Comments Back

I welcome your input, folks: Sorry about the gap here for the last few weeks with comments turned off. I want to hear what you have to say—but the bottomfeeders of the Internet were using robots to attack my comments system. (Long version: Old Movable Type 3 JavaScript library reference bug, long fixed, was still embedded in some of my templates and pages. Short story: I fixed it.)

Sound off! Or, rather, sound on!

Jennifer Hudson’s old dream, music, is a new dream
(AP)
APNewsBreak: Andrews to succeed Cronkite on PBS
(AP)
Don’t Panic over WPA Flaw, But Do Pay Attention
Quantenna: Radical New Design or Great PR?

He's No John Dvorak, But He's a Wi-Fi Hater

Andy Ihnatko, the hat-wearing, glacially intelligent Mac writer, seems to have woken up on the wrong side of his Wi-Fi network: Andy writes in praise of Ethernet cables, including tacking them up around the house. Sounds as if, as he describes it in his regular Chicago Sun-Times column, he has some ugly kind of Wi-Fi environment in which his wireless signals run as sub prime as many mortgages issued in the U.S. in the last few years. Bada bing! I gotta million of them.

Andy is no John Dvorak: he’s doesn’t use the language of super-hyperbole to provoke reasonable readers and trolls alike into providing some heat and light. Rather, Andy is generally reasonable and extremely funny. All the concerns he raises in this column seem to be better raised about 3 years ago: reliably, range, consistent DHCP assignment, throughput, and so on.

Andy, maybe you need a working 802.11n router and some modern hardware? Or maybe your apartment building is simply being bombarded by untoward RF interference.

Don’t get me wrong: I like my copper Ethernet wiring, too, especially when I’m moving big files around my network. But with Draft N, I’m more likely to have a gating factor at my Internet gateway or a particular computer’s ability to shoot files over a given protocol than I am by the network’s raw speed.

Wee-Fi: Broadband Test Fairness, Network Magic 5, Manassas BPL, Wi-Fi Thermostat
St. Louis Park Settles with Arinc over Failed Network
Q&A: MySpace CEO aims to build music site’s community
(Reuters)
Foos Fighting With McCain
(E! Online)

SMS on Planes

Reporters are conflating text messaging, instant messaging: I keep seeing articles like this one from the Washington Post, in which it states that Aircell’s in-flight Internet service won’t allow voice calls but will allow a variety of Internet services, like instant messaging (IM), as well as text messaging. That’s not quite correct.

SMS messages require a cell network to back them when sent and received using a carrier’s system. There are SMS gateways, including a free one built into AOL Instant Messenger, that allows a gateway user to avoid fees for sending or receiving IMs, or to use a fixed-rate plan (depending on the service) via an Internet connection. That includes services like Truphone which allow SMS and VoIP over WiFi, although VoIP will be blocked.

Aircell has no current plans to put picocells on board, that would act as mini cell towers, and that would be required for native SMS. The fact that people can use gateways and workarounds still doesn’t allow them to continue to use an understood mechanism while in flight. People will need to change behavior.

Delta Launches In-Flight Internet Next Week
Live from Virgin America’s Inaugural Wi-Fi Flight
Busta Banned in the U.K.?
(E! Online)

Stephen Fry, Five Miles High

Actor, director, genius Stephen Fry uses American Airlines Internet service: I admit to being an unabashed fan of this British performer, who also happens to write quite well about technology, and who uses Twitter. He filed this tweet from an AA flight taking him from NY to LA, after watching his friend and “m’colleague” Hugh Laurie host Saturday Night Live last night.

Live from Virgin America’s Inaugural Wi-Fi Flight
Busta Banned in the U.K.?
(E! Online)

Delta Launches In-Flight Internet Next Week

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that the newspaper’s local airline Delta will put Wi-Fi in planes starting next week: Just six planes will be equipped initially with Aircell Gogo service, which costs $10 for flights of less than 3 hours, and $13 for 3 hours or more. A total of 10 planes will be wired up for wireless this year, as opposed to the 75 that Delta had hoped to have ready to go.

The J-C says that initially, New York-based McDonald-Douglas MD88s and Boeing 757s will have the service. The airline told the newspaper that they were targeting 330 planes during 2009. As I noted a few days ago, reports that Delta had changed its plans were incorrect: they had always intended to put planes in service with Wi-Fi during 2008.

Because the FAA certifies airworthiness of equipment by its installation on specific models of aircraft, it’s worth noting that Delta has the greatest number of any model of planes in those two models: Planespotters.net says Delta has 132 757s and 116 MD88s in service. It has a sizable number of 767s (99) and 737s (75), as well. Delta’s total in-service count is about 450.

Many of these planes serve international routes, and Aircell’s service currently works only over ground and only over the U.S., so 330 may represent the total number of primarily domestic wide-body craft. (Aircell has a satellite add-on via Inmarsat for general (private) aviation, and the company told me a few weeks ago that they’re already talking with airlines that fly over water about a hybrid ground/satellite operation.)

Delta’s merger with Northwest Airlines adds about 275 more, of which 71 are Boeing 757s, although Airbus craft form the substantial majority of its fleet. Again, it’s unclear how many of these planes are used mostly for international or mixed US/international routes.

Live from Virgin America’s Inaugural Wi-Fi Flight
Delta Hasn’t Changed Plans for Planes
Delta museum is a tribute to bluesman B.B. King
(AP)

Metro Bits: Ok. Network Applications Emerge; Harvard Solar-Fi

Oklahoma City, home to several hundred sq mi of municipal Wi-Fi, finds another application: Okla. City is working on a $4m plan to reduce the costs and inflexibility of their traffic-light management system. A local news station quotes the city’s IT director saying that such a move could cut commuter time on average by 5 percent and stops by 8 percent, as well as allowing dynamic changes for special events. Many cities use outdated and bizarre control channel systems that long predate modern networking; Oklahoma City has none in place at all right now.

I’m channeling one Mr Craig Settles here, but if you have applications for a network before it’s built, then you have a purpose to build it, and then more applications emerge that make sense once it’s built. Paying $4m to allow remote signal control will likely save residents, commuters, and businesses far more in increasing productivity and reducing gas use, if the numbers the IT director holds up. Beyond that, it likely makes the efficiency of managing intersections far far higher, reducing delays and expense from signals that stop working.

On the other hand, predictions about changes in travel time to improvements in congestion tend to not come true, according to the book Traffic. If you make roads easier to travel, people travel those roads more.

Harvard Square Business Association uses Meraki Solar to extend network: The eagles come home to roost. Meraki was founded by nearby MIT graduate students. The Industry Standard says Harvard Square is officially the first customer for the solar devices. Meraki’s founder told me a few weeks ago that in beta testing, they found that solar devices were just as important in the developed world for difficult-to-reach locations: Places where bringing power was so expensive (and involved a recurring bill, in some cases) that solar was more sensible even with the $850 to $1,500 price tag for Meraki Solar.

If you figure that such a device might only burn $50 in power a year, but that bringing power to a rooftop could cost $500 to $2,000, if you’re even allowed to hire someone to wire the power correctly), the solar option is perfectly sensible.

St. Louis Park Settles with Arinc over Failed Network
Abdul chides Fox, `Idol’ producers over stalker
(AP)
Wee-Fi: News from Meraki, Violet, Qualcomm
Rocker Meat Loaf hospitalized for 3 days in London
(AP)

Delta Hasn't Changed Plans for Planes

Gizmodo and Engadget are engaged in the usual echo chamber of blogging: Some of us, you know, make a few phone calls to see what’s going on—i.e., reporting—instead of regurgitating press releases. Both Engadget and Gizmodo in the last day have seized upon a year’s end summary press release from Aircell to say, hey, wait, Delta’s launching in 2008 instead of 2009!

Well, no. The press release reiterates what Delta and Aircell have said earlier: Delta still expects to have service launched in 2008, although they did say fall, and they have 10 days left to execute on that. When I called Delta a few days ago, they said they had nothing to add, but might soon, which I take to mean that they’re striving to meet their 2008 deadline for having some birds with Gogo Internet service.

Likewise, when I spoke to Aircell a few weeks ago, they had nothing to add about Delta’s plans beyond what Delta was saying.

The two gadget sites are under enormous strain to post a million new, previously unseen items every day. The pressure must be getting to them.

Delta museum is a tribute to bluesman B.B. King
(AP)
Virgin Announces Launch Schedule
Country star Tim McGraw rips label over hits CD
(Reuters)
Live from Virgin America’s Inaugural Wi-Fi Flight