Science and technology news blog

To connect to a high-speed wireless network from a car, consumers pretty much have been limited to one choice: rigging a laptop computer with a special modem and subscribing to a pricey, and sometimes temperamental, wireless service.

But Autonet Mobile, a start-up wireless technology company based in San Francisco, was expected to announce this week that it had reached an agreement with Avis Rent A Car System to provide an optional wireless access point — better known as a Wi-Fi hot spot — to Avis customers in the United States by March. For an additional $10.95 a day, Avis will issue to motorists a notebook-size portable device that plugs into the power supply of a car and delivers a high-speed Internet connection for passengers.

For now, the service is intended for business travelers. But Autonet sees its service as appealing to families traveling with children, although its unit is expected to cost $399 — about twice as much as current cellular card technology — plus $49 a month for service.

A mobile Wi-Fi hot spot that lets laptops and other hand-held computers link to the Internet without cables represents an important step toward what technology experts call the “connected car” — a vehicle in which passengers’ devices and the car’s essential systems are always online.

“I think this is a precursor to the connected car,” said Roger Entner, a wireless telecommunications analyst at Ovum, a consulting firm based in London. “This shows us a glimpse of where we will be in the future.”

Click here for full article

Following on from the launch of the PCMCIA wireless broadband modem that plugs into compatible laptop computers, Telstra have finally launched two external USB modems, one designed for mobile use at the same pricing as the PCMCIA solution, and the other a fixed wireless USB modem needing an external power source offering cheaper pricing.

Telstras 3.5G wireless broadband voice and data network, dubbed Next G, was only launched a couple of months ago and offered wireless coverage 100 times greater than competing 3G networks, with download speeds averaging 550k to 1.5Mbps.

Access to the network for wireless broadband is possible through a PCMCIA card or through 3.5G handsets via USB cable or Bluetooth connection.

Weve been able to test the Next G wireless broadband throughout various locations in Sydney, and for the most part Next G access at the advertised speeds has been regularly achieved, with speeds dropping to EDGE or 2.75G speeds of 100kbps+ on occasion, generally well inside a big building with lots of concrete getting in the way of a good signal, although competing slower 3G cards usually have the same issues, except theyll take you to much slower GPRS speeds of around 40-45kbps or slower.

Now Telstra have launched two USB alternatives. One is a USB modem stick, similar to a USB flash drive. This just plugs into a USB port and draws power from your laptop or desktop computer.

Click here for full article

A US court ruling on a widely used CSIRO-patented WiFi technology could have broad implications for the wireless industry and CSIRO’s future.

The organisation has won the first round of its battle to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty payments for its patented wireless LAN technology.It was granted a patent in 1996, but the CSIRO claims many manufacturers are using the technology without permission or licence.

It filed a test case early last year in the US against Japan’s Buffalo Technology in an attempt to take back control of its intellectual property. According to the CSIRO, devices using the 802.11a/g standards adopted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1999 and 2003 infringe its patent.

Click here for full article

Tired of your laptop’s battery dying during presentations or bursting into flames? Take heart: scientists are perfecting a new method for transmitting electrical energy from a base station using a technique that resembles a wireless Internet connection. Researchers say that a specially designed device should be able to draw power from a strong magnetic field permeating a room.

The effect, which has not yet been demonstrated, would take advantage of the stationary magnetic field that surrounds a charged loop of metal. This so-called near-field can be powerful—it is what makes an electric motor turn. And in principle its oscillations can induce an electric current in another nearby loop, because dynamic magnetic fields create electric fields and vice versa. The second loop could act as a battery or recharger, but it would normally receive only a slight current because the near field fades rapidly over distance.

Click here for full article

Samsung Electronics President Lee Ki-tae Tuesday took the wraps off a handset that doubles as a terminal for the high-speed mobile Internet platform, WiBro. Samsung predicted that the versatile model- the SPH-P9000, with the moniker Deluxe MITs- will provide fresh momentum to WiBro, which debuted here earlier this year.

“This is a true convergence device capable of voice and Internet,” Lee said in a press conference held on the sidelines of the Samsung Mobile WiMax Summit 2006 in Seoul.

“The SPH-P9000 will help the fledgling WiBro take off in time with the expansion of its service areas,” said Lee, who is in charge of Samsungs mobile phone division.

Click here for full article

Cell phone company Sprint Nextel Corp. is becoming a media company, producing its own sports and entertainment newscasts for its wireless Internet service in addition to the repackaged video programming it provides from TV networks and other content providers.

Sprint Power View will provide customers with about 25 minutes a day of brief, original segments on sports, entertainment and news. Among the offerings are NFL Game Center, hosted by sports broadcaster James Brown, and The Mobile Fix, a five-minute entertainment news show. Another called “New York Fashion Week” will feature interviews with fashion designers.

The company already offers live television feeds and video clip downloads from cable and satellite broadcasters. This new service, free to Sprint Vision and Power Vision subscribers, appears to be the first attempt by a U.S. cellular operator to generate a regular supply of video content with its own studio, on-air talent and production crews.

Sprint Power View shows will originate from a studio in New York in partnership with IMG Media. In addition, 15 mobile camera crews will file on-location stories from venues and events from major markets in the United States.

The service is compatible with about 30 handsets in Sprint’s lineup. A mobile entertainment company, mSpot, is providing a multimedia application to use the service for Java-based phones. Customers with non-Java handsets can access Power View through Sprint’s TV service.

Skype has announced cordless phones that do not require a running computer to be used with the popular VoIP (Voice over IP) service. This new class of phone enables Skype users to make and receive both Skype calls over the Internet and traditional landline calls, without a computer, offering the added convenience of a cordless phone.

The first series of products to be launched in this class are the Philips VOIP841 cordless phone (pictured) and NETGEAR’s cordless phone for Skype.

Cordless phones offer increased mobility throughout the home or office, giving consumers the freedom and flexibility of not being tethered to their computer. Also, consumers with multiple cordless phone handsets in their home have the ability to hold separate conversations simultaneously (one on Skype, the second on the traditional line) each from a different handset.

Both the Philips and NETGEAR cordless phones have Skype running on them out of the box, and they can act as a replacement for an ordinary cordless phone, because they can make and receive traditional telephone calls through the landline line connection.

Existing Skype users can sign into their account, downloading all their contacts to the cordless phone. Users also have the ability to search for Skype contacts directly on the phone, and add them to an integrated contact list for both Skype contacts and traditional phone numbers.

Sometimes failure is the handmaiden of later, sweet success. It was for Hwang Ki Soo. Back in 1997 he had hit a career wall. He had clearly lost the confidence of Hyundai Electronics’ top management over his stewardship of the company’s logic chip business, and with good reason: His unit had been bleeding cash after a nine-year quest to develop image sensors, microcontrollers, smart-card drivers, and image compression and other specialized chips.

Hwang simply wasn’t making his numbers. The chip unit—which later merged with the LG Group’s semiconductor business, was rechristened Hynix Semiconductor, and was spun off from the Hyundai Group—is now the world’s second biggest memory-chip maker. But the market wasn’t ready for the more specialized chips Hwang had in mind.

“With all the top management focus and attention on money-making memory chips, I was pushed to the corner,” says Hwang.

On a Mission

So Hwang left one of the most powerful jobs in South Korean high tech and launched Core Logic in 1998, smack dab in the middle of the Asian financial crisis that had caused a severe recession throughout much of the region.

Hwang, who earned a PhD in computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, staked his severance payment of $208,000 on a mission that even the country’s semiconductor powerhouse Samsung Electronics could never quite manage. His company aimed to compete and win against big name players such as Texas Instruments or Qualcomm in the rapidly evolving logic chip market.

Hwang has a long way to go. But for now the Korean startup is the fastest-growing mobile multimedia chip company in Asia. And local technology conglomerates such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are relying on his company’s chips for their camera phones and multi-functioning handsets.

A joint venture between UK telco, Pipex, and Intel says trials of Airspan WiMAX gear have proved successful and it is gearing up to provide WiMAX networks in several UK cities, starting with Milton Keynes.
If the claimed results of the trial are true, they will give the nascent WiMAX technology, already buoyed by the recent announcement from Sprint Nextel, a further boost.

In a statement Pipex Wireless said performance in the trial, in Stratford Upon-Avon, had exceeded expectations. “Performance has been evaluated using both indoor and outdoor antennae, powered by Intel Rosedale chipsets, with the trial showing that WiMAX can deliver near symmetric services in most environments.”

Speeds in excess of 2Mbps up and down have been achieved indoors at a range of 1.2km from the base station with no direct line of sight, Pipex Wireless claimed.

Drive tests using the indoor antenna in a vehicle at various distances from the base station have shown symmetric speeds of 5Mbps. Speeds of 10Mbps down and 9Mbps up have been achieved to external antennas at the test house at 1.2km from the base station. Longer range tests with external antennas have achieved 6Mbps down and 4Mbps up at a range of 6km from the base station.

Airspan’s CTO, Alastair Westgarth, said the trial had given his company “the opportunity to prove that our software defined radio base station and indoor, self install CPE fit the needs of a solid WiMAX service provider such as Pipex. The combination of range and throughput demonstrated by the achievements to date are very encouraging and provide an added baseline for our continuing product development of this platform.”

Google on Wednesday plans to offer free, high-speed Internet access to everyone in its Silicon Valley home town a hospitable gesture that the online search leader hopes to see spread to other parts of the country.

The new wireless, or “Wi-Fi,” network, is believed to establish Mountain View, Calif., as the largest U.S. city with totally free Internet access available throughout the entire community, according to both Google and city officials.

St. Cloud, Fla., a suburb of Orlando with a population of about 28,000, had claimed that mantle earlier this year after it launched a free Wi-Fi network.

About 72,000 people reside in Mountain View, an 11.5-square-mile city located about 35 miles south of San Francisco. As the home to major companies like Google and VeriSign, Mountain View’s daytime population can swell above 100,000.

“We aren’t concerned about being able to handle the load,” said Chris Sacca, a Google executive who oversaw the Mountain View project. “We think we have built a pretty cool, robust network.”

Similar Wi-Fi networks are under development in many other cities, including Philadelphia and Chicago, but most of those envision charging for Internet access.

Small pockets of free Wi-Fi access often called “hot spots” have become increasingly common throughout the United States, often cropping up in downtown districts or by coffee shops and fast-foot restaurants hoping to lure in customers.

Google’s community-wide network has had Mountain View buzzing in anticipation, said City Manager Kevin Duggan.

“There’s a lot of excitement,” he said. “It’s something we could have never anticipated a few years ago when we were just excited to be able to pay for dial-up access to the Internet. Now our entire town is a hot spot.”

Google invested about $1 million to build the Mountain View network and expects to have to spend far less than that each year to keep it running. The financial commitment represents a pittance for Google, which has nearly $10 billion in cash.

Powered by 380 radio antennae, the Moentain View ?etwork is supposed to surf the Web at speeds comparable to the Internet connections delivered by digital subscriber, or DSL lines. It will be slightly slower than a high-speed cable connection.

Still, Google believes the free service will be fast enough to prompt some Mountain View residents to stop paying DSL and cable providers for Internet access. People who take that step will probably want to spend $30 to $170 for a Wi-Fi modem to improve the connection to Google’s free service, Sacca said.

Web surfers using the Google service will have to log on, but once they’re connected they will be able to sign off without losing access, Sacca said. The network is “very naive,” so it won’t track people’s online activities when they aren’t on a Google site, Sacca said.

Like many Internet companies, Google has an incentive to ensure people have easy and cheap access to the Internet because its profits depend on Web surfers navigating through waves of online ads.

Toward dhat end, Google last year decided to help develop free Wi-Fi networks in Mountain View, the company’s home since 1999, and San Francisco, where many of its employees live. Google doesn’t expect to undertake similar projects elsewhere, partly because so many other companies are angling to build Wi-Fi networks in hundreds of other cities, Sacca said.

In contrast to the Mountain View network, Google decided to team up with another company, EarthLink Inc., to build San Francisco’s Wi-Fi network. The San Francisco plan envisions EarthLink charging roughly $20 per month to surf at the top available speed while Google will offer a free service that transmits data at a much slower rate.

Negotiations on the San Francisco network still haven’t been completed, making it unlikely it will be switched on until next year.

Despite the fact that Draft 1.0 of the 802.11n standard drew an unusually large number of comments, some manufacturers have already begun shipping so-called “draft-compliant” gear. It looks as though that deluge of comments will lead to a delay in the second draft of the specification, with a vote for Draft 2.0 not coming until January 2007.

802.11n is the next step up from 802.11g, offering wireless data transmission speeds of up to 600Mbps. The promise of such speeds has been enough for manufacturers and consumers alike to jump on the 802.11n bandwagon. However, as we pointed out in May, those investing in next-gen wireless might not get the return they are hoping for.

One issue is that the draft-compliant equipment may not be upgradeable up to the final spec, once one has been ratified. While Dell hopes that the 802.11n minicards it is now selling will be able to handle the finalized version of the technology via a firmware upgrade, there are no guarantees. Mostif not allcompanies realize that; Linksys says that while they are confident that their products adhere “to the key and mandatory features required” in Draft 1.0, they cannot guarantee their upgradability.

The other problem comes from having a mishmash of vendors supporting an early draft of the spec: their gear doesn’t play nicely together. Some cards may not be compatible with base stations from a different manufacturer. Even more troubling is that equipment from different vendors can step on one another’s toes. Rolf De Vegt of Airgo Networks, which sells draft 802.11n chipsets, acknowledges this, saying that “the initial crop of products have ‘bad neighbor’ characteristics in early tests.”

It is hoped that the IEEE task force dealing with the 802.11n spec will be able to approve a second draft of the specification early next year. Even if that happens, we are not likely to see final ratification of 802.11n until early 2008.

Speeds of 600Mbps over WiFi sounds promising, but there is still a lot of work to be done. For now, it’s best to resist the temptation to live on the bleeding edge and wait until the IEEE decides what the final spec should look like.

Some computers with wireless internet capabilities are vulnerable to attacks that could expose passwords, bank account details and other sensitive information even if the machines aren’t actually online, researchers say.

The researchers demonstrated the vulnerability at a computer-security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, showing how to take complete control of a MacBook from Apple Computer.

But the two researchers, David Maynor, 28, and Jon Ellch, a 24-year-old who prefers to go by his hacker handle Johnny Cache, said the technique will work on an array of machines, including those that run Microsoft’s Windows and the free Linux operating system.

“The problem itself isn’t really an Apple problem,” said Maynor, a researcher at SecureWorks Inc, a network-monitoring company. “This is a systemic problem across the industry.”

The technique, detailed during the first day of the Black Hat conference, has broad implications for the large number of people who over the past five years have grown accustomed to connecting to the internet wirelessly while sitting in airports, hotels and cafes.

“It’s an alarming weakness,” said Phil Zimmermann, a software engineer who specialises in data security. “Now I would rather connect using an ethernet cable,” he said, referring to the term for wired internet connections.

Maynor and Cache showed a room of about 300 attendees a video in which they dropped what is known as a “root kit” into a MacBook by exploiting a weakness found in a wireless card, a component that uses radio waves to connect to the Internet.

A root kit is a virtually undetectable program that criminals can use to do things such as log passwords and gain access to sensitive files.

Maynor was able to create, read and delete files on the Apple laptop. The MacBook, which was running a fully patched version of the latest Apple operating system, showed no indication that it had been compromised.

The MacBook used in the demonstration was not using the wireless gear that shipped with the computer. Instead, they used a third-party wireless card that they declined to name. (more…)

MindTree Consulting has joined the WiMAX Forum, an international, industry-led, non-profit corporation formed to promote and certify the conformance and interoperability of broadband wireless access products using IEEE 802.16 and ETSI HiperMAN wireless specifications.

As part of WiMAX Forum, MindTree would contribute in the development and adoption of standards. The company would provide design engineering and value-added testing services in the broadband wireless product space to silicon vendors, original device manufacturers and equipment vendors. The IT and R&D services company would also gain access to the detailed specifications of WiMAX technology.

S. Janakiraman, president and CEO, R&D services, MindTree Consulting Pvt. Ltd., said, ``As newer services and products are adopted, MindTree is investing in building a test infrastructure and pre-built test libraries to speed up the testing process for WiMAX products and reference designs. We believe that WiMAX technology is poised for heavy deployment and high mainstream acceptance. This adoption will drive the pace of new services and product development.

The WiMAX Forum and its member companies collaborate to accelerate the introduction of IEEE 802.16 and ETSI HiperMAN wireless systems into the market.

802.11n wireless LAN got a green light from the IEEE Thursday when its task group voted to make the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) proposal its first draft.

The group decided by a 184 to 0 margin with four abstentions, and while that may signal an end to the special interest group politics that have disrupted the standards progress in the past, it has set off a chain of competition in less than one day.

Article continues below

At its core, EWC-based 802.11n is expected to move at speeds up to 600Mbits/sec., a significant jump over former 802.11 family leader 802.11gs speed and fast enough to stream high definition video and data seamlessly through the home. The big difference between 802.11g and 802.11n is .11ns use of MIMO, or multiple input multiple output, technology, that allows for the increased speed. High hopes exist in the industry for the next-generation technology in terms of the connected home, with companies preparing to move WLAN beyond the PC and into consumer electronics like DVD players, gaming systems and digital cameras.

With those high hopes and expectations come high opportunities that some wireless players are already claiming stakes on. EWC member company Broadcom came out of the gate four hours after Thursdays noon approval with an announced 802.11n family of chipsets. Marvell, also an EWC member company, followed with an announcement this morning, saying its chips will be in customer products this quarter.

Not all companies are expected to bring products described as 802.11n to market, however. Airgo, for one, came out against promoting technologies as firmware upgradeable to the final 11n specification at this point in time.

While most within the 11n task group agree that it will take just over a year to move from Draft 1.0 to .11n ratification, it is debatable as to when the draft will be stable enough to begin designing firmware upgradeable chipsets, the company said in a statement. Claims that chip sets based on any early draft will be firmware upgradeable to the final 11n specification are irresponsible, and may mislead consumers who do not fully understand the IEEE process. (more…)

There’s the Adidas smart shoe, which uses a microprocessor to adjust the cushioning around your foot automatically. There are wearable heart-rate monitors that keep you looking cool doing cardio exercises. There’s even a wrist-worn, Windows-based computer that has a video display designed to fit over one eye, turning you into a reasonable facsimile of the Borg from Star Trek.
Clearly, the dawn of wearable computers is here.

Even as the chips that power these devices are getting smaller, they are getting smarter. Futurists say that the day when we will all be wearing full-fledged computers attached in one way or another to our bodies is right around the corner.

But for those of us already burdened with mobile handsets, PDAs, pagers, and laptops, a computer you slip into every morning might seem less like a must-have and more like a hassle.

Fortunately, a convergence of technologies is underway between engineers of wearable computers and manufacturers of mobile devices. It’s a union that promises to revolutionize consumer lifestyles in several new and interesting ways. (more…)