Alcatel is teaming up with the Government of India to set up a WiMax development center in the South Indian city of Chennai and the products developed there will be marketed worldwide. It appears that parts of Asia prefer to rollout wireless data networks as opposed to wireline ones, probably due to the fact that it is easier to deploy wireless networks. With Europe going ahead with the adoption of UMTS and HSDPA, it looks like wireless data networks are going to become pretty ubiquitous in many parts of the world. I wonder what new applications we will see once the pipe to the phone/wireless device gets much bigger than what it is today.
Even the bluetooth part is not really that new. There was a company which had similar products back in 2002. They had even set up such a system in the Danish Parilament. More details here
> By then we will already very cheap voice calls
> in UMTS/GSM.
Hmmm, I never thought I'd live to see the day when the words "cheap" and "UMTS" were used in the same sentence. Are you talking about the same UMTS which cost billions in license fees and billions more in infrastructural costs to roll out ? If so, that UMTS as of now has a peak of 384 Kbps. CDMA 1xEVDO (peak of 2.4Mbps) which Verizon has already rolled out in the US can do outdo that even today. Even assuming HSDPA gets rolled out with UMTS (not likely for some time to come), UMTS will still not match WiMAX. UMTS+HSDPA will probably still lag behind whatever is the CDMA standard at that point of time.
But UMTS et al are still going to be under the control of the big service providers and telcos. That's going to involve a lot of $$s. The point I was trying to make was that if WiMAX enjoys the same kind of popularity as WiFi it is not inconceivable that in the not too distant future a bunch of geeks get together to create an alternate infrastructure based on WiMAX to provide cost effective mobile voice telephony at a fraction of the cost of CDMA, UMTS etc. The important thing is that such a thing is easier to build using something like WiMAX than using WiFi and whoever gets it right stands to gain a lot of money.
Geeks can make money from this
on
WiMax: When, Not If
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· Score: 4, Interesting
As many people are sure to point out, there's the possibility of using WiMAX for VoIP but that's too blas'e. What would be interesting is providing a mobile like user experience using VoIP+WiMAX, thereby challenging the commercial wireless carriers (read guys with big $$). But before we get to that we need to note that for VoIP (sent over any wireless medium) to rival a cellular voice offering, a user really has to be mobile and should be able to carry a small piece of equipment a la a mobile phone to be able to access the network. With VoIP, using say Wi-Fi, the user is expected to lug around at least a laptop and if she doesn't have one, she's got to be tied to the PC at home. If a truly mobile, VoIP service could be provided over something like WiMAX which uses free spectrum, just imagine the savings that could be made by whoever's providing the service.
Coming back to WiMAX, there is better scope to channel VoIP traffic (along with user mobility) over WiMAX than over WiFi for several reasons, bandwidth being only one of them. For any kind of wireless telephony to be taken seriously, the handoff problem needs to be solved in a clean way. The commercial cellular offerings have no issues in handling handoffs and in providing true mobile service over large geographical areas. With Wi-Fi's range being much shorter than that of WiMAX, providing wireless telephony with handoffs over Wi-Fi for even a medium sized city will mean that the entire region be covered by hundreds (if not thousands) of access points. This complicates both the RF network planning as well as managing of the core network (the backend) which actually handles and routes the calls/handoffs. With WiMAX's larger range, the complexity of these problems gets reduced.
So how does geek community make money out of this ?
1. Try to make a portable WiMAX device which can handle VoIP on the lines of a mobile phone. This is not as difficult as it sounds. The VoIP protocols have been ported to embedded devices before. All this device would need are a WiMAX chip, VoIP protocols, some DSP to handle digitized voice and a minimal user intrface (at least to start with).
2. Get the core network to handle multiple WiMAX access points, do handoffs, route calls etc. This is also not too difficult. There's free software for things distributed call handling, fault management etc, some of it even from telecom companies like Ericsson.
3. Get taken seriously. This is probably going to be the biggest challenge (Sigh !) and I don't know how the average geek can do that:-)
4. This is the step we all love - Profit !!!
Using WiMAX to run Skype etc over it isn't that great. If someone could go to the next level and use the range + bandwidth of WiMAX to actually provide a cellular like mobile service, then there's scope for making a lot of money.
Look at it this way. Your company has allowed your boss to survive and maybe even flourish. You need to strike back and the only way you can do that is to conceal the truth. In your exit interview (if you do have one) don't say that you're leaving because of a PHB. Think up some other reason. If possible, praise your boss. That will mean that he'll be given more control in the company and will piss off more people, who will also leave. The people who leave will also share your opinion and that might indirectly make your boss unemployable in many other companies. They will also bad mouth your former employer wherever they go and that will make it difficult for your former employer to find replacements for the people who leave. At the very least, you will have the satisfaction that your former employer will have to look for more than one replacement after you leave. That's the best way to strike back at the environment which shelters PHBs.
The Playboy editors misread the news about Google's public offering as "pubic offering" and said, "What the heck ! That's what our models offer every month. Let's get these guys on board as well."
Not to mention that a large number of Bangalore's software engineers are from Chennai. They migrated from Chennai to Bangalore in the late 80s/90s and continue to do so even today. The work ethic is different because Chennai on the whole is a more traditional city and you'll find the general population more hardworking than in Bangalore, which unitl the software boom was considered a sleepy town. This is also the reason why people don't job hop at the drop of a hat and the salaries are lower than in Bangalore. Salaries for software engineers in Chennai are probably 60% of those in Bangalore. And you thought Bangalore had cheap labour.
An interesting fact not known to many is that Texas Instruments, the first non-Indian company to start software operations in India, originally considered setting up shop in Chennai. This was back in 1987 or so. They later on plonked for Bangalore because they didn't find the political climate in Chennai (Madras as it was called then) very positive. TI set a precedent and all the other American and European companies followed suit and set up shop in Bangalore. So Chennai's loss led to Bangalore's prominence.
The reason why functional programming languages (not just Haskell) aren't popular is a bit of a Catch-22 situation. Most people try to learn a new language because it adds value to their resume or because something they're working on demands it. In the former case they always lean towards the so called mainstream languages - C/C++/C#/Java/... In the latter case, they probably don't care which language they're forced to learn and abandon it once their work is done. So a language doesn't get adopted unless it goes mainstream. But for a language like Haskell, it's difficult to go mainstream unless it gets adopted.
This does not in any way mean that an implementation of an idea in a functional language is necessarily slower than one in a say C/C++. See for e.g. Yaws . Phil Wadler has some information on functional language use in industry here. Galois Connections uses functional languages like Haskell/ML and there are several companies which use Erlang.
If concurrency and running your software on multiple hosts in parallel are very important and you don't mind picking up another language, you could try Erlang. Recent conference proceedings can be found here and here.
You don't even have to write your code in Erlang. You could wrap C code with a wrapper which uses sockets to communicate with the rest of the Erlang environment. Erlang runs on *nix, Windows, BSD, VxWorks and Mac OS X.
Did I ever tell you the story about the plan to release PC UNIX - Politically Correct UNIX ? Back in the good old days of AT&T, there was a lot of criticism levelled against UNIX because of it's apparent gender bias - if you're stuck and need help, you look up the "man" pages. Pray, why not "woman" pages ? So it was decided that things should change. The best minds were brought in and they all concurred that it was indeed a matter of a few minutes' work to fix things. And so was the Mission Statement written - remove all traces of the offending word. The fix was scheduled for a Friday evening so that they could have the project completion dinner that night. The project was appropriately called "Plan for dinner at 9".
The day of the release dawned. "Find and replace all occurences of man by woman", decreed Sed, the project manager and the minions went to work and as predicted, in a few minutes they were done. Just as they were about to declare the project closed, an eager beaver pointed out that they hadn't gone through the release readiness review yet. So Grep, the chief tester, was called in. He ran a cryptic command and found that the offending word was still present - all over the place. After hurriedly consulting the Mission Statement, they realised they now had to get rid of the "man" in "woman". Sed, the project manager, was called in again and he repeated his decree. The minions toiled but for a few minutes before their work was done but once again they failed to pass Grep's muster - they now had to get rid of the "man" in "wowoman". Once again they appealed to Sed's finer sense of judgement and for a third time, he repeated his decree. Once again the minions laboured, but this time there were a few who grumbled, especially when at the end of it Grep asked them to remove the "man" from "wowowoman". The entire rigmarole was repeated over and over again. The last time anyone from the external world observed them, they still hadn't finished their work and for some strange reason, everyone was going "wowowowowowowo...." And there was no sign of that dinner either.
Yet another language where it's possible to do high speed development is Erlang (and here ). (The sites seem to be down temporarily. Is the Slashdot effect that that powerful ?) It's the kind of stuff that you can use to quickly put together a working prototype - ideal for testing "proof of concept". The language + support libs also support distributed applications. So, if your prototype is good, you can try scaling it to multiple CPUs with minimum effort. Don't be fooled by the "telecom" tag that the language comes with - there's more to it than meets the eye.
Slashdot Mirror
There quite a lot of videos available at MSRI but they are more on the lines of workshops and not university course material.
Alcatel is teaming up with the Government of India to set up a WiMax development center in the South Indian city of Chennai and the products developed there will be marketed worldwide. It appears that parts of Asia prefer to rollout wireless data networks as opposed to wireline ones, probably due to the fact that it is easier to deploy wireless networks. With Europe going ahead with the adoption of UMTS and HSDPA, it looks like wireless data networks are going to become pretty ubiquitous in many parts of the world. I wonder what new applications we will see once the pipe to the phone/wireless device gets much bigger than what it is today.
Even the bluetooth part is not really that new. There was a company which had similar products back in 2002. They had even set up such a system in the Danish Parilament. More details here
The Windoze enabled ATMs do not dispense more than $640. When asked about it, Bill Gates said, "$640 should be enough for anyone."
> By then we will already very cheap voice calls
> in UMTS/GSM.
Hmmm, I never thought I'd live to see the day when the words "cheap" and "UMTS" were used in the same sentence. Are you talking about the same UMTS which cost billions in license fees and billions more in infrastructural costs to roll out ? If so, that UMTS as of now has a peak of 384 Kbps. CDMA 1xEVDO (peak of 2.4Mbps) which Verizon has already rolled out in the US can do outdo that even today. Even assuming HSDPA gets rolled out with UMTS (not likely for some time to come), UMTS will still not match WiMAX. UMTS+HSDPA will probably still lag behind whatever is the CDMA standard at that point of time.
But UMTS et al are still going to be under the control of the big service providers and telcos. That's going to involve a lot of $$s. The point I was trying to make was that if WiMAX enjoys the same kind of popularity as WiFi it is not inconceivable that in the not too distant future a bunch of geeks get together to create an alternate infrastructure based on WiMAX to provide cost effective mobile voice telephony at a fraction of the cost of CDMA, UMTS etc. The important thing is that such a thing is easier to build using something like WiMAX than using WiFi and whoever gets it right stands to gain a lot of money.
As many people are sure to point out, there's the possibility of using WiMAX for VoIP but that's too blas'e. What would be interesting is providing a mobile like user experience using VoIP+WiMAX, thereby challenging the commercial wireless carriers (read guys with big $$). But before we get to that we need to note that for VoIP (sent over any wireless medium) to rival a cellular voice offering, a user really has to be mobile and should be able to carry a small piece of equipment a la a mobile phone to be able to access the network. With VoIP, using say Wi-Fi, the user is expected to lug around at least a laptop and if she doesn't have one, she's got to be tied to the PC at home. If a truly mobile, VoIP service could be provided over something like WiMAX which uses free spectrum, just imagine the savings that could be made by whoever's providing the service.
:-)
Coming back to WiMAX, there is better scope to channel VoIP traffic (along with user mobility) over WiMAX than over WiFi for several reasons, bandwidth being only one of them. For any kind of wireless telephony to be taken seriously, the handoff problem needs to be solved in a clean way. The commercial cellular offerings have no issues in handling handoffs and in providing true mobile service over large geographical areas. With Wi-Fi's range being much shorter than that of WiMAX, providing wireless telephony with handoffs over Wi-Fi for even a medium sized city will mean that the entire region be covered by hundreds (if not thousands) of access points. This complicates both the RF network planning as well as managing of the core network (the backend) which actually handles and routes the calls/handoffs. With WiMAX's larger range, the complexity of these problems gets reduced.
So how does geek community make money out of this ?
1. Try to make a portable WiMAX device which can handle VoIP on the lines of a mobile phone. This is not as difficult as it sounds. The VoIP protocols have been ported to embedded devices before. All this device would need are a WiMAX chip, VoIP protocols, some DSP to handle digitized voice and a minimal user intrface (at least to start with).
2. Get the core network to handle multiple WiMAX access points, do handoffs, route calls etc. This is also not too difficult. There's free software for things distributed call handling, fault management etc, some of it even from telecom companies like Ericsson.
3. Get taken seriously. This is probably going to be the biggest challenge (Sigh !) and I don't know how the average geek can do that
4. This is the step we all love - Profit !!!
Using WiMAX to run Skype etc over it isn't that great. If someone could go to the next level and use the range + bandwidth of WiMAX to actually provide a cellular like mobile service, then there's scope for making a lot of money.
Sorry for the long post.
Look at it this way. Your company has allowed your boss to survive and maybe even flourish. You need to strike back and the only way you can do that is to conceal the truth. In your exit interview (if you do have one) don't say that you're leaving because of a PHB. Think up some other reason. If possible, praise your boss. That will mean that he'll be given more control in the company and will piss off more people, who will also leave. The people who leave will also share your opinion and that might indirectly make your boss unemployable in many other companies. They will also bad mouth your former employer wherever they go and that will make it difficult for your former employer to find replacements for the people who leave. At the very least, you will have the satisfaction that your former employer will have to look for more than one replacement after you leave. That's the best way to strike back at the environment which shelters PHBs.
The Playboy editors misread the news about Google's public offering as "pubic offering" and said, "What the heck ! That's what our models offer every month. Let's get these guys on board as well."
Not to mention that a large number of Bangalore's software engineers are from Chennai. They migrated from Chennai to Bangalore in the late 80s/90s and continue to do so even today. The work ethic is different because Chennai on the whole is a more traditional city and you'll find the general population more hardworking than in Bangalore, which unitl the software boom was considered a sleepy town. This is also the reason why people don't job hop at the drop of a hat and the salaries are lower than in Bangalore. Salaries for software engineers in Chennai are probably 60% of those in Bangalore. And you thought Bangalore had cheap labour.
An interesting fact not known to many is that Texas Instruments, the first non-Indian company to start software operations in India, originally considered setting up shop in Chennai. This was back in 1987 or so. They later on plonked for Bangalore because they didn't find the political climate in Chennai (Madras as it was called then) very positive. TI set a precedent and all the other American and European companies followed suit and set up shop in Bangalore. So Chennai's loss led to Bangalore's prominence.
The reason why functional programming languages (not just Haskell) aren't popular is a bit of a Catch-22 situation. Most people try to learn a new language because it adds value to their resume or because something they're working on demands it. In the former case they always lean towards the so called mainstream languages - C/C++/C#/Java/... In the latter case, they probably don't care which language they're forced to learn and abandon it once their work is done. So a language doesn't get adopted unless it goes mainstream. But for a language like Haskell, it's difficult to go mainstream unless it gets adopted.
This does not in any way mean that an implementation of an idea in a functional language is necessarily slower than one in a say C/C++. See for e.g. Yaws . Phil Wadler has some information on functional language use in industry here. Galois Connections uses functional languages like Haskell/ML and there are several companies which use Erlang.
Outsourcing's spreading to non-tech jobs as well. Read this
If concurrency and running your software on multiple hosts in parallel are very important and you don't mind picking up another language, you could try Erlang. Recent conference proceedings can be found here and here.
You don't even have to write your code in Erlang. You could wrap C code with a wrapper which uses sockets to communicate with the rest of the Erlang environment. Erlang runs on *nix, Windows, BSD, VxWorks and Mac OS X.
Did I ever tell you the story about the plan to release PC UNIX - Politically Correct UNIX ? Back in the good old days of AT&T, there was a lot of criticism levelled against UNIX because of it's apparent gender bias - if you're stuck and need help, you look up the "man" pages. Pray, why not "woman" pages ? So it was decided that things should change. The best minds were brought in and they all concurred that it was indeed a matter of a few minutes' work to fix things. And so was the Mission Statement written - remove all traces of the offending word. The fix was scheduled for a Friday evening so that they could have the project completion dinner that night. The project was appropriately called "Plan for dinner at 9".
The day of the release dawned. "Find and replace all occurences of man by woman", decreed Sed, the project manager and the minions went to work and as predicted, in a few minutes they were done. Just as they were about to declare the project closed, an eager beaver pointed out that they hadn't gone through the release readiness review yet. So Grep, the chief tester, was called in. He ran a cryptic command and found that the offending word was still present - all over the place. After hurriedly consulting the Mission Statement, they realised they now had to get rid of the "man" in "woman". Sed, the project manager, was called in again and he repeated his decree. The minions toiled but for a few minutes before their work was done but once again they failed to pass Grep's muster - they now had to get rid of the "man" in "wowoman". Once again they appealed to Sed's finer sense of judgement and for a third time, he repeated his decree. Once again the minions laboured, but this time there were a few who grumbled, especially when at the end of it Grep asked them to remove the "man" from "wowowoman". The entire rigmarole was repeated over and over again. The last time anyone from the external world observed them, they still hadn't finished their work and for some strange reason, everyone was going "wowowowowowowo...." And there was no sign of that dinner either.
Yet another language where it's possible to do high speed development is Erlang (and here ). (The sites seem to be down temporarily. Is the Slashdot effect that that powerful ?) It's the kind of stuff that you can use to quickly put together a working prototype - ideal for testing "proof of concept". The language + support libs also support distributed applications. So, if your prototype is good, you can try scaling it to multiple CPUs with minimum effort. Don't be fooled by the "telecom" tag that the language comes with - there's more to it than meets the eye.