Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Thursday 29 May 2008, 12:53 PM
EU sets target for IPv6
The European Commission wants a quarter of European industry, public authorities and households to use IPv6 by 2010.
"This is very much a case of a stitch in time saves nine," according to our Viv. "In the short term, businesses and public authorities might be tempted to try to squeeze their needs into the strait jacket of the old system, but this would mean Europe is badly placed to take advantage of the latest internet technology, and could face a crisis when the old system runs out of addresses. IPv6 provides more addresses in cyberspace than there are grains of sand on the world's beaches."
And a good place to start would be the EC's own europa.eu website, which is currently, er, not IPv6 compatible. It will be, apparently, by 2010. But then again, by that point - according to ICANN - there probably won't be many IPv4 addresses left. So the EC, and the rest of us, won't have a choice.
Friday 23 May 2008, 12:15 PM
Intel's Centrino 2 solid-state play
Very interesting news on the Intel front - according to the usually-reliable Digitimes, the chipmaker is getting into the solid-state drive business in a big way, with SSDs apparently to be bundled with the upcoming Centrino 2 (Montevina) platform.
We're seeking some comment or confirmation from Intel itself on the matter, but in the meantime - if the story is solid - we're looking at a product line called Intel High Performance SSD.
From Digitimes:
Initial shipments of Intel High Performance SSDs will come in two versions – Client X25-M and Client X18-M – the former having a physical size of 2.5-inch and later 1.8-inch. Both will feature 80GB capacity and a SATA interface.
Storage capacities will go up "to 250GB and above" in 2009, apparently.
Thursday 22 May 2008, 4:57 PM
iPass: We like embedded 3G now
About half a year ago I had a chat with some folks from iPass, the Wi-Fi hotspot aggregators. At the time, they said it was not sensible for businesses to buy laptops with embedded 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA/etc, largely because - as the preceding acronymic string suggests - a newer, better standard gets released roughly every few seconds.
But no longer! Yesterday at the Mobile Broadband Congress in West London, I asked Gary Negus of iPass whether this was still the case. No, he said, "the world has moved on. We're not anti-embedded. Our perspective is to stay agnostic. Users don't care about the bandwidth. They just want it to work. A lot of advances have been made in embedded chipsets."
Leaving aside the matter that he was sitting next to representatives from Orange, Microsoft and Qualcomm, all of whom are very enthusiastic about embedded - not to mention the extraordinary amount of activity that seems to have occurred in the last six months - he does have a point. It's all a bit like what 3's been saying recently: mobile broadband technology has already hit the point where advertisements pushing faster (theoretical) speeds means not a lot at all. Mobile broadband is now pretty much on a par with most people's DSL experience, and all that really matters to people now is coverage and indoor penetration.
For now then, success. Until they're trying to sell us LTE/WiMax, at which point the tune might change again.
Thursday 22 May 2008, 2:30 PM
Why is T-Mobile trying to stall 2.6GHz auction?
Here's an interesting one, reported a few weeks ago in the Grauniad but only picked up today by yours truly, while listening to Charles Jenne, Ofcom's policy director for spectrum, at the Mobile Broadband Congress in West London.
T-Mobile has made a legal challenge against Ofcom's upcoming 2.6GHz spectrum auction, which is scheduled for September. The challenge is essentially over the issue of refarming old 900MHz GSM spectrum for 3G services. T-Mobile is against this being allowed, because it doesn't own any - the beneficiaries would be Vodafone and O2. T-Mobile only has 1800MHz spectrum, and it is now trying to delay the 2.6GHz auction (spectrum that can also be used as a 3G expansion band) until the refarming issue is sorted out.
In other words, T-Mobile wants to know how much it needs 2.6GHz before it starts bidding on it.
However: the 2.6GHz spectrum could be used for three things - 3G expansion, LTE or mobile WiMax, the latter two being the hot tips for the future. WiMax, which could theoretically get a big block of spectrum out of the auction (the cap is 80MHz), currently has a first-mover advantage over LTE, which is the technology most favoured by big operators like T-Mobile. The longer it takes for 2.6GHz to get auctioned off, the more time LTE has to catch up with its rival. So a delay may be beneficial to T-Mobile in more ways than one.
Monday 19 May 2008, 1:49 PM
The iPhone gets that Vista feel
Just out of interest - how many fanboi iPhone-owners would actually want the UI to look like Vista?
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