But for god's sake, take some of that R&D money and BUILD SOME MORE TOWERS!
The people making the phones are not the people financing and putting up towers, so take a deep breath. Even in a company like Motorola that makes both, the people who design base stations are far removed from those who design phones. Also, Motorola (and Nokia, Ericsson, Nortel, etc) don't put up cell towers. They just sell the equipment that allows cellular providers to arrange huge cells, allowing your calls to constantly drop!
I'm as frustrated by wireless coverage as you are, but it's not going to change any time soon. Best thing you can do is complain regularly to your cell provider.
The height isn't the issue -- according to my first search result, here, GSM's extended range cells extend to a radius of 60 kilometers, or about 200,000 feet in mobile to base station distance. The only reason GSM is normally limited to 17km distance is for frequency reuse and timing considerations. With base stations in balloons far above the earth you pretty much eliminate multipath interference...Except maybe from the ground beneath your feet.
The claim that gives me pause is that the balloons will cover 100,000 square miles. That's a hypotenuse of about 180 miles at the edge of the cell.. That may indeed require a little more transmit power.
Maybe the author owns some AT&T stock. It occurred to me that if the average stockholder gets wind of this they may start to insist that AT&T and other cable operators start cracking down on this sort of thing. Which would suck for those of us who don't own AT&T stock (and do get free basic cable).
I've regularly roamed onto Sprint when I've been in the States using my tri-band (900/1800/1990MHz) GSM phone purchased in Europe
Are you sure it was Sprint? AFAIK they only have GSM networks (today) in a couple of US cities. I forget what that service is called.. "Sprint Spectrum" maybe?
Anyway, the major GSM players in the US are Voicestream and soon AT&T and Cingular. There are lots of small regional GSM providers too.
As most of us know, there are six widely used technologies, Analog, GSM, CDMA 800mHz, CDMA 1900mHz, TDMA 800mHz, and TDMA 1900mHz.
I don't think this is the problem we're discussing. A dual-band (800/1900) CDMA phone will work just fine on the Verizon or SprintPCS networks if they would let customers use them. And I'm not talking about using an ancient CDMA 1900 phone that nobody will know how to set up, I'm talking about a brand-new phone without a subsidy lock. I for one would pay $500 for a phone if I knew I could use it with any service provider (who uses the standard, be it GSM 1900 or CDMA).
Another reason they require their own handsets deals with the fact that many companies (AT&T and Sprint for example) upgrade the software in the phones before sending them to the stores.
This isn't required - they add logos and tailor how the user interface works so that the end-user can figure out their phone more easily. Non-customized phones will still work perfectly well on their networks. How about the service providers say, "If you want to use a non-subsidy-locked phone on our network fine..But we won't help you figure out your phone. Complain to us only if you get lots of dropped calls."
Maybe the US are just technologically inept? Or more likely, it's just the effect of companies too comfortable with their power.
Certainly not a matter of being technologically inept. (stop reading now if I'm repeating what's already been said - I was reading at +3) The US had a rather kick-ass analog cell network(s) in place before GSM took off. Since then each carrier had to make decisions on future technology based on things like their target market, available spectrum, and their network infrastructure. The GSM/TDMA vs. CDMA struggle here is largely due to the fact that they use different network protocols to link the cell sites to the higher network layers. I imagine this was an issue when 2G digital standards first came about, but I'm sure it's the reason AT&T's upgrade path was from TDMA to GSM and not TDMA to CDMA. So we'll (the US) have competing standards for quite some time yet.. and your small (as in non-multi-protocol) phone won't work everywhere.
Here, we can send SMS from any carrier to any other carrier, even from GSM network to CDMA ones.
I believe that Motorola has a turnkey "SMS gateway" product ready for service providers to buy.. if/when it's financially beneficial for them to do.
Then again, GSM mobile phones encrypt their traffic (I think, correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe it isn't seen as a problem.
GSM can include encryption. As I understand it, the network operators choose whether or not it is used on their network. I don't know what percentage have it on.
Nevertheless, IIRC GSM encryption has been broken and may have backdoors for law enforcement too.
When it comes to connecting to the corporate LAN, I imagine any company worth it's salt will require employees to use VPN software. And, as you mentioned, terrorists could make use of it as well. Kind of scary.
I've had similar experiences.. I've been farsighted basically since birth, with a bit of a lazy left eye. Since my problem was caught at around age 4 I wore glasses morning to night. Sometime in high school I read somewhere that corrective lenses for near/farsightedness tend to make your eyesight worse over time (hence the new prescription every 2 years), so I decided to experiment with this.. I could always see without my glasses, it just strained my eyes a bit and things got blurry/crossed when I (or my eyes) were tired. Little by little, though, my vision improved.. It's been (um counting..) 8 years now since I regularly wore glasses. I used to wear them from time to time (when I was reading, etc) but for years now I've gone without.
That said, over the past few months I've been working longer hours and forgetting to take breaks as regularly as I should so I'm thinking of getting some reading glasses. My eyes get fatigued when I overdo it but I don't get headaches.
Anyway, YMMV, IANAD, etc.. Oddly enough, I still think of myself as a "glasses" person.
And you won't get very far telling me that it's easier to upgrade OS X to OS X.1 or whatever where you have to go around with a CD and reboot every computer
Just have all of your OS X clients boot off of a disk image on a Mac OS X Server machine.
Yeah, I know I could have stopped myself from clicking on the link, but it's hard. I would have rather been forced to wait until tomorrow to see the new iMac. I feel like I unwrapped my presents when the parents weren't looking!
If you build such base stations and sell them, there goes your hardware business. In my company (GSM cell phone base stations) we are JUST starting to sell software as a separate product..as in last year for the first time. Before that all sales were hardware.
There are a lot of good ads on TV these days. Sure, there's a LOT of crap, but I enjoy a well-done, entertaining ad as much as I enjoy Conan O'Brian's latest bit.
With the 30-second skip button on my ReplayTV I can quickly parse through the ads, but I will back up and watch one that looks decent. I see PVRs as a challenge to companies and ad agencies to raise the signal to noise ratio a bit.
I recently saw a few references to DataPlay's storage product. "Up to" 500MB on a small recordable disk. This could be incredibly handy for any number of devices. They're partnering with a number of companies - I just hope it catches on.
http://www.dataplay.com/
As someone who considers himself an indie-rock/beardcore/shoegaze music fan, I have to question your position.. I don't think that the popular kids in school are necessarily less happy than the misfits..
I used to spend too much energy being disgusted with pop music and its fans, just as I spent too much time feeling sorry for kids in high school who were apparently always trying to fit in. Eventually I realized that I was working almost as hard to not fit in and to stand apart. When I got comfortable with that I could finally enjoy a Backstreet Boys song once in a while during the drive home from work.. What the hell, I'm not hurting anyone..Guilty pleasures are an important part of life. =)
There is some middle ground, and I'm grateful that I finally found it (somewhere in high school). The hardships of social life in middle/high school were enough to make me want to become a teacher, if only to go in there and somehow convince all of the kids to relax and just do their own thing and learn to forget about what everyone else thinks. It was a hard-learned lesson for myself and I just wish to impart my wisdom on others..
The 1900 MHz band used in the US is the closest thing to a worldwide standard phone band.. Unless we keep moving to higher and higher frequencies, someone will have already allocated them for other uses already. 1900 MHz, or something very close to that, has been allocated to 3G mobile phones pretty much around the world - the band shifts a little up or down in different places, but a mobile can compensate for (small) shifts like that. Of course, how many companies are going to go with 1900 vs. cheaper bands like 800, 450, etc...
The costs of putting a network in place to support wireless is way too high for anybody to jump in knowing they could have the license janked out from underneath them! This is an interesting idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if some FCC folks have suggested it. But I'm sure the telecom folks started throwing lobbying money at it quicker than I can.....shoot off a Score 1 post on/.!
Sure, I just sent my old 5300 in for the above-mentioned repairs 3 months ago. I guess I was lucky in that mine hadn't exibited the problems until it was about 5 years old. I'm also lucky that it's now worth more to Apple than I paid for it (used) 2 years ago.
Right on, I do the same thing for many reasons. I love not getting telespam, and with cable modem service I almost don't need a landline...
...except that the cable modem service is so unreliable that I still need a landline and ISP for the downtimes.
The only downside about getting all of your calls on your cell phone is that there are never answering machine messages to check when you get home. Of course, you're never depressed that you have no messages. Say.. this ABC plan is a good idea. Never come home to an empty answering machine!
I'll be the first to admit that I haven't made very good use of Apple's Sherlock 2 utility, but it addresses some of the concerns of metaphor limitations. None of it is revolutionary, but the designers were really thoughtful.. Being able to search for anything from one applicaiton is a nice touch (local/networked files, people, internet, news, etc.), plus the fact that you can search for local files by name or contents (and get a summary of the contents as well).
But the most intriguing options is the custom file search. Every combination you can think of is searchable: the application which created the file, whether or not it's locked, the version, empty folders, size, name contains or doesn't contain "blah", the date created or modified (with tons of options.. older than x, within 3 weeks of y..).
If you haven't really explored Sherlock, and you're using a Mac (grin), take a closer look at it! For the longest time the move to Sherlock only annoyed me because it takes longer to load.. =)
Apple's web site has just been updated with the new products, and is leaning heavily under the load. I would expect them to anticipate this sort of thing, and at least accomodate this kind of load via Akamai. Wouldn't every technology company love to have this sort of excitement surrounding their every move?
You can buy hand-held radios that are smaller than cell phones and are able to transmit two ways over a distance of a mile or more
The only cell system I'm intimately familiar with is GSM, but I can tell you that normal GSM cells can be up to 17km in diameter, or about 10 miles. Generally speaking, cell phones have to transmit farther than a simple two-way radio.
The also have to do other things such as a lot of signal processing, reporting received signal strength back to the tower (even when you're not in a call), and monitor the "pilot" transmissions from the tower for incoming calls, text messages, etc. And we expect them to do this in a tiny, lightweight package with long battery life.
While the idea of cell phones acting as repeaters has some merit (in crowded areas where the phone will only have to transmit a few hundred feet to the next phone), the task of orchestrating that is very complicated.. And even though you're transmitting over a shorter distance, you'll be rebroadcasting other people's calls, which means you won't end up saving any power overall.
The simple solution for crowded cell airwaves is simply to make the cell smaller...
Re:Not likely to happen anytime soon...Here's why
on
Advertising Via GPS
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· Score: 1
Yes, your cell phone could have an integrated GPS receiver, and then use the phone portion to transmit your location, but I don't think that's going to happen.
Your phone is constantly sending data back to the base stations (towers) - when you're not receiving a call it is still sending information on the quality of the received signal from the towers in the area (so handovers can be arranged). Adding in some GPS data wouldn't be too tough.
So it's gonna cost advertisers plenty of money to have cell phones that are broadcasting your whereabouts all the time, and sending down those adds. I bet the per-view cost of this type of advertising would be prohibitive for most advertisers.
I remember a quote from a communications class I took way back when which said something to the effect that advertising never pays for itself; that the increase in revenue due to advertising almost never equals the money spent on the ads.. Yet everyone still advertises. This remark was from before internet advertising had taken hold, so things have probably changed in terms of cost and returns. Knowing the recipients' exact location is the ultimate tool in one branch of directed advertising (the other being what's easy on web pages - showing them ads for products similar to what they're looking at now).
That adds battery drain to the cell phone, which is exactly what nobody wants
GPS receivers are still a very small market - once big mobile phone companies get into the game the size/power requirements of GPS will drop dramatically. The market isn't big enough yet to justify huge efforts in power reduction, or in receiver cost.
GPS is Line-of-Sight
This is a very good point, and unless receivers get considerably better I can't think of any way around this.
One other factor in this game is whether the end user is willing to pay to AVOID receiving ads.. Personally, I only have a cell phone and no normal telephone line. I did this largely because I wanted mobile service that I wouldn't be afraid to use (so I pay $100 a month for a LOT of free air time), but another really nice benefit is that I *never* get called by solicitors. Never. They can't - at the time of writing it is illegal for solicitors to call your mobile since you're footing the cost of the call (I remember some legislation floating around that would require the caller to pay for the call, which would then allow solicitors to call your mobile). If one service provider allowed GPS-based ads I would be entirely willing to switch..
One other note: it would be really easy for mobile service providers to accomodate location-based ads. Keep in mind that they know where you are based on which tower your phone is communicating with.. In the GSM system your phone often shows the name of your location right on the screen (such and such town, cafeteria of the building, etc) based on the tower/micro site you're talking to. Perhaps there is a profitability argument keeping location-based phone ads from happening..
I have one and they're very convenient, especially when your entire department has them. Beyond the standard two-way paging, the email and voice page (enter text and send it to a phone number, it calls them and reads the message) features are fantastic.. There are a lot of other possibilities just starting to be explored (i.e., InfoBeam), but in my opinion everything about the PageWriter seems to be about leaving a lot of its potential unused. I can't vouch for the coverage (seems to be about as good as my SprintPCS phone) or the cost (work's paying for it), but it's much more convenient than a phone for wireless web/email stuff. Bulky, though. Randy
Slashdot Mirror
The people making the phones are not the people financing and putting up towers, so take a deep breath. Even in a company like Motorola that makes both, the people who design base stations are far removed from those who design phones. Also, Motorola (and Nokia, Ericsson, Nortel, etc) don't put up cell towers. They just sell the equipment that allows cellular providers to arrange huge cells, allowing your calls to constantly drop!
I'm as frustrated by wireless coverage as you are, but it's not going to change any time soon. Best thing you can do is complain regularly to your cell provider.
The claim that gives me pause is that the balloons will cover 100,000 square miles. That's a hypotenuse of about 180 miles at the edge of the cell.. That may indeed require a little more transmit power.
Maybe the author owns some AT&T stock. It occurred to me that if the average stockholder gets wind of this they may start to insist that AT&T and other cable operators start cracking down on this sort of thing. Which would suck for those of us who don't own AT&T stock (and do get free basic cable).
I've regularly roamed onto Sprint when I've been in the States using my tri-band (900/1800/1990MHz) GSM phone purchased in Europe
Are you sure it was Sprint? AFAIK they only have GSM networks (today) in a couple of US cities. I forget what that service is called.. "Sprint Spectrum" maybe?
Anyway, the major GSM players in the US are Voicestream and soon AT&T and Cingular. There are lots of small regional GSM providers too.
As most of us know, there are six widely used technologies, Analog, GSM, CDMA 800mHz, CDMA 1900mHz, TDMA 800mHz, and TDMA 1900mHz.
I don't think this is the problem we're discussing. A dual-band (800/1900) CDMA phone will work just fine on the Verizon or SprintPCS networks if they would let customers use them. And I'm not talking about using an ancient CDMA 1900 phone that nobody will know how to set up, I'm talking about a brand-new phone without a subsidy lock. I for one would pay $500 for a phone if I knew I could use it with any service provider (who uses the standard, be it GSM 1900 or CDMA).
Another reason they require their own handsets deals with the fact that many companies (AT&T and Sprint for example) upgrade the software in the phones before sending them to the stores.
This isn't required - they add logos and tailor how the user interface works so that the end-user can figure out their phone more easily. Non-customized phones will still work perfectly well on their networks. How about the service providers say, "If you want to use a non-subsidy-locked phone on our network fine..But we won't help you figure out your phone. Complain to us only if you get lots of dropped calls."
Maybe the US are just technologically inept? Or more likely, it's just the effect of companies too comfortable with their power.
Certainly not a matter of being technologically inept. (stop reading now if I'm repeating what's already been said - I was reading at +3) The US had a rather kick-ass analog cell network(s) in place before GSM took off. Since then each carrier had to make decisions on future technology based on things like their target market, available spectrum, and their network infrastructure. The GSM/TDMA vs. CDMA struggle here is largely due to the fact that they use different network protocols to link the cell sites to the higher network layers. I imagine this was an issue when 2G digital standards first came about, but I'm sure it's the reason AT&T's upgrade path was from TDMA to GSM and not TDMA to CDMA. So we'll (the US) have competing standards for quite some time yet.. and your small (as in non-multi-protocol) phone won't work everywhere.
Here, we can send SMS from any carrier to any other carrier, even from GSM network to CDMA ones.
I believe that Motorola has a turnkey "SMS gateway" product ready for service providers to buy.. if/when it's financially beneficial for them to do.
Then again, GSM mobile phones encrypt their traffic (I think, correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe it isn't seen as a problem.
GSM can include encryption. As I understand it, the network operators choose whether or not it is used on their network. I don't know what percentage have it on.
Nevertheless, IIRC GSM encryption has been broken and may have backdoors for law enforcement too.
When it comes to connecting to the corporate LAN, I imagine any company worth it's salt will require employees to use VPN software. And, as you mentioned, terrorists could make use of it as well. Kind of scary.
I've had similar experiences.. I've been farsighted basically since birth, with a bit of a lazy left eye. Since my problem was caught at around age 4 I wore glasses morning to night. Sometime in high school I read somewhere that corrective lenses for near/farsightedness tend to make your eyesight worse over time (hence the new prescription every 2 years), so I decided to experiment with this.. I could always see without my glasses, it just strained my eyes a bit and things got blurry/crossed when I (or my eyes) were tired. Little by little, though, my vision improved.. It's been (um counting..) 8 years now since I regularly wore glasses. I used to wear them from time to time (when I was reading, etc) but for years now I've gone without.
That said, over the past few months I've been working longer hours and forgetting to take breaks as regularly as I should so I'm thinking of getting some reading glasses. My eyes get fatigued when I overdo it but I don't get headaches.
Anyway, YMMV, IANAD, etc.. Oddly enough, I still think of myself as a "glasses" person.
Just have all of your OS X clients boot off of a disk image on a Mac OS X Server machine.
http://www.apple.com/education/k12/networking/diff er/index.html#macmanager
Yeah, I know I could have stopped myself from clicking on the link, but it's hard. I would have rather been forced to wait until tomorrow to see the new iMac. I feel like I unwrapped my presents when the parents weren't looking!
If you build such base stations and sell them, there goes your hardware business. In my company (GSM cell phone base stations) we are JUST starting to sell software as a separate product..as in last year for the first time. Before that all sales were hardware.
With the 30-second skip button on my ReplayTV I can quickly parse through the ads, but I will back up and watch one that looks decent. I see PVRs as a challenge to companies and ad agencies to raise the signal to noise ratio a bit.
Actually, Motorola will be laying off folks from the Semiconductor Products Sector... And mine.
I recently saw a few references to DataPlay's storage product. "Up to" 500MB on a small recordable disk. This could be incredibly handy for any number of devices. They're partnering with a number of companies - I just hope it catches on. http://www.dataplay.com/
I used to spend too much energy being disgusted with pop music and its fans, just as I spent too much time feeling sorry for kids in high school who were apparently always trying to fit in. Eventually I realized that I was working almost as hard to not fit in and to stand apart. When I got comfortable with that I could finally enjoy a Backstreet Boys song once in a while during the drive home from work.. What the hell, I'm not hurting anyone..Guilty pleasures are an important part of life. =)
There is some middle ground, and I'm grateful that I finally found it (somewhere in high school). The hardships of social life in middle/high school were enough to make me want to become a teacher, if only to go in there and somehow convince all of the kids to relax and just do their own thing and learn to forget about what everyone else thinks. It was a hard-learned lesson for myself and I just wish to impart my wisdom on others..
The 1900 MHz band used in the US is the closest thing to a worldwide standard phone band.. Unless we keep moving to higher and higher frequencies, someone will have already allocated them for other uses already. 1900 MHz, or something very close to that, has been allocated to 3G mobile phones pretty much around the world - the band shifts a little up or down in different places, but a mobile can compensate for (small) shifts like that. Of course, how many companies are going to go with 1900 vs. cheaper bands like 800, 450, etc...
The costs of putting a network in place to support wireless is way too high for anybody to jump in knowing they could have the license janked out from underneath them! This is an interesting idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if some FCC folks have suggested it. But I'm sure the telecom folks started throwing lobbying money at it quicker than I can.....shoot off a Score 1 post on /.!
Sure, I just sent my old 5300 in for the above-mentioned repairs 3 months ago. I guess I was lucky in that mine hadn't exibited the problems until it was about 5 years old. I'm also lucky that it's now worth more to Apple than I paid for it (used) 2 years ago.
The latter is a coworker's page who has the screen rotated vertically..the machine is beautiful.
The only downside about getting all of your calls on your cell phone is that there are never answering machine messages to check when you get home. Of course, you're never depressed that you have no messages. Say.. this ABC plan is a good idea. Never come home to an empty answering machine!
But the most intriguing options is the custom file search. Every combination you can think of is searchable: the application which created the file, whether or not it's locked, the version, empty folders, size, name contains or doesn't contain "blah", the date created or modified (with tons of options.. older than x, within 3 weeks of y..).
If you haven't really explored Sherlock, and you're using a Mac (grin), take a closer look at it! For the longest time the move to Sherlock only annoyed me because it takes longer to load.. =)
Apple's web site has just been updated with the new products, and is leaning heavily under the load. I would expect them to anticipate this sort of thing, and at least accomodate this kind of load via Akamai. Wouldn't every technology company love to have this sort of excitement surrounding their every move?
The only cell system I'm intimately familiar with is GSM, but I can tell you that normal GSM cells can be up to 17km in diameter, or about 10 miles. Generally speaking, cell phones have to transmit farther than a simple two-way radio.
The also have to do other things such as a lot of signal processing, reporting received signal strength back to the tower (even when you're not in a call), and monitor the "pilot" transmissions from the tower for incoming calls, text messages, etc. And we expect them to do this in a tiny, lightweight package with long battery life.
While the idea of cell phones acting as repeaters has some merit (in crowded areas where the phone will only have to transmit a few hundred feet to the next phone), the task of orchestrating that is very complicated.. And even though you're transmitting over a shorter distance, you'll be rebroadcasting other people's calls, which means you won't end up saving any power overall.
The simple solution for crowded cell airwaves is simply to make the cell smaller...
Your phone is constantly sending data back to the base stations (towers) - when you're not receiving a call it is still sending information on the quality of the received signal from the towers in the area (so handovers can be arranged). Adding in some GPS data wouldn't be too tough.
So it's gonna cost advertisers plenty of money to have cell phones that are broadcasting your whereabouts all the time, and sending down those adds. I bet the per-view cost of this type of advertising would be prohibitive for most advertisers.
I remember a quote from a communications class I took way back when which said something to the effect that advertising never pays for itself; that the increase in revenue due to advertising almost never equals the money spent on the ads.. Yet everyone still advertises. This remark was from before internet advertising had taken hold, so things have probably changed in terms of cost and returns. Knowing the recipients' exact location is the ultimate tool in one branch of directed advertising (the other being what's easy on web pages - showing them ads for products similar to what they're looking at now).
That adds battery drain to the cell phone, which is exactly what nobody wants
GPS receivers are still a very small market - once big mobile phone companies get into the game the size/power requirements of GPS will drop dramatically. The market isn't big enough yet to justify huge efforts in power reduction, or in receiver cost.
GPS is Line-of-Sight
This is a very good point, and unless receivers get considerably better I can't think of any way around this.
One other factor in this game is whether the end user is willing to pay to AVOID receiving ads.. Personally, I only have a cell phone and no normal telephone line. I did this largely because I wanted mobile service that I wouldn't be afraid to use (so I pay $100 a month for a LOT of free air time), but another really nice benefit is that I *never* get called by solicitors. Never. They can't - at the time of writing it is illegal for solicitors to call your mobile since you're footing the cost of the call (I remember some legislation floating around that would require the caller to pay for the call, which would then allow solicitors to call your mobile). If one service provider allowed GPS-based ads I would be entirely willing to switch..
One other note: it would be really easy for mobile service providers to accomodate location-based ads. Keep in mind that they know where you are based on which tower your phone is communicating with.. In the GSM system your phone often shows the name of your location right on the screen (such and such town, cafeteria of the building, etc) based on the tower/micro site you're talking to. Perhaps there is a profitability argument keeping location-based phone ads from happening..
I have one and they're very convenient, especially when your entire department has them. Beyond the standard two-way paging, the email and voice page (enter text and send it to a phone number, it calls them and reads the message) features are fantastic.. There are a lot of other possibilities just starting to be explored (i.e., InfoBeam), but in my opinion everything about the PageWriter seems to be about leaving a lot of its potential unused. I can't vouch for the coverage (seems to be about as good as my SprintPCS phone) or the cost (work's paying for it), but it's much more convenient than a phone for wireless web/email stuff. Bulky, though. Randy