in the File -> Properties).

If Alcatel had not modified their .doc file as moron.com suggests, then why is the file modification date four days after the post date?

Bobby
http://wso.williams.edu/~rmcgehee

According to the register, Alcatel will be releasing Linux USB drivers for its ASDL modem in the next month or so...Open source etc...
It will be here.

Yeah, but can you find those Linux/Mac drivers? The modem you get's made by Alcatel. Their site says something like, "We're working on Mac drivers. No chance for Linux."

Well, in October 1999, I succumbed to the siren songs of ADSL service. Not having cable, I pretty much had no choice and had to use Bell Sympatico's service.

When the modem arrived a few days after my signup, I hooked it up and it worked flawlessly. Then, I found out many horror stories about Bell's ADSL service. I had even the surprise to discover that they were even phasing out DHCP and taking up PPPoE, which was strange, as I hooked the modem straight to my NT workstation, configured with DHCP.

Turns out that I was in the last pockets of "resistance"... About two months later, DHCP was dropped, and I switched to PPPoE, which worked fine except for maybe three or four times in the further 6 months where I could not connect for about 30-40 minutes.

Then I moved to another part of the country, where ADSL wasn't available. This is surprising, because I live downtown, 3 blocks from the CO which also serves a very high concentration of government offices...

I wasn't very hot with the idea of using a cable modem, because I don't relish TV at all, and because of the abysmal level of service that is so typical of cable companies (they hire people not smart enough to work for phone companies)...

I managed to last 3 months on a 56 kbps hookup, and when the ADSL became available, I jumped on it. So I went to register, was told that there would be a 3 week backlog. I decided to endure the 56kpbs for a while more.

But I had the immense surprise to see a package arrive by courier two days ago, and the documentation bore a notice that the service would be activated today. So, I just hooked-up the modem, and the service logged-on flawlessly first shot. This is my first post with the new service... :) :) :)

Interestingly, the box had a sleek-looking Alcatel Sp eed -Touch Home modem rather than the bland Nortel modem I used to have...

Well, in October 1999, I succumbed to the siren songs of ADSL service. Not having cable, I pretty much had no choice and had to use Bell Sympatico's service.

When the modem arrived a few days after my signup, I hooked it up and it worked flawlessly. Then, I found out many horror stories about Bell's ADSL service. I had even the surprise to discover that they were even phasing out DHCP and taking up PPPoE, which was strange, as I hooked the modem straight to my NT workstation, configured with DHCP.

Turns out that I was in the last pockets of "resistance"... About two months later, DHCP was dropped, and I switched to PPPoE, which worked fine except for maybe three or four times in the further 6 months where I could not connect for about 30-40 minutes.

Then I moved to another part of the country, where ADSL wasn't available. This is surprising, because I live downtown, 3 blocks from the CO which also serves a very high concentration of government offices...

I wasn't very hot with the idea of using a cable modem, because I don't relish TV at all, and because of the abysmal level of service that is so typical of cable companies (they hire people not smart enough to work for phone companies)...

I managed to last 3 months on a 56 kbps hookup, and when the ADSL became available, I jumped on it. So I went to register, was told that there would be a 3 week backlog. I decided to endure the 56kpbs for a while more.

But I had the immense surprise to see a package arrive by courier two days ago, and the documentation bore a notice that the service would be activated today. So, I just hooked-up the modem, and the service logged-on flawlessly first shot. This is my first post with the new service... :) :) :)

Interestingly, the box had a sleek-looking Alcatel Sp eed -Touch Home modem rather than the bland Nortel modem I used to have...

I realize that this message is probably futile and it is totally off-topic but I'm going to post it anyway. I've sent this story to /. twice but it was rejected both times. I've read a lot lately about the RIAA taking legal action to prevent the illegal trading of Mp3's. I don't really agree with this legal action, however I can understand why they are suing most of the companies that they are suing. That is until today. I am a Linux user and Unix Systems Administrator for a large Networking Corporation. I have been using Linux on my Home PC for a number of years now. There was always a couple of things that I have found Linux lacked as compared to Windows. Linux lacks the multimedia features of Windows and the only other thing that I couldn't find for Linux was a really good News reader, something comparable to Forte Agent for windows. The other night I did a search for "linux news readers" and found one called "pan" I downloaded it, compiled it and found that it worked Great! It had almost all the features that Forte Agent had, I was able to download and decode binary attachments in newsgroups, it had great posting capabilities etc. So I decided to check out the developers web site. SuperpimpSoft I couldn't believe what I saw when I got there.

This company is being sued by the RIAA. The RIAA is suing them because their news reader is capable of decoding binary attachments. I'd like to know when the hell the RIAA is going to realize that the entire internet doesn't revolve around Mp3's. I mean come on, because it is capable of decoding binary attachments, that could possibly be Mp3's!! Hell why not sue AOL, MSN and every other ISP that enables people to connect to the internet, because if it weren't for them there is no way people would be trading Mp3's online.

Words cannot express how angry I am right now. Because of the RIAA, a great, open source news reader will have to stop development because it could potently be used to download Mp3's .. well news flash so can Netscape, Internet Explorer, WS_FTP, DOS FTP, Cute FTP, Lynx and the list goes on!!

So I did a Thought for a while .. why would the RIAA want to bully around such a small company that has only one software product, and that product is open source anyway? Then it hit me.. The RIAA knows that these guys can't fight back and they know that they'll probably win in court. This will set a precedent, opening the doors for the RIAA to sue other companies that make news readers, Most popular Windows newsreader .. Forte Free Agent. So I went to Forte's site to do a little digging. When I got there I read that Forte had recently been acquired by a company by the name of Genesys. Genesys is owned by Alcatel! I think that Alcatel should help out the guys at SuperPimpSoft I mean, it would be great PR for Alcatel, not to mention that they would be helping to avert a future lawsuit against one of the companies that they've acquired.

I think the most important thing is letting as many people as possible know about this. And that's my 2 cents..

---

Buy an Alcatel. You can pop out the battery pack and replace it with AA alkalines. Wonder why every phone maker (and notebook maker) doesn't do this simple thing. I've kept my Alcatel going on alkalines for days on off-the-track trips.

sample of Commercial Appliances based on FreeBSD -
Nokia Firewall/VPN Appliances
Internet Devices, Inc. - Products Overview

router/dialup/etc ... - FreeBSD on a Floppy...
PicoBSD

Commercial Embedded BSD from BSDI

I have been using this with my laptop to connect to the net for the past few months - slow but usable. Thanks to Cellnet's current offer I am able to do this for free off-peak (2 landline numbers free off-peak till the end of the year).

Another phone I had considered was the Mondial ML808, I belive this also has a built in modem and is even supplied with the serial cable. I am sure the web site was www.mondial.com - but it seems to have gone now - so may be the phone is no loner avalible...

One phone to be cautious of is the Ericson SH888, although this can be connected via a serial cable it will still want to use the infared protocols!