Feh. Just when I promised myself to be a bit assiduous on the blogging, AT&T ceases to be @home. Back up now, thanks to some stealthy listening for ARP calls on the cable circuit.
Evening scan:
Blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah.
Journalist Thrown Off Flight for Taking Photos wartimeliberty.com
Appears to be more extenuated than first meets the eye (the paranoid Guard, it’s implied, is a undercover drugs officer). Worrying though – and I know someone is going to say “Well, serves the journalist right. He shouldn’t have been practicing Yoga”.
Al Qaeda Spokesman Abu Ghaith Seriously Wounded al jazeera
The laptops for schools pilot project mefi that lead to a general rollout of PCs to Maine’s kids says wireless networks made it a success:
“If they had to plug the laptops into a wall someplace to get Internet access I don’t think we would be seeing the impact we have,” said Priest. “Untethering the technology has been key, so that it is as easy as using a pencil and piece a paper.”
On the other hand, judging from another pilot project in VA, it’s not all beer and skittles
In the past four weeks, we have discovered that some students have been using the Internet excessively for personal use during school time. This has put a tremendous strain on the network, creating network traffic which is preventing the effective usage of iBooks for their intended educational purposes.
\. discussion on Cingular’s 2.5G mobile rollout. I was at the same 802.11 conference that GlennF blogged so finely, and I agree with him: it was eye-opening how the US mobile telcos are coming to the unlicensed side of the Force.
One speaker mentioned that telcos planning 2.5G/3G networks really didn’t want wandering desktop apps on laptops consuming large amounts of bandwidth over the cellular net. They want to charge by the packet on 3G, and applications that would require hours of data transfer would make those rates look ridiculous. Customers, the thinking goes, will be happy at paying a $1 for a minute long video clip, but would seriously balk at $60 an hour for file-sharing.
Somebody else I spoke to – again from a big mobile telco – mentioned that the cost-effectiveness of the 802.11 base stations compared to 3G. Even though the range is so crummy, 3G basestations currently cost >$100,000. “I’d much prefer to rollout an 802.11 based network.”, he said, unprompted. This fits in with a comment by Monica Paolini that real estate owners are the people who will determine the nature and cost of large scale 802.11 rollouts – with such short range, there’s a lot more negotiating and partnerships with the people living under your basestation to be done.