Canadian Telcos Agree on WiFi Hotspot Standard

Jucius Maximus writes "As reported by Globetechnology, Canada's cellphone providers have agreed to create a common standard for their subscribers to connect to the Internet via public "hot-spots." The agreement became necessary because Canada's cellphone providers offer four different and incompatible connection technologies. The carriers will continue to vigorously compete with each other, both for customers and Wi-Fi hotspot locations, the CWTA said in a statement."

Comments

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Standards do not really promote competition

What do you mean they don't promote competition? Of course they promote competition. When you have a standard, anyone who wants to can implement that standard. When you have nonstandard, proprietary connection technologies, each company has a monopoly over its own version. That doesn't sound very competitive to me; it means that any new players in the field will have to make their own incompatible technology, enlarging the barrier to entry. So make no mistake about it, standards do promote competition.

Re:Telus: Future outpost of Hell?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

3AM from people who say things like "What the @#$%!! Stop calling this number you @#$#tard!" or "Hello? Hello? STOP CALLING ME YOU PERVERT!"

Maybe your cellphone has been cloned. That would explain the huge bills and these calls. Have you ever asked for a listing of the calls made with your phone?

Re:Hmm...

[zhiwenchong]

The latter, I'm inclined to think.

Savage wasteland, eh? Hmm.... but the weather in Minneapolis, Detroit, upstate New York, and the northern states aren't too different from other cities in Canada. The weather in Seattle isn't too different from Vancouver either.

So how is Canada a savage wasteland? If you're talking about Yukon, NWT and Nunavut, well... Americans have Alaska.

Re:What an apt name!

[Eric Ass Raymond]

where energy comes in intensity distributions, not levels

But that's my point and that's what people don't often understand when it comes to matters of radiation.

Intensity does not matter because

Damage(E) = Intensity * Damage per photon(E)

If the energy (E) is too low to disrupt the DNA, "Damage per photon" goes to zero.

A (high) school physics example of this is the photoelectric effect in which the incoming photons extract electrons from metals. If the energy of a photon is less than the energy between a free electron state (=ejected electron) and a binding valence state (=electron in an atom), electrons do not get ejected no matter how intense your radiation is. You can replace the free-electron - valence electorn bandgap with the energy required to disrupt the DNA and the same reasoning applies.

The energy does not "accumulate" in the system either. The photon will only yield its payload of energy to the matter IF the payload is equivalent to the energy gap. Otherwise the interaction is negligible.

It's well documented that natural temperature variations in the brain are larger than anything induced by a modern cellphone.

The only way that I can imagine the cell phone radiation causing damage is an extremely unlikely chance of a interference peak of several fields inside the skull cavity. But even that would be short-lived because of the extreme sensitivity of the interference pattern on the dimensions and spatial location of the skull and the transmitters.

Re:What an apt name!

[lars-o-matic]

Intensity matters... ever use a microwave oven? That's non-ionizing radiation too, but hardly irrelevant to organic materials (hint: cooking breaks molecular bonds, too).

Also, as you point out, your physics properly applies only to metals. There are lots of lower-energy bonds one can excite in long organic molecules.

As to total energy deposition, evidence suggests that bulk heating is not required in long-term exposure. I have read that highway cops who used to sit with traffic radars next to their heads had a scary incidence of brain cancers. Last I heard, there was no way to argue away the increased incidence of childhood leukemia, etc. for people living under power lines, either.

How does non-ionizing, (relatively) low-power EM radiation affect overall health, immune disorders, incidence of cancer, etc.? I don't know, and neither do you.

Empirical evidence beats hand-waving from a first-year physics course. I'll try to limit my unnecessary exposure to non-ionizing EM radiation until conclusions are in from long term studies, where maybe the biophysics will be more subtle than the photoelectric effect. There are lots of ways to affect (and damage) big, complicated molecules than knocking single electrons out of them.