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T-Mobile Launches GSM/802.11 Phone In Germany
prostoalex writes "German subscibers of T-Mobile can now get a hybrid PDA phone that supports both GSM and WiFi wireless networks. The new Mobile Digital Assistant (pretty pictures) will connect to cellular and wireless hotspots built by T-Mobile as well as any 802.11a/g Wireless LANs."
The full text of this article from The Economist follows. The original content is subscriber-only; it is reproduced here in the hope and expectation that you will find it useful.
(The most relevant bits are probably under "A rose by any other name...")
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CASE HISTORY
A brief history of Wi-Fi
Jun 10th 2004
From The Economist print edition
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Wireless networking: Few people have a kind word to say about telecoms regulators. But the success of Wi-Fi shows what can be achieved when regulators and technologists work together
IT STANDS as perhaps the signal success of the computer industry in the last few years, a rare bright spot in a bubble-battered market: Wi-Fi, the short-range wireless broadband technology. Among geeks, it has inspired a mania unseen since the days of the internet boom. Tens of millions of Wi-Fi devices will be sold this year, including the majority of laptop computers. Analysts predict that 100m people will be using Wi-Fi by 2006. Homes, offices, colleges and schools around the world have installed Wi-Fi equipment to blanket their premises with wireless access to the internet. Wi-Fi access is available in a growing number of coffee-shops, airports and hotels too. Yet merely five years ago wireless networking was a niche technology. How did Wi-Fi get started, and become so successful, in the depths of a downturn?
Wi-Fi seems even more remarkable when you look at its provenance: it was, in effect, spawned by an American government agency from an area of radio spectrum widely referred to as "the garbage bands". Technology entrepreneurs generally prefer governments to stay out of their way: funding basic research, perhaps, and then buying finished products when they emerge on the market. But in the case of Wi-Fi, the government seems actively to have guided innovation. "Wi-Fi is a creature of regulation, created more by lawyers than by engineers," asserts Mitchell Lazarus, an expert in telecoms regulation at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth, a law firm based in Arlington, Virginia. As a lawyer, Mr Lazarus might be expected to say that. But he was also educated as an electrical engineer--and besides, the facts seem to bear him out.
In the beginning
Wi-Fi would certainly not exist without a decision taken in 1985 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), America's telecoms regulator, to open several bands of wireless spectrum, allowing them to be used without the need for a government licence. This was an unheard-of move at the time; other than the ham-radio channels, there was very little unlicensed spectrum. But the FCC, prompted by a visionary engineer on its staff, Michael Marcus, took three chunks of spectrum from the industrial, scientific and medical bands and opened them up to communications entrepreneurs.
These so-called "garbage bands", at 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz, were already allocated to equipment that used radio-frequency energy for purposes other than communications: microwave ovens, for example, which use radio waves to heat food. The FCC made them available for communications purposes as well, on the condition that any devices using these bands would have to steer around interference from other equipment. They would do so using "spread spectrum" technology, originally developed for military use, which spreads a radio signal out over a wide range of frequencies, in contrast to the usual approach of transmitting on a single, well-defined frequency. This makes the signal both difficult to intercept and less susceptible to interference.
Though the 1985 ruling seems visionary in hindsight, nothing much happened at the time. What ultimately got Wi-Fi moving was the creation of an industry-wide standard. Initially, vendors of wireless equipment for local-area networks (LANs), such as Pro
The full text of this article from The Economist follows. The original content is subscriber-only; it is reproduced here in the hope and expectation that you will find it useful.
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SMART RADIOS
How the radio changed its spots
Dec 4th 2003
From The Economist print edition
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Smart radios: Radios capable of switching from one wireless standard to another, with nothing more than a dose of new software, are at last emerging from the laboratory
WHEN is a radio not a radio? When it's a computer program. Whether in a mobile phone, a fireman's walkie-talkie or a laptop's Wi-Fi card, a radio plucks a raw signal from the air and translates it into a useful stream of information (and vice versa). This translation involves several steps, most of which are normally done by dedicated signal-processing chips. But given enough processing power, the same job can also be done using software, rather than hardware. The result is a "software-defined radio" (SDR), also known as a "reconfigurable" or "smart" radio. As these names suggest, such a device can switch from being one kind of radio to another simply by loading some new software.
This chameleon-like ability is useful for a number of reasons. A mobile phone based on smart-radio technology might, for example, be able to switch between cellular standards used in different parts of the world. Mobile-phone base stations could be quickly and easily reconfigured to support new wireless standards. Smart radios could also ensure compatibility between the various radio standards used by different emergency services in a disaster-recovery situation, or link up soldiers in a multinational force whose radios might otherwise be incompatible.
Such flexibility comes at a cost, however. Dedicated signal-processing chips are designed to do one thing well, and use much less power than a general-purpose microprocessor. But as general-purpose chips continue to become smaller, cheaper and more powerful, the smart-radio approach will become increasingly practical, even in mobile devices where power consumption is constrained.
Smart radios will also make more sense as new wireless technologies proliferate, increasing the number of radio standards that a single device is expected to support, which in turn increases the number of dedicated radio chips required. A wireless-data card for a laptop might have to support various cellular standards, the Wi-Fi wireless local-area network standard, and Bluetooth, a short-range technology used to link computers with mobile phones. With exotic new standards such as 3.5G, 4G, WiMax and 802.20 on the horizon, smart radios could provide flexibility and compatibility. Now, after years in the laboratory, they are starting to emerge into the market.
Alphabet soup with chips
Next year, for example, Sandbridge Technologies of White Plains, New York, plans to launch a new smart-radio chip called Sandblaster. Once the appropriate software has been loaded, this chip can support a range of wireless standards, including GSM and CDMA cellular standards, their respective "third-generation" (3G) standards, W-CDMA and CDMA2000, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and global-positioning system (GPS) standards. Sandblaster can even support more than one of these standards at the same time, such as W-CDMA and Bluetooth, for example. A single smart chip can thus replace several dedicated ones.
The trick to doing all this while maintaining low power consumption, says Guenter Weinberger, the company's boss, is that Sandblaster is both optimised for signal processing and based on a very efficient "multi-threaded" design which allows it to run several interleaving programs, or threads, at once. Supporting one of the 3G protocols, he says, requires the chip to run multiple threads. Simpler standards s
If all he wants is to educate us, then let him do it without the karma points.
a dead maN walking.
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