Too many words (images, thoughts) , not enough time. Have you got half an hour?

Kevin Werbach is on a roll. In a day's blogging we've got;  Advertizing driven TV has 5 years to live; We need a third way in politics because technology changes exist outside the traditional left-right euclidean way; A link to Tools for the mob, following up on an essay on Mobile blogging. The End of Free about AOL Time Warner ending free access on the net to their printed copy; And the resurgence of Video On Demand.

Do you like cartoons? Check out e-Sheep, especially Spiders and Delta. Then move on to MegaTokyo and then go to Get Your War On.

Need to know when the the cluetrain pulls in? Try Britt Blaser and Doc Searls on the Creative commons and the difference between Customers and Consumers. Then compare a deconstruction of Fox CEO Peter Chernin's keynote at Comdex, with Lawrence Lessig's challenge to spend equal amounts on content and people trying to keep content free.

For laughs there's always the image of what happened when Bush asked "How do you want to govern your country today?"

After all that you'll need a WTF? T shirt or hoodie from Thinkgeek. Though perhaps a miniature tracked remote control webcam is more to your liking? [from: JB Ecademy]

Internet "nearing 655 million users" 30% year on year growth.

Gosh! [from: JB Ecademy]

Free office space - but coffee's extra Nice little story about startups in Boston who don't have any office space. They use the local Starbucks for space (and coffee) and use their WiFi for internet access.

So where would you go to do this in London (or other cities)? Do you have a favourite place to sit, work and have meetings where you can get WiFi access to the net?
[from: JB Wifi]

Most of the manufacturers now make and ship a combo WiFi box aimed at the home networking and broadband market. These typically have a WiFi Access point, 4 10/100 Ethernet ports, and a NAT firewall gateway. Some of them also have an ADSL modem or a Cable modem built in as well.

If anyone has got one of these, could they please get in touch and let me know their experiences. Or alternatively post an article here about how they go on? I'm particularly interested in any problems or issues with the firewall and how well it works in practice.

For instance, I've heard one story that the firewall didn't support UPnP and so couldn't cope with Microsoft voice and video from MSN Messenger and Netmeeting. [from: JB Wifi]

Slashdot continues to amuse. Hidden in an article "Smart" Billboards Debut in Sacramento : I found this tidbit of wisdom.

I cannot believe that your argument for listening to the radio vs. CDs is that CDs have just "the same songs repeated forever." I mean, have you listened to the radio, ever?

If you live in London, you might like to note that the giant US pigopoly, "Clear Channel" is in negotiations to buy Capital Radio. Now Clear Channel has bought up so many radio stations in the US that the radio landscape has completely changed over the last few years. They now effectively control the listening habits of the nation and restrict output to a comparatively narrow play list. Once upon a time, I used to listen to Capital but I can't stand it now so I'm not especially worried about this one purchase. But I'd hate to see Clear Channel work their way across the UK buying up all the non-BBC radio stations.

In theory, there's an alternative here in Internet radio. In practice, it's good for either microcasting or for people with deep pockets, but not much in between. And in the USA, the music industry has been going after net radio stations for absurdly large performing rights payments. [from: JB Ecademy]

Surprise!

BBC NEWS | Technology | Efforts to stop music piracy 'pointless' [from: JB Ecademy]

P-to-p's next frontier? Combining P2P, WiFi, Meshnetworks, SOAP, Jabber, Groove, VoIP, Encryption, this article reads like a roll call of all the most interesting technologies around at the moment. One particularly interesting experiment is this one. Mesh Networks has begun trials with Orlando, Fla., city buses, using off-the-shelf 802.11 radios and a variant radio it has developed that utilizes real-time equalization and a multitap rake receiver -- which can handle multipath and fading -- to enable multihopping networks at vehicle speeds as fast as 70 mph. Combined with relay devices posted on light poles (two per square mile), the system can provide a QoS (quality of service) sufficient to stream video and to support VoIP calls, Stanforth claims. [from: JB Wifi]

Where is the definitive list of public WiFi Hotspots ? Now maybe this is an exercise worthy of King Canute, and maybe there will come a time when it's unnecessary because WiFi access will be everywhere. But right now I feel the need for a definitive list of hotspots world wide. This should include every commercial hotspot showing the company operating it and with a link to it's terms and prices along with every deliberately free to air service. I think this requires some manual collation rather than simply war-driving. The problems are many. All the current directories I've found are seriously incomplete. Each provider lists it's own hotspots but not competing provider's. Lists such as Consume.net have too many non-working nodes. And we're in the middle of explosive growth so keeping the data up to date is going to be hard.

I think this is one of those "should exist" systems. I wonder who's going to build it? [from: JB Wifi]

Howard Rheingold Interview on "Smart Mobs" Essential reading. And an add on to the website of the book. Dave Hughes also gets a good chunk of space about his project to cover Wales with WiFi broadband. [from: JB Ecademy]

e-fro - The Welsh Wireless Broadband project A project to flood Wales with broadband access via community run WiFi nodes.

[from: JB Wifi]

Voyager2000 No word on delivery yet, but they've set a price of £199. It appears to be a combined ADSL modem, firewall, router and WiFi access point. They've also got WiFi PCMCIA and USB cards for £79.99 [from: JB Wifi]

BW Online | November 21, 2002 | Europe's Clueless Wireless Operators

Well who wouldn't bite on a headline like that!

I have to say I really hate the cellphone industry. Both my kids managed to break their cellphones this month. Trying to choose a handset, plan and facilities was a complete nightmare. It's refreshing to hear that the latest GPRS, 3G and other internet access is equally hard to understand, over-priced and ineffective. Not! What's wrong with these people? Have they grown so big and owe so much debt that they can't create and sell a simple product that the customer (remember them) might want to use? [from: JB Wifi]

Comdex Puts Wi-Fi Weaknesses on Display

WiFi was huge at Comdex this year. And yet almost none of the Las Vegas hotels had WiFi support and allegedly WiFi access was pretty thin on the convention floors as well. Doh! Looks like the industry missed a trick there. [from: JB Wifi]

I keep seeing the same idea being promoted that HotSpot providers (such as BT Openzone) intend to, or should, provide managed VPNs so that corporate customers can feel safe about using WiFi. I have to say I just don't get this. Here's why:-
- The first concern is email and email security can be assured without going to a full VPN simply by using SSL and SMTP Auth.
- Any company that is exposing internal systems to home workers will already have a VPN in place. Just because the final 100m is via WiFi makes no never mind.
- Providing a managed VPN means the third part will need access to the company's firewall. Unless this third party is managing the organization's entire security infrastructure, why would anyone ever allow this?

So given that this comment is so common, I must be missing something. What is it? [from: JB Wifi]

An open letter on BAWUG prompted a warning on terminology. Just because it involves the Internet, data comms and it's wireless doesn't mean it's WiFi. WiFi refers specifically to the 802.11a/b/g standards at 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. There are several companies and experiments being done with things like very long distance links or wireless broadband provision that are not WiFi even if they are in the same general area of spectrum. So for instance the recent 72Km link off San Diego is not using WiFi due to timing constraints in the protocol (although in this case they were using hacked WiFi hardware). Similarly there are several companies producing hardware and systems for remote broadband provision that use 2.4Ghz, 3.6Ghz and 5 Ghz for point to point links. Again this is not WiFi.

But it's all wireless TCP/IP so we can talk about it here! [from: JB Wifi]

IOL: O2 to launch public wireless services : Following trials, O2 Ireland has announced the commercial availability of public WLAN services for business customers from January 2003.

More strange cross over. O2 Ireland is of course part of mmO2, the cellphone service that was spun off from BT. And of course BT run BT Openzone in the UK. With Vodaphone in Germany and T-Mobile all over the place are the cellphone companies a natural fit to manage a network of WiFi hotspots? Can we expect to see SIMs in WiFi cards soon so that they can identify us and charge us for usage? [from: JB Wifi]

Glenn and Kevin both raise the issues of the proliferation of standards in WiFi and the dangers of manufacturers shipping hardware before the standard is finalised. thiis refers to the current status where we have 802.11b selling in big quantities; the incompatible but faster 802.11a hardware dropping in price rapidly, and the unfinished 802.11g. Now G is intended to be backwards compatible with B, uses the same spectrum so all the same antennas work, and looks like being the likely winner. The chip manufacturers are right on the verge of shipping. The manufacturers are announcing boxes and for Dec-Jan delivery. There's just one problem, the standard is not expected to be ratified until Mar-April at the earliest and so there's no third party certification that all this stuff works together and between manufacturers. This could seriously upset the applecart if the consumers (remember them?) spend their money only to find that nothing works.

This actually reminds me of the early days of the 56Kb modem. There were two or three designs each of which only worked sometimes with the providers modem banks. But we got through that one with a mix of free upgrades and firmware replacements OK. I think there's sufficient reward for playing fair and penalty for stepping too far out of line that the manufacturers will help us get through this without too much pain. What makes this more likely is that there's a very limited number of chipsets that all the manufacturers are using. which in turn limits how far off the group standard they can go. They don't like this very much as it's hard to differentiate products via the feature set if you're using the same silicon as the next company.

Which brings me to the real danger. I'm much more worried by things like D-Link's Turbo 802.11b that works at 22Mhz but only with Dlink equipment. It's really important that they have good compatibility with other people's devices are normal speeds. What we don't need is a D-Link owned standard that gets too much traction. Having one company have a monopoly on the design is bad for everyone in the long run.

So my bet is that 802.11a will disappear and 802.11g will win out. And it will all happen sooner than you think. And as long as all the G equipment still works with the installed base of B access points, it really doesn't matter.

[Edited to add]. See also Wired. [from: JB Wifi]

The Times in it's Business Travel section today has a piece on Internet access in Hotels : Derek Wood, an IT consultant within the hospitality industry, says that, of the business hotels that have installed high-speed access, up to 10 per cent of all guests use the service. "Nearly everyone has high-speed access at work and an increasing number of people have it at home so they have come to expect it."

But he says that what business travellers really want is access to their own e-mail. Most technology providers to hotels can provide high-speed access to the web but access to corporate e-mail relies on setting up a virtual private network with each company, which is technically difficult and costly.

So here we have confirmation. Business travellers need internet access on the road. And they need access to email. But the last conclusion is wrong. If your ISP or company provided SSL POP3 and SMTP you wouldn't need a "technically difficult or costly" solution you'd just need to configure your email client.

The connection here with WiFi is the trend towards providing it in hotels with coverage of the rooms as well as the conference centre. [from: JB Wifi]

Can Chips Revive the Internet Economy? Impressively optimistic Comdex keynote speech from Brian Halla, CEO of National Semiconductor "A glut followed the railroad boom, but it was followed by another wave of unprecedented growth as people began to come up with new ideas to make use of the foundation that had been laid, he explained. "We overbuild; we have a glut. That's where we are today. The period that follows after the glut is when the new ideas get incubated," he said."

So what do you get when you combine IPv6, with pervasive WiFi, with all the bandwidth and dark fibre that was laid during the boom years. The IPv6 makes every device addressable and reduces the need for NAT firewalls. The WiFi means all those little devices are part of the net. And if we can just find a way of coping with the debt, the bandwidth infrastructure brings connectivity costs down to the floor. Sounds like a great environment for innovation to me. [from: JB Wifi]

Rather interesting little article in El Reg about why the US doesn't get SMS TXT unlike the whole of the rest of the world. It's also an interview with Howard Rheingold who's done extensive personal and international research on the subject. The short answer is that it's the combination of a Monopoly (Qualcomm) and a Pigopoly (The Telcos) rejecting the godless and commie GSM in favour of their own home grown standard CDMA. It's the same answer you can give when asking why US Cellphones don't have Bluetooth. Or MMS. Or why you can't roam everywhere with one phone and one service provider. And why analog cellphone service won't die in the US. And so on. And on.

But then the US still uses NTSC (Never Twice the Same Color) for it's TV standard. ;)

DonchaJusLove free markets! [from: JB Ecademy]