Author: Kevin Fitchard

Aruba Networks is already building a good deal of the world’s enterprise Wi-Fi networks, pumping wireless signals to malls, conference centers and hotels around the globe. Now it has another use for those networks beyond mere connectivity: it can pinpoint a smartphone’s location within those locations’ maze-like corridors.

Aruba has acquired Meridian Apps, a Portland, Ore.,-based startup that uses Wi-Fi triangulation to determine location indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate. (The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.) Meridian is one of many companies using Wi-Fi signals to gain its bearings, but Meridian, like its competitor Wifarer, also builds apps for businesses that want location-awareness to be key part of their mobile offering.

Meridian has designed museum guide apps for the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History. It’s built department locator apps for Macy’s and incorporated casino floor plans into the Bellagio’s mobile app.

While this kind of kind of technology can be used to bring the usual bevy of location-based services to building interiors, it has the potential of making those services much more granular. For instance, many of the museum apps developed by Meridian and Wifarer are able to determine not just what room you’re in, but what exhibit you’re actually looking at — the app can immediate populate your smartphone screen with details about the wooly mammoth or Van Gogh painting you’re admiring. This kind of hyper-local content is attracting the interest of the big mobile services players, including Apple and Google.

Aruba’s particular interest in Meridian probably has something to do with the fact that its technology is largely infrastructure-dependent. As Meridian CTO Nick Farina explained in his blog, even though smartphones have the ability to sniff out their own locations by measuring Wi-Fi signals, Meridian’s technology relies on access points to make those measurements, thus sparing the phone’s battery and allowing it to work on more restricted devices like the iPhone.

Aruba is the No. 2 enterprise WLAN supplier in the world, supplying networks for every manner of hospital, corporate campus, convention center or mall. You can imagine that many of those customers would be very interested in buying not just a network from Aruba, but also a means to use that network to provide location-aware content and services to their employees and customers.

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Satellite broadband provider ViaSat has selected Boeing to develop and build its new geostationary orbiter, a satellite that will put even the impressive might of its recently launched ViaSat-1 to shame. The two companies said they will jointly design and build the new satellite and are planning to launch it into high-Earth orbit in mid-2016.

ViaSat-1 has already won numerous praise as satellite marvel, boasting a total capacity of 140 Gbps, which it uses to provide its Exede broadband service in remote and rural areas in the U.S. as well as to supply internet connectivity to JetBlue airplanes. The new satellite, aptly named ViaSat-2, is expected to double ViaSat-1’s capacity and greatly expand the provider’s coverage in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean and Central America (ViaSat-1’s beams today skip over large parts of the Rocky Mountains and Western Great Plains).

The satellite hasn’t been without controversy, though, as ViaSat is switching out suppliers. Space Systems/Loral built ViaSat-1, but the two became embroiled in litigation after ViaSat accused the aerospace company of absconding with its intellectual property when it built a competing satellite for Hughes Network Systems.

That satellite became EchoStar 17, doesn’t have quite the capacity of ViaSat-1, but Hughes is using it to go head to head with ViaSat in the rural broadband market. Its Gen4 service offers speeds of 10-15 Mbps to customers, while ViaSat’s Exede service clocks in at about 12 Mbps.

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One of the biggest gripes about Google Glass has been it doesn’t have any apps. Well, some of the biggest app developers and content providers in the world have decided to rectify that problem. On Thursday, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and CNN along with a handful of other content providers announced that they have already created or are in the process of developing apps — dubbed “Glassware” — for Google’s new headgear.

In a blog post, Twitter said you can now tweet photos from Glass to your feed — the update will include the hashtag “#throughglass” — and see your other tweets by turning on in-Glass notifications. The service is now available and users can activate the Twitter app on Google’s MyGlass portal.

Facebook’s Glass implementation is also live, though for now you can only share photos, not post status updates or view your newsfeed. You can, however, set privacy levels and add descriptions to photos you post using Glass’s speech recognition features.

Evernote doesn’t yet have an app per se, but it is integrating with Glass’s sharing menu, allowing you to capture a picture or short video and save it as a note in your Evernote account. It is also giving users the option of sending notes (from its web app) to the Glass timeline so your grocery list or crib notes are right in your line of vision.

At I/O Google revealed three other companies taking up shop on Glass. CNN’s app will put news alerts in front of your retinas. Elle is providing content from its magazines that can be viewed in the Glass display or read aloud. Tumblr lets you post content to your personal blog and get updates from Tumblrs you follow.

These companies join Path and the New York Times as the only official third-party apps on the Glass. For now Google is being rather conservative in its Glassware efforts, placing restrictions on the level of access to platform and banning ads or any other monetization scheme.

Still, once Google fully opens up Glass, it likely won’t have any shortage of interest. Smaller developers are already clamoring to get on board. For instance, Open Garden wants Google to expose Glass’s networking functions so it can link the headgear to its crowdsourced mesh network.

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Verizon Wireless figures if it’s a bit more generous with data spigot it can reel in more prepaid subscribers looking to get a smartphone but not get tied down by a contract. This week it boosted the data caps on its prepaid smartphone plans, making them available to existing customers.

Its $60 and $70 prepaid plans still aren’t exactly cheap, but you get a lot more data value out of them. The $60 plan now includes 2 GB of data (up from 500 MB), while the $70 plan includes 4 GB (up from 2 GB). Both includes unlimited talk and text, but as with the previous plans prepaid customers don’t get access to the LTE network. If you want a 4G connection, you’ll have to sign a contract.

I’ve noted before that Verizon is getting a lot more aggressive in the prepaid space – a market it has historically ignored. But Verizon has always been all over the premium smartphone subscriber, and increasingly those customers are moving away from contract plans to prepaid services. In the first quarter, nearly one-third of all smartphones activated landed on a prepaid plan, according to The NPD Group.

While the bigger data buckets are only available to current prepaid customers, Verizon said it will extend them to new customers on June 6.

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A lot of people who own smartphones never bother to link them to their home Wi-Fi networks when available, according to virtual hotspot provider Devicescape. Since a good deal of smartphone usage occurs at home, tapping into home Wi-Fi would not only save these folks data plan charges, but more often than not, provide them with a faster more resilient connection than their operator’s 3G or 4G networks.

The problem is there are a lot of people who don’t realize their phones will link to their home networks — they either can’t figure out how to configure their devices’ Wi-Fi settings or they’ve disabled their Wi-Fi from the get go. Devicescape on Thursday said it has developed a new bit of software that attempts to lure those customers onto their own home networks.

Called Personal Curator, the smartphone client utilizes Devicescape’s radio management and network detection technologies, along with a machine-learning algorithm, to identify when a user is at home and a wireless network is available. If the smartphone’s Wi-Fi radio is disabled, Personal Curator will activate it and prompt the user to connect, walking them through the device configuration process.

Devicescape claims that as many as 30 percent of smartphones never connect to an available home Wi-Fi network, which would mean an enormous quantity of traffic that could easily be shunted onto a cheap broadband connection is instead heading toward the cell towers. That number seems high, but it’s not entirely out of the question. I’ve configured the Wi-Fi settings of many a friend or relative who never bothered to do it themselves.

Devicescape is selling Personal Curator to carriers, who would pre-install it on the smartphones they sell and have the biggest vested interest in coaxing customers on to as many Wi-Fi networks as possible. Devicescape estimates operators would save $631 in lifetime network data delivery costs for each subscriber that it can lure onto a home network.

Frankly, that figure is a bit absurd. It assumes that customers who don’t use their home Wi-Fi today will wander the world blithely unaware of Wi-Fi for the rest of their lives. It also assumes all smartphone users are created equal (More technically savvy users who consume more data tend to be more aware of their device’s networking capabilities).

Still, for Devicescape’s core customers, Personal Curator could be a very attractive service. The company’s whole business model is designed around the idea of providing cheap ubiquitous Wi-Fi to carriers. Through crowdsourcing, it has identified and mapped 12 million open access points around the world, and its client software automatically links to those nodes whenever they’re available.

It counts among its customers MetroPCS (now part of T-Mobile USA and mobile virtual network operators like Republic Wireless, which offer subscribers cheap unlimited data plans. Any packet those operators ship over the unlicensed airwaves is a direct cost savings. And once connected to home Wi-Fi, smartphone owners would likely use the heck out of it. A recent Sandvine report shows that 20 percent of all traffic traversing home broadband connections comes from a phone or tablet.

Devicescape has grown considerably in the last year. It now sells its products to eight carriers in North America and Europe (including U.S. Cellular and Bouygues Telecom). It has also struck deals with Intel and Microsoft to embed its software directly into the former’s Ultrabook and tablet connection manager and the latter’s WP8 software. Devicescape revealed today that it has now managing 1.5 billion Wi-Fi connections monthly, a 50 percent increase in 12 months.

Based in San Bruno, Calif., Devicescape hopes to draw more attention to itself next week at North America’s biggest mobile trade show, CTIA Wireless. It’s releasing an Android app called Magnifi CTIA that will let anyone connected to thousands of Las Vegas access points in its curated virtual network for the duration of the show.

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Wi-Fi is everywhere and more often than not it’s free for the taking. Pretty much everyone but airlines and fancy hotels are opening their networks to all comers. The only problem is that open networks are, well, wide open. They’re unencrypted and insecure, exposing users to a world of electronic eavesdroppers and attacks.

Hotspot maker Ruckus Wireless, however, has developed a kind of ad-hoc security system for open hotspots, which it plans to release next week with the next version of its access point management software. Called Open Secure Hotspot, the technology automatically generates encryption keys for any user who logs into an open Ruckus hotspot, granting them a secure connection within moments, Ruckus VP of marketing David Callisch told GigaOM.

Ruckus started out as a supplier of IPTV wireless streaming nodes and enterprise wireless LANs, over which security measures were much easier to enforce. But as Ruckus’s public access network business grew it found itself supplying more Wi-Fi gear that enterprises and service providers simply wanted open to the public, Callisch said. Those customers didn’t want their open networks turning into playgrounds for Firesheep, man-in-the-middle attackers and other internet nasties, Callisch said, so they pressed Ruckus to develop a secure form of open Wi-Fi.

The rather confusing diagram above details how the security software works, but here’s what it boils down to: Anytime an unknown user connects to an upgraded Ruckus hotspot he or she will receive the option of establishing a secure connection to the network. If the user opts in, Ruckus’s network gateway will generate what Ruckus is calling a dynamic pre-shared key, randomly generated for each device. Users can either input the key by launching an executable file sent by the gateway, or they can manually enter the key into their Wi-Fi settings.

It may not seem like the most elegant way of getting online in a hotel lobby or public square, but Callisch but it’s still a relatively simple process, and it beats the alternative – surfing the internet over a naked connection or installing virtual private network (VPN) software on the fly.

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Wondering where the big surge in Android activations Google announced at I/O is coming from? In the U.S. at least, Google should be thanking the prepaid operators. According to The NPD Group, one out of every three smartphone activations (32 percent) in the U.S. last quarter was on a prepaid no-contract plan.

Since Android has long been the prepaid carrier’s OS of choice, the vast majority of those devices ran Google’s software. NPD’s Mobile Phone Track service show that year-over-year prepaid smartphone unit sales doubled in the first quarter. Quarter over quarter, prepaid’s overall share of the smartphone market jumped form 22 percent to 32 percent. NPD’s VP of industry analysis Stephen Baker said Q1 marked the twelfth straight quarter of triple digit sales increases in the U.S.

Apple certainly isn’t blind to the trend. In fact, it’s been actively seeking out prepaid carrier partnerships in the last year working with carriers like Cricket Communications, Straight Talk and T-Mobile USA. Though the iPhone’s share of the prepaid smartphone market was only 8 percent, that’s up considerably from last year when it was a mere 2 percent. Samsung share of the prepaid smartphone market is big, 32 percent, but it’s relatively stable, while Apple is on a big growth trajectory.

“For consumers looking at prepaid phones today, value does not equate with finding phones that are cheap or obsolete,” Baker said in a statement. “In fact, the Galaxy S2 and the iPhone 4S, two of the top five prepaid smartphone models in 2013, were among the top-selling phones overall just one year earlier.”

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If you’re waiting for the days of a “toll-free” mobile internet, you may not have to wait much longer. Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference on Wednesday, AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson said he expects content providers and app developers soon to starting paying the network freight for their content, FierceWireless reported.

Content providers could do this through direct payments to carriers, Stephenson said, but according to Fierce, he also said they could subsidize data costs through some kind of advertising revenue share. The end result, though, would be the same: content providers who pay would see their traffic exempted from customers’ mobile data caps.

Stephenson comments come a week after reports that arch-competitor Verizon Wireless is in discussions with ESPN for just such a toll-free data deal. What seemed like a crazy suggestion from AT&T and other carriers last year, now looks like it might become reality. But is it a reality we really want?

A content provider-subsidized internet would be appealing to many consumers, especially those on AT&T and Verizon since carriers have hunted the unlimited data plan to the point of extinction. Imagine streaming Netflix movies and ESPN games to your heart’s content without ever worrying about exceeding your data cap or incurring overage fees.

But as I pointed out last week there could be some major unintended — or if carriers are being really cynical, intended — consequences to adopting these kinds of subsidy models. Legally mobile operators aren’t subject to the same net neutrality guidelines as the wireline broadband providers, but if mobile carriers created two separate classes of mobile data traffic they could upset the delicate balance that makes the mobile internet the mobile internet:

… there are enormous consequences to such a deal. The biggest and most obvious consequence is that it favors one provider’s content over another. If all access is created equal, then no content has an inherent advantage over another — which is the whole idea behind the wireline network neutrality rules the FCC established in 2010. But if consumers know they can get ESPN’s content without incurring any additional charge, they’ll naturally gravitate toward that content.

There’s an even bigger risk that ESPN’s competitors won’t just get penalized in the eyes of the consumer. Their traffic flow could be penalized as well. Embedded deep within Verizon’s network are policy servers that can distinguish an ESPN packet from any other packet. Not only could Verizon use that technology to exempt ESPN traffic form data plans, it also could use that technology to prioritize ESPN’s traffic from all others. The  [Wall Street] Journal’s story didn’t mention anything about traffic shaping, but you can bet its high on the list in any negotiation.

What’s particularly noteworthy about Stephenson’s comments, though, is the mention of using advertising as a former of subsidy currency. Stephenson could just be talking about inserting carrier-generated advertising into their app ad engines as compensation for their free ride on the network. But the other implication is that AT&T wants a true revenue share, taking a cut off the top of any revenue generated from YouTube ads or any Netflix subscription used on mobile.

This is an old idea the mobile industry first proposed way before the advent of the smartphone – in an age when the mobile internet was still a walled garden and carriers its gatekeepers. The idea was that operators would become equal partners with content providers, and that’s a scary proposition. I doubt that content providers want to give the gate keys back to the carriers.

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It’s plain to see we’re experiencing a renaissance of mobile virtual network operators. After numerous virtual operators died off in the last decade, new MVNOs — which repackage and resell the major carriers’ voice, SMS and data services — are now popping up almost weekly. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for new virtual operators to distinguish themselves from one another.

MVNO veteran PlatinumTel is launching a new carrier brand called GIV Mobile Wednesday, separating it from the pack not by offering unlimited data, selling app-specific plans or implementing bandwidth sharing features. Instead GIV is playing the role of charitable fund-raiser. You don’t just sign up for a voice and data plan. You sign up for one or more charities such as the American Red Cross or the Alzheimer’s Association. GIV claims it will donate 8 percent of your bill to those selected charities each month, or up to $50 per year per customer.

Of course, it might seem easier to cut a check for $50 to your charity choice rather than build your mobile service around the idea of giving. But GIV seems to targeting the same segment of the population that latches onto to charity vanity credit cards, which donate a small portion of every purchase to a customer’s organization of choice, rather than award points or miles. By allowing customers to divide their giving between multiple charities GIV acts a bit like a donation box; it aggregates a bunch of tiny gifts from individual consumers into one big check.

The MVNO is offering customers dozens of initial charities to choose from, ranging from animal welfare groups to environmental causes to disease research (you can see a full list here). Every six months GIV will take submissions from its customers for new charities, and then those same customers will vote to name one new organization to its roster each period.

As for the actual mobile service, GIV looks like many of the new breed of smartphone-centric prepaid MVNOs popping up. It offers two plans both of which have unlimited voice and text, both of which use T-Mobile’s network. The $40 plan includes 250 MB of monthly HSPA+ data before speeds are throttled, while the $50 plan includes 2 GB of data. There’s still new word on what phones GIV will sell starting tomorrow, but it will support any GSM phone that works on T-Mobile’s network for customers who just buy a SIM card.

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Coming off a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund its Dispatch broadband aggregation software, Connectify is returning to the crowd-funding site for the next iteration of its product. This time around, the Philadelphia startup is developing a cloud-based packet parsing and channel bonding service called Switchboard designed to speed up video and other high-bandwidth content to your Mac or PC.

According to Connectify, Dispatch — which went live in December — has some inherent limitations. While it was able to aggregate multiple wireline and wireless connections into a single fat pipe, allowing your Windows-based PC to take advantage of every available internet link, Dispatch could only ship certain types of content over one of those connections at any given time, Connectify President Bhana Grover said in an email.

“This worked fantastically with multi-threaded applications like web browsing and Bittorrent,” Grover said. “But the feedback we got from our backers and customers was that they wanted a more robust connection aggregation technology: one that could speed up video streaming, uploads, and VPNs… and was Mac-compatible, too.”

Switchboard basically works like a virtual private network (VPN). All of your internet connections — whether Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G — link to Connectify’s servers in the cloud. Those servers then go about dismantling content or files into their component packets and routing them over those different connections. Over Dispatch, a Netflix movie would stream over the highest-bandwidth connection available to the PC. If you were on public hotspot or cellular network that connection might be fairly slow. With Switchboard that single Netflix stream is split between multiple connections, resulting in faster buffering and better resolution.

Connectify has developed a prototype for Switchboard on both the PC and Mac, but it wants to raise $100,000 in funds on Kickstarter over the next month to complete its user interface, develop customer management software and deploy its first cloud-based servers. As with Dispatch, Connectify plans to sell Switchboard on a subscription basis, but due to its software-as-a-service element Switchboard is setting capacity limits as well. That means the more data you consume via Switchboard, the more you pay. Backers of the project, however, will get early discounted access to the service this fall.

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The auto industry has long said that one of the biggest obstacles to commercializing the self-driving vehicle is consumer mindset: not everyone is comfortable handing the wheel to the in-dash computer while hurtling down the highway. But a new study by Cisco Systems shows that consumers around the world may be more amenable to the autonomous vehicle than everyone thought.

In a global survey of 1,514 consumers 18 years or older, Cisco found that 57 percent would put their trust in a driverless vehicle. The answers varied wildly depending on country, with 95 percent of Brazilians embracing the concept of a silicon chauffeur. In Japan skepticism is still very high with only 28 percent willing to give up direct control of their cars.

In the U.S., where many of these autonomous vehicle technologies are being tested, acceptance was above the global average at 60 percent. What’s more those Americans surveyed weren’t just a bunch of wild risk-takers: 48 percent said they would trust a driverless car to ferry around their children. In general, western Europe was less accepting of vehicle autonomy than North America, and rapidly developing regions of the world like India and China were the more enthusiastic.

Of course, consumer perception of a technology depends largely on how it’s presented to the public. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk last week made that very point when outlining Tesla’s future autonomous vehicle plans, saying he didn’t like the connotations of the term “driverless car” because it implies a complete ceding of control. Musk’s term of choice is “autopilot.”

But according to Andreas Mai, Cisco director of product management for smart connected vehicles, the survey didn’t sugar coat its question. Its exact text: “Imagine a car on the road that is controlled entirely by technology and requires no human driver (i.e. Johnny Cab from Total Recall). How likely would you be to ride in such a car?”

I’m generally a proponent of connected car technologies and look forward to the day when advanced sensors and ad hoc wireless networking would largely automate my daily commute. But I have to say if presented with that question on Cisco’s survey my answer would “no.” I would be willing to give my car autonomy in many situations, but the idea of being reduced entirely to passenger status doesn’t sit well with me. If Cisco’s survey is truly representative of the public’s current mindset, then we’re a lot closer to creating a driverless highway network than I ever imagined. (For information on the connected car, see GigaOM’s infographic)

Of course, as with any industry produced survey, you do have approach Cisco’s numbers with some healthy skepticism. Cisco isn’t Ford or Google, but it certainly has some skin in this game. It produces the security software and router hardware that would be used to deliver connected and autonomous car services. In general, though, Cisco tends to produce very thorough industry reports such as its Visual Networking Index of internet traffic.

Cisco asked some other interesting questions in its survey. For instance, it found that consumers are eager to connect their vehicles to the internet of things if they can get tangible benefits. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said they would allow remote monitoring of their driving habits if it produced savings on their insurance premiums or auto repair bills.

Another 64 percent said they would be willing to share even more personal information, such as their height and weight and entertainment preferences, for the creation of a unique driver profiles. In a such a scenario, your car could recognize a specific driver by voice imprint and adjust the steering column and seat position automatically and then immediately tune the entertainment system to favorite presets. A surprising 60 percent said they would even provide their automaker or a third-party company with sensitive biometric information like fingerprints or DNA if it could help make their vehicles secure.

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As Google I/O gets ready to kick off Wednesday, there’s a lot of buzz about what’s in store for Glass, in particular which new apps Google will let onto the so far bare-bones platform. At least one developer, however, is vying for a spot on glass, but not to offer up any kind of new game or service. Instead Open Garden wants to change how Glass – and eventually any wearable — connects to the Internet.

Open Garden is trying to build a mesh network for mobile devices that does away with the notion that a single device must connect to the internet through a pre-defined path. Instead it’s created tablet, smartphone and PC software that will allow their host devices to crowdsource their connections by forming ad hoc mesh networks with other Open Garden devices. Collectively those clients determine which device or devices have the best connections to the internet – whether its 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi or Ethernet – and route traffic through those links.

It’s a hard notion for many people to grasp since we tend think of our connections as individual property, but Open Garden is trying to change that mindset. If everyone shares their connection, then everyone’s link to the network is optimized. Open Garden co-founder and CEO Micha Benoliel believes that Google Glass is an ideal candidate to demonstrate that principle.

Open Garden has succeeded in installing its networking software for Glass, which means the wearable can now act as a node in a larger mesh. The setup has an immediate advantage for Glass owners: they don’t need to pair Glass to their Android devices through Bluetooth or subscribe to a tethering plan from their operators. The Open Garden client makes the connection automatically over Wi-Fi.

But the bigger implication is that Glass could eventually become part of a larger networked community ranging far beyond its owner’s personal constellation of devices. A Glass user, for instance, might be able to leave his smartphone at home or in his office. Instead of losing connectivity, the Google headgear would search out other Open Garden devices – even other Glass units — hopping from node to node until it wended its way onto a mobile or broadband network.

To make its software work on Glass, Open Garden had to do more than just tap into the Mirror API. Benoliel said Open Garden’s developers had to delve deeper into the Android kernel to gain access to its networking functions, which will make distributing its software all but impossible when Glass becomes generally available to the public. But Benoliel is hoping Google will see the advantage of making Glass part of the larger mesh and is lobbying the search giant to clear the way for its app.

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On Monday, Samsung made a big news splash with the revelation it has successfully tested a “5G” network in its labs, delivering a 1 Gbps connection over airwaves that were previously useless for mobile communications.

From what few details Samsung has released about the tests, the feat sounds impressive, and its adaptive array transceiver technology could very well make it into the future networks we’ll one day call 5G. But for Samsung to call its technology 5G today is very disingenuous. Quite frankly a huge global vendor vendor and researcher like Samsung should know better than to play so fast and loose with media and technology perceptions. Samsung is grubbing for headlines, and it appears to have succeeded. A search of Google News for “Samsung” and “5G” yielded 97 separate stories.

The fact is, 5G only exists as barest concept today. Groups like METIS have just started investigating the technologies and network architectures that will comprise 5G networks a decade down the road. There is certainly no standards-based definition of 5G, and anyone who claims other is frankly making crap up.

Yet we’ve been witnessing a growing number of companies and tech media outlets start tossing the term 5G about, just as we saw the industry warp the definition of 4G years ago and are seeing carriers abuse the term LTE-Advanced today. Samsung certainly isn’t the first or worst offender. Broadcom attached the term 5G to its 802.11ac Wi-Fi gear — which isn’t even a mobile cellular technology – over a year ago. But Samsung and the rest of the industry aren’t doing anyone any favors by adding to the confusion.

That said, Samsung appears to have done something impressive in these tests. Packing 1 Gbps into a millimeter-wave transmission (A minor technical point: Samsung calls it millimeter, but the 28 GHz Ka-band frequencies it uses straddles the millimeter and microwave bands) is nothing new. Backhaul specialists for years have been cramming loads of capacity into broad swathes of high-frequency spectrum. The problem is those frequencies have been useless for mobile communications because they have no range. Shorter wavelengths can’t propagate at the power levels used for cellular transmission.

Samsung, however, seems to have solved that problem by using a boatload of antennas – 64 to be exact. It’s the same principle behind the MIMO antennas used in our Wi-Fi routers and LTE phones: if instead of a single high-powered transmission, you send several low-power transmissions that reinforce one another, your signal will propagate farther. Samsung claims that by using this technique it’s produced a link in the 28 GHz band that can travel 2 km and deliver a connection speed of just over 1 Gbps.

If Samsung and the mobile industry can commercialize this technology for cellular, it could open up whole new hunks of spectrum for wide area network use. There are plenty of obstacles to making such technology viable, not the least of which is shoving 64 antennas into a mobile phone, but it’s a start.

So kudos to Samsung for pushing the bounds of wireless technology, but shame on Samsung for conflating that accomplishment with its ridiculous pretensions to 5G. “Adaptive array transceiver” may not have the same ring on a press release as “5G”, but at least it’s honest.

Pinocchio image courtesy of Shutterstock user neven

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The increasingly crowded virtual operator club just got a new member: Zact. Created by Andreessen Horowitz-backed cloud-services startup ItsOn, Zact is hoping to change consumers’ conceptions of the mobile service plan by making them ultra-customizable.

Zact is one of the new breed of mobile virtual network operators (MVNO), though ItsOn CEO Greg Raleigh refuses to use that term to describe his company. Like any MVNO, Zact doesn’t own any spectrum or wireless network infrastructure. It buys its access from a larger carrier instead – in this case Sprint. But Raleigh argues that MVNOs typically repackage traditional mobile voice and data plans, selling them at cheaper prices and without contracts. Meanwhile, Zact is offering a radically different way to buy services, making its plan options so granular that customers can tailor them specifically to their mobile habits.

Zact is actually a lot like Ting, an MVNO launched by Tucows last year that allows customers to select their voice, data and SMS usage separately, lets customers share those services across multiple phones and charges customers only for the minutes, texts and megabytes that they actually use. Zact, however, is taking that concept one step further.

The company plans to offer plans you can customize by the app. For $5 a month you could choose an unlimited Facebook or unlimited navigation and mapping plan, which would exempt either service from your monthly data usage. The virtual carrier is also supporting granular parental controls, which could let adults remotely control when their kids use their phones, but also who they call and what types of apps they can access.

The mobile industry has been talking about such app-tailored plans for years, but, except for a few limited cases, carriers have yet to implement them. The reason Zact is ahead of the curve is because ItsOn core business is in the policy management technology that powers such service models. While there is a huge segment of the wireless industry dedicated to building network-based traffic shaping and policy service technology, ItsOn is trying upend that market by virtualizing all of those capabilities in the cloud.

ItsOn is already trialing its technology with four major carriers – three in Europe and one in the U.S. – but the company wanted to jumpstart demand for such customizable service plans by launching its own service provider, Raleigh said. He added though, that ItsOn has no plans to shut down Zact even if it proves successful selling its cloud policy service to carriers.

ItsOn, however, faces a lot of competition on both sides of its business. The big telecom vendors like Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Oracle and Cisco Systems have been upping their game in the policy management space, in many cases buying up smaller policy players. Alcatel-Lucent recently unveiled a new consumer-facing phone client and back-end management system called Smart Plan that supports most of the same plan tailoring features Zact and ItsOn offer.

The MVNO market is becoming an increasingly crowded one, as well. Ting not only has a head start over Zact, it’s also supporting many new and popular smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S 4. Meanwhile Zact is selling two older LG Android devices for now. Dozens of other MVNOs are vying for consumers’ attention, and though they may not have the granularity of Zact or Ting’s service plans, they’re all trying to distinguish themselves with other features just as likely to attract consumers’ attention such as ultra-cheap pricing or unlimited data.

Multiple smartphones image courtesy of Shutterstock user Reno Martin

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Back in July, the GSM Association’s research arm Wireless Intelligence recorded only a measly 27 million LTE subscribers worldwide, most of them concentrated in the U.S., Japan and Korea. Well, a lot happened in nine months. Wireless Intelligence found that global LTE connections grew four times that number to 100 million in that timeframe.

Most of those connections are still in the U.S., Korea and Japan, but Australia joins the list of early LTE adopters. Those four countries account for 90 percent of LTE connections, and within their borders four out of five people are in LTE coverage area, WI found.

Today there are 160 LTE networks in 70 countries, but WI predicts that in 2017 that number will grow to 400 networks in 120 countries hosting a total of 900 million subscribers.

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For the last year mobile carriers have entertained a strange notion: content providers should pay for the mobile data their customers consume on operators’ networks. At first, the big internet players seemed to shrug off the suggestion, but carriers may have found their first taker in sports entertainment giant ESPN.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Disney-owned ESPN is negotiating with Verizon Wireless to let the operator’s customers partake in unlimited quantities of ESPN content without incurring any additional data charges. In essence, ESPN would pay Verizon to exempt its content from its data caps.

The Journal reported that no deal is imminent and ESPN isn’t even sure that the economics will work, but the fact that it’s entertaining the idea is significant. It turns the notion of a neutral mobile internet on its head. The hierarchy of the internet is pretty simple: customers pay for access in the form of data plans, leaving internet players free use of the mobile airwaves to deliver their content either for free or as paid services. If ESPN and Verizon strike a deal that hierarchy gets flipped, and there would be consequences.

The mobile internet has problems, but it works best when it remains neutral

Mobile operators have chipping away at the principle of net neutrality for years, banning certain apps here and restricting competing over-the-top services there. In Europe, carriers are battling with Google over carriage fees. But in this case, a carrier appears to be challenging net neutrality with the complicity of a content provider. I can understand why ESPN might be eager to take the plunge into subsidizing mobile data. In fact, I’m surprised a big name player like Netflix or Hulu hadn’t done it sooner.

One of the biggest obstacles to widespread video consumption on the mobile internet is overage fees. Who’s going to watch a 3-hour sporting event on their mobile phone or tablet if it drains your monthly data plan in the process? If ESPN wants to make consumers as comfortable using its mobile apps as they are watching its cable programming and using its web services, then it has to get around those data caps.

But there are enormous consequences to such a deal. The biggest and most obvious consequence is that it favors one provider’s content over another. If all access is created equal, then no content has an inherent advantage over another — which is the whole idea behind the wireline network neutrality rules the FCC established in 2010. But if consumers know they can get ESPN’s content without incurring any additional charge, they’ll naturally gravitate toward that content.

There’s an even bigger risk that ESPN’s competitors won’t just get penalized in the eyes of the consumer. Their traffic flow could be penalized as well. Embedded deep within Verizon’s network are policy servers that can distinguish an ESPN packet from any other packet. Not only could Verizon use that technology to exempt ESPN traffic form data plans, it also could use that technology to prioritize ESPN’s traffic from all others. The Journal’s story didn’t mention anything about traffic shaping, but you can bet its high on the list in any negotiation.

Do carriers really want to go down this road?

I suspect ESPN isn’t the only content provider interested in bargaining with the carriers. And I’m sure the carriers are thrilled at the prospects at an additional mobile data revenue stream. But there are risks for the carriers, too.

Operators have long complained about being reduced to mere dumb pipes, but these kind of subsidy deals would only make their pipes dumber. If all the big destinations on the mobile internet starting paying network fees for the consumer, then operators won’t have much left to sell. Consumers basically would be dealing with the big internet brands to get their content and their access. That leaves carriers selling smaller and smaller mobile data plans to customers who will increasingly gravitate toward those big content providers. Operators will have even fewer ways of distinguishing themselves from their competitors.

What’s more, operators are making the very dangerous assumption that they will always have the upper hand in such negotiations. Last week The New Yorker published a very insightful piece by Tim Wu about the growing threat to net neutrality. While Wu was making his case for wireline neutrality, his points apply to the mobile internet as well:

An important aspect of the Internet’s original design is that many prices were set at zero—what have been called zero-price rules. The price to join the network is zero. The price that users and sites pay to reach others is zero: a blogger doesn’t need to pay to reach Comcast’s customers. And the price that big Web sites charge broadband operators to carry their content is also zero. It’s a subtle point, but these three zeros are a large part of what makes the Internet what it is. If net neutrality goes away, so does the agreement to freeze prices at zero.

If mobile carriers and content providers start negotiating over access the delicate balance of the mobile internet suddenly goes off kilter. Right now it’s teetering toward the mobile operators but that might not always the case. ESPN, Google, Facebook and HBO are enormously powerful brands and their consumer influence is only growing. Meanwhile carriers are becoming increasingly less significant.

It’s not hard to imagine a day when ESPN asserts itself in mobile just as its done in the cable industry, turning the tables on the operators. One day carriers may have to pay ESPN for the privilege of delivering its sports content.

Featured photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Lane V. Erickson; Verizon photo courtesy of Flickr user slgckgc

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Think the current options for in-flight Wi-Fi suck? The Federal Communications Commission hears you.

The FCC on Thursday proposed to auction off more airwaves for commercial ground-to-plane broadband communications. We’re not just talking about a handful of frequencies here: The FCC is eyeballing a 500 MHz block of spectrum, which could boost the connection speeds available to aircraft by a factor of 100,000.

As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham explained in a recent post, current in-flight broadband is so pricey and low-bandwidth because airlines rely on expensive satellite or ground-to-air transmissions systems to link aircraft to the internet. The dominant airline provider GoGo uses what is in essence a 3G CDMA network pointed at the sky. That means a single 3Mbps EV-DO connection must be spread among all of the internet users in an aircraft. Your fancy new laptop may support gigabit Wi-Fi, but the bottleneck in the ground-based backhaul link can slow you down to dial-up speeds.

The FCC’s plans, however, key in on a proposal Qualcomm made last year to clear a massive swathe of spectrum in the 14 GHz frequencies over which a kind of super-LTE network could be built. That network would only sport about 150 towers but each of those nodes would blast a high-powered signal into the northern horizon. Airplanes would fly between these huge crescent-shaped cells just as our cellphones move from tower to tower on the ground. But each of these aerial cells would have a whopping 300 Gbps of capacity, which would be shared among all of the planes occupying the surrounding airspace.

That’s a lot of bandwidth, but it’s conceivable that the airlines and their passengers could find a use for it. Today’s in-flight Wi-Fi is priced for the business traveler with an expense account and the inability to go four hours without email access. But these days everyone in the cabin from first-class to steerage is carrying multiple Wi-Fi-enabled devices. And they don’t just want to check email — they they want to stream video and play networked games. Airlines could also use that bandwidth to offer on-demand entertainment and live programming from the cloud, not just from their on-board hard-drives.

As for costs, a more efficient network could allow airlines to drop rates — or maybe even eliminate in-flight broadband fees entirely — to make high-bandwidth connections available to all customers. GoGo’s current network uses 160 towers, making it the same the size as Qualcomm’s proposed system. The infrastructure investment would be about the same, but by using the latest 4G network technologies and hell of a lot more spectrum, we could shove a lot more bandwidth into that infrastructure.

The 14 GHz band is currently used by fixed satellite providers as an uplink path to their birds in orbit. The FCC proposal would require that the any new in-flight network share those frequencies with its current tenants. In its notice of proposed rulemaking, the Commission said it is seeking industry comment to ensure there will be no interference between those two uses.

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New York City food trucks are adding a new item to their menus: free Wi-Fi. Starting on Thursday, 30 roving restaurants in the Big Apple will be sporting virtual operator Karma’s 4G mobile hotspots, offering anyone in the vicinity 100 MB of free access.

The participating trucks are run by empanadas specialist Nuchas, Andy’s Italian Ices, mobile burger flipper Frites ‘N’ Meats and coffee wagon Mudtruck. Karma is also installing the hotspots — which connect users through Wi-Fi to Clearwire’s WiMAX network — at Mad. Sq. Eats, a seasonal outdoor market in Madison Square Park.

Once interested web surfers log into a hotspot (under the Your Karma SSID) using Facebook, they will receive 100 MB of free data access, which they can use not only at the hosting food truck but also at any other participating food truck or any other Karma hotspot. If you like the hosting food truck’s Facebook page, you receive an additional 25 MB.

The fascinating thing about Karma is that unlike other wireless ISPs, it doesn’t just sell you access to your own mobile hotspot. Karma gives you access to everyone else’s hotspots, too. Any Karma customer can link to any Karma hotspot — whether it is on a food truck or in your neighbor’s pocket — allowing you to use your megabytes wherever its ad hoc network of devices are present.

Karma doesn’t want to be another mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) selling devices and bulk megabytes. Instead it hopes to build a social mesh network that divorces access from the device. If Karma can achieve scale, customers will no longer be forced to tether their tablets or PCs to a single modem they have to lug around wherever they go, said Karma CEO and co-founder Robert Gaal. By working with food trucks, Gaal said, Karma can seed its social mesh network in more places, helping it achieve that scale.

“This all started because the Mudtruck was parked around the office from TechStars,” Gaal said in an email. “During our time in the program and after, we kept in touch with them. At one point, we figured that all those people in line for the truck with their eyes glued to their phones might need some Wi-Fi. The first tests we did worked really well, so we approached many more after.”

After using up your initial 100 MB of free data, you can buy an additional gigabyte for $14, and that data never expires. Since Karma is so small today, customers will need to get their own dedicated hotspots if they expect to get a connection in most places. But Karma offers incentives to share your connection with as many people as possible: for everyone who connects to your modem you get 100 MB of free data, and any data those guests consume isn’t subtracted from your data bucket.

Eventually it may be possible to be a Karma customer without ever owning a Karma modem. As more customers buy into the service, the likelihood of finding a Karma signal will increase, especially in areas where internet users converge like airports and coffee shops. Gaal said Karma will also build on the food truck project and began seeding hotspots in other heavily trafficked areas.

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Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk thinks that autonomous vehicles that drive themselves may not be as far off in the future as the auto industry makes them out to be. The big sensor arrays that Google, Toyota and Ford are testing in their autonomous car prototypes are a long ways from becoming commercially viable or affordable, Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg. But he said a scaled down version of such sensor systems relying on camera imaging could power a form of car autopilot that automates many of the ordinary tasks of driving.

“I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self-driving,” Musk said in the interview. “Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.”

Musk told Bloomberg that he’s discussed the autopilot concept with Google’s engineers and even mentioned the possibility of Tesla and Google jointly developing such a system. But Musk later tweeted from his Twitter account that his comments to Bloomberg were meant to be off the cuff, and that Tesla and Google weren’t announcing any big new initiative.

“Creating an autopilot for cars at Tesla is an important, but not yet top priority,” Musk tweeted. “Still a few years from production.”

Musk’s notion of an inexpensive autonomous driving system is an interesting one as it does away with the complex light detection and ranging — or Lidar — sensors that use 360-degree scanning lasers to render a 3D construct of the world around the vehicle. You’ve seen such funky laser arrays on top of mapping vehicles before, so the technology is readily available, but even a scaled down version of such systems would add enormous cost to car. According to Ford engineers, those costs are among the principal reasons why fully autonomous cars are still many years away from becoming reality.

But Musk posited that a car could simply use cameras to collect the data the car needs from its surroundings. The approach has its limitations compared to lasers. Cameras take pictures, while Lidar is registering physical objects, tracking their distance and relative speed to your car. Cameras would extrapolate that data from images. Stereoscopic lenses could allow for better depth perception on the road, but ultimately a camera-based system would depend on a lot of image-processing muscle to cull critical life-saving information from a massive pool of pixels.

Luckily for Musk, he’s not the only one thinking this way. Many of the new advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) systems that warn drivers of impending accidents or alert them to lane drifting are camera based. It’s also no coincidence that graphics card giant Nvidia is making a big play in the connected car space. The silicon vendor believes that its years of crunching real-time image and spatial data in PCs and game consoles make it the ideal company to power future car sensor systems.

Eventually cars won’t just sense the other vehicles and objects in their vicinity. Those vehicles will actively communicate with one another and those objects. Using a secure form of long-range Wi-Fi, a car will tell all the vehicles behind its about brake or change lanes. Transmitters on the highway will tell you a big curve is coming up. (For more info on the connected car see our infographic.)

Such vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications could never replace sensors entirely since it would take decades for every vehicle on the road and every stretch of asphalt to become connected. But those technologies would allow cars to evolve cars beyond autonomy into a kind of ad hoc network, in which they would collectively make decisions instead of merely reacting to each other’s actions.

Returning to Musk’s remarks, though, I find it particularly interesting how he’s positioning the concept of the driverless car. He’s calling it a form of autopilot not too far off from the adaptive cruise control we use in our vehicles. Musk is downplaying the idea of car usurping control from the driver. He’s keyed in on the biggest obstacle facing the autonomous vehicle today: consumer perception. Few people are ready to cede act of driving to computer.

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