It can get a little bit annoying when people ramble on about how Facebook and Google are taking over the world. They’re just websites! But when those websites start to buy up other things, say, the very cables that connect the people of the world—well that’s actually pretty alarming.
     |
As we all desperately claw after more bandwidth to sate our unquenchable thirst for data, there may yet be an oddly affordable solution; a simple piece of circuitry and software that can double bandwidth in the blink of an eye.
| |
We transmit almost a thousand petabytes of data over the ‘nets every month—an amount that’s growing exponentially, thanks to your narcissistic obsession with Snapchat. In fact, we’re quickly closing in on the limits of how much data optical fiber can transmit. Luckily, scientists at Boston University recently unveiled what could be the next generation of bandwidth tech.
| |
Qualcomm’s been doing very well lately, and most of those chips it builds are for mobile devices that demand a lot of data to serve their owners’ needs — and as more and more folks jump on the smartphone bandwagon, the demand for data will continue to grow exponentially. Today at Qualcomm’s What’s Next in Mobile event in Santa Clara, California, the company told us more about its plan to help build a network that’ll be able to serve up the data all its SoC’s need. The goal is to give us 1000 times the capacity of what we currently have. One of the key parts, as Qualcomm sees it, is small cell base stations in homes, offices and retail spaces working in tandem with the large cell towers that currently adorn so many roofs and mountain tops — the same thing ex-FCC head honcho Julian Genachowski talked about last year.
You see, macrocells (read: towers) can blanket wide areas in signal, but they struggle to penetrate the innards of buildings, which is where small cells come in handy. For those who aren’t familiar, small cell base stations like femtocells and picocells have been around for years, helping to boost cell signal in small areas by hooking into a local wired network. Until now, these small cells have served as a small-scale supplement to macro networks, but Qualcomm CTO Matt Grob sees them comprising a much bigger chunk of the network of the future. According to him, there are a few issues with using them in an expanded role, however.
Filed under: Mobile
If your internet connection leaves you constantly waiting for streams to buffer, you probably love nothing more than to bitch and gripe about bandwidth. But easy there, tiger, because your issue could be a much more fundamental issue that everyone seems to have forgotten about: latency. More »
If you’re looking to trasnfer hundreds of gigabytes of data, it’s still—weirdly—faster to ship hard drives via FedEx than it is to transfer the files over the internet. But why is that, and when will it change? More »
We got some details on Verizon’s (and Time Warner Cable’s) so-called six strikes policy for dealing with piracy back in November, but TorrentFreak has now turned up more details on just how it will work. According to a copy of Verizon’s full policy obtained by the site, the six strikes are actually divided into three tiers, giving users increasingly serious alerts before their bandwidth speeds are reduced to 256 kbps.
The first of those are fairly straightforward emails and voicemails informing users that copyright owners have filed a complaint against them, but the second tier goes a bit further, automatically redirecting users to a website where they’ll have to acknowledge that they’ve been receiving the alerts and then be prompted to watch an anti-piracy video. If you get to the fifth and sixth alerts, you’ll again be redirected to a page where you must agree to either an immediate reduction in speed for two to three days or the same 2-3 day speed reduction delayed until 14 days later. At that point, you’ll also be able to request a review of your situation, for which you’ll be charged a $35. A TorrentFreak notes, Verizon won’t take any further action after the sixth alert, but users could then face possible litigation from the MPAA and RIAA.
Filed under: Internet, Verizon
Source: TorrentFreak
The founders behind Karma (no, not that Karma) think that there’s something fundamentally broken in the market for mobile providers. And they’re hardly alone. So, the TechStars grads set out to create a new format, one that eschews the traditional subscription model for a pay-as-you-go approach to mobile bandwidth.
In an effort to realize their vision of providing anyone and everyone with a 4G, mobile Hotspot for their pocket, the startup is today officially launching its $79 hotspot device that comes with 1GB of free bandwidth and is available for purchase on YourKarma.com.
The 4G and WiFi-capable Hotspot is about half the size of a smartphone (so it does indeed fit in your pocket), comes with a range of six to eight hours of battery life, is capable of speeds of up to 6 megabits per second (Mbps) and can facilitate up to eight open connections at once. Additional bandwidth costs $14 per gigabyte and “never expires,” according to Karma co-founder Robert Gaal.
But, what the founders believe sets their Hotspot package apart is that it introduces the concept of “Social Bandwidth,” meaning that the device and its network are social right out of the box. The more you share your connection with people, the more bandwidth you earn. Right from purchase, Karma’s open WiFi signal is individually branded to its owner — “Rip’s Karma,” for example — and allows owners to earn 100 megabytes of free data each time they share their WiFi network with a new user.
This also works both ways, as the new user is gifted 100 megabytes of free data so that they can get up and running on the network for free once they sign up for an account. Say what you will about this “Karmic loop,” but in the stodgy old world of mobile providers, it’s an innovative business model and approach to user acquisition.
So, just in case it’s not clear, here’s how it works: I buy a Karma 4G, WiFi Hotspot, which has eight hours of battery from a single charge and works just as fast as WiFi connection any in my local area. Once the device is received, I create a Karma account (sign in via Facebook) and immediately given 100MB of free bandwidth. If I go over that limit, I pay $14 for each additional GB of data I use.
Sure, it’s not unlimited, but it’s competitive with other mobile plans if you, say, end up using 5GB of data, as that comes out to $70. If you don’t use that much, you pay less, and if you happen to go over that 5GB, you don’t have to deal with overage charges, which is a breath of fresh air.
Once I’m set up, I head to my local coffee shop, where Karma’s open WiFi network is bound to find some poachers. If those thieves sign up for Karma via Facebook, they too get 100MB free (as do I) attached to their Facebook ID. Even if they don’t have their own Hotspot, they still get free access to WiFi, and since, as the admin, I see the incoming WiFi connections and their Facebook profiles, I have the opportunity to do a little social curating, disapproving if I see something I don’t like. What’s more, the poachers can buy 1GB of data if they go over the 100MB limit right through Karma.
As to who’s powering Karma’s 4G? Karma operates as a virtual provider on the Clearwire broadband network, which serves approximately 135 million people across the U.S. in 80 cities and Simplexity (an authorized MVNA for Clearwire) provides access to the the company’s 4G network.
It’s a very interesting time for Karma to be entering the space, especially as the big mobile service providers are increasingly choosing to offer shared plans and, really, becoming data brokers — that’s their core revenue stream. If it’s true that the average smartphone user consumes about 220MB of data per month, then that makes Karma a favorable alternative. Especially if one is a Karma owner, as it would only require sharing your WiFi network with a couple of other coffee shop dwellers to get a couple hundred MBs of free data.
While Karma is very much provider and platform agnostic, right now it’s only working with Clearwire. Going forward, it’s going to be key for Karma to partner with other networks to extend its national reach. However, it’s hard to imagine that the bigs like Verizon and AT&T are going to be jazzed about supporting the competition.
Nonetheless, there’s a big opportunity in the air, as GoGo Inflight Internet is sorely in need of disrupting. The company is in the early stages of a pilot with one of the largest airlines in the U.S., which will offer “free Karma hotspots to frequent fliers,” for example. Building out these partnerships could prove to be a great revenue stream and user acquisition strategy for Karma.
After graduating from TechStars NY this summer, the startup raised approximately $1 million in funding from Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), DFJ, BOLDstart Ventures, Chang Ng, Collaborative Fund, David Tisch, David Cohen, Eliot Loh, Jerry Neumann, Kal Vepuri, TechStars and 500 Startups, to name a few.
For more, find Karma at home here.
Using public Wi-Fi is a hit-and-miss endeavor: sometime’s its perfect, at others it’s bogged down so much as to be worthless. Fortunately a team of researchers has hit on a solution that can improve throughput by 700 percent—and because it’s software-based, it won’t even need any new hardware to have us all contentedly online. More »
Dodging the issues of spectrum auctions and more cell towers, researchers at MIT have discovered that they can use an algebraic equation to improve data speeds by reducing dropped packets. It’s these dropped packets that can build up congestion across a wireless network, as devices attempt to recoup these missing data nuggets. But instead of sending typical packets, MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics created an equation that describes a series of packets. If a packet fails to deliver, then the receiving device is apparently able to “solve” the missing chunk, with the processing load on phones, routers and base stations apparently negligible.
The tech, which can also seamlessly transition a data stream between wireless internet and LTE, has already been tested on WiFi networks over at MIT; when two percent of data packets were dropped, speeds were boosted from 1Mbps to 16Mbps. If five percent of packets were being lost, the researchers then saw bandwidth increase from 0.5Mbps to 13.5Mbps. Companies are apparently already licensing the tech, although MIT isn’t revealing more on this just yet. Muriel Medard, project lead, said that there were currently “very severe inefficiencies that should be remedied before you consider acquiring more resources” — namely more spectrum and hardware, although the gains seen in these early tests are yet to be replicated in real life. There’s more on the science and development at the source link below.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Science, Mobile, Alt
MIT researchers use algebraic equation that improves WiFi and LTE data streams: boosts speed, reduces network congestion originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Oct 2012 07:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Fierce Wireless | 
Technology Review | Email this | Comments
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
