Orient Expression

While many cities have already dabbled with, and in many cases shutdown, city WiFi projects Bangkok is just rolling theirs out . The speeds will be low, around the 64K mark, as the service is designed to allow employees to check their email and use IM. This is all in an effort to give people an alternative to the daily commute in the time of high fuel prices, lack of supply for NGV cars (Taxis) and the general congestion problems on the capital's roads. Having worked from home on ADSL and dealing with large attachments typically sent my email today the low speed will be impacting on adoption. Overall I wish the operator every success but feel that the service is doomed from the start. The main concern is how much business, even general business, can be conducted in a hands off approach in Thailand. The Wai is still a powerful sales and business tool. Face-to-face meetings will continue to be the core of the decision making process and distance from the Pu Yai's office ties i

Having just moved to Wellington I have recently been through the process of setting up broadband access. The whole process was more difficult than I had planned for but it got me thinking of various approaches to avoid sitting in the internet cafe.... ADSL Naked DSL Cable Broadband AirCard Public WiFi Public WiMax The classic approach would be ADSL. The apartment we moved to didn't have a phone line already connected which is the pre-requisite for ADSL. Who says you don't need copper anymore? Given the take up of mobile handsets as the only phone of choice for many people what then are the choices when you don't have a land line? This is where Naked DSL comes to the fore. There are however scarce numbers of providers that run Naked DSL lines into homes, none that I could see in New Zealand. There is however Telstra Clear that operate a cable network to supply TV, Voice and with a cable modem broadband access. This is the best option for subscribers in the US if you wa

iPhones baby brother, iTouch , looks very similar but doesn't allow you to make phone calls, or does it? Engadget has run a series of posts on iTouch hacks that make the iTouch able to make VoIP calls. Adding an external microphone News on VoIP applications Now today they are advertising a free download of a SIP based VoIP client app for the iTouch. It was only a matter of time before someone found another use for the onboard WiFi connection of this nice looking device.

The past couple of months have seen the entire country unplugged from the internet more times than I care to count. You can always tell it's a national problem when you phone the call centre and end up being on hold for 10 minutes or so. I don't know if this is to stop being hassled or because there really are a lot of people reporting the problem. Suggestions of using IVR updates to handle some of the calls "If you are phoning about internet connection difficulty, there is a problem and we are working on it. Please check back for updates" would be a good option, however it falls on deaf ears. What I'm not sure of is the cause of the problem. Lack of infrastructure investment More people going online Fragility of links out of Thailand There certainly is a lack of investment in infrastructure. One calculation suggests that if everybody that could go online went online at the same time each user would get 1.2Kb of bandwidth. As an example to get the copper wire

There has been lots of discussion on Kindle and eBooks in general. Besides the obvious use for reference books by the IT industry, in particular IT consultants that work onsite a lot, there is another use for eBooks and gadgets. Geek Travel. Travel is an obvious target. Many people take the opportunity to take 6+ months off and travel the world. Guide books are heavy, bulky objects. There is a rich trade in swapping books at the natural convergence points around the world. Some people plan very carefully and take the required pages with them. But if you've only got specific pages and you want to wander off your trail you're up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Why not then take all of your books, and some for countries that you might not actually have a plan, with you on your eBook Reader. Something like Kindle , iLiad or Sony Reader . Go get your travel books from Rough Guide , Travelfish or search through Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree project . While you're

Golden Telecom and the Golden Arches have teamed up to provide WiFi equipment and services in the 175 McDonalds outlets across Russia. Starbucks has long been the haunt of out of work or writers block authors looking to catch up and some work. Maybe the trend is moving away from Half Fat Latte to Big Mac Meals as the staple of the budding writers. I expect we'll hear the inevitable cheery question "would you like WiFi with that?"

Almost one year ago I posted on this blog about how operators that have invested in public telephone networks could still use the asset today in the day of prolific mobile phone use. This was the convergence of two main ideas Using street lights as Wifi Hotspots , they are everywhere and they are powered. Also as I noted if you combine with broadband over power line (BPL) you also don't need to invest in new cabling and the convenience of no minimal disruption that no digging brings makes this compelling. After the limited success of Ionica and their fixed wireless network a case for fixed wireless today. There is a summary available on Telegeography of how TeliaSonera are looking to adapt their network of phone booths to become WiFi hotspots. The math has to make sense as the revenue stream from these assets has to be impacted by mobile use. Though somewhat redundant functionally they still represent real presence for the operator on the high street and so any use that can b

UMA, the technology that allows WiFi and GSM convergence should be a natural evolution for carriers. The infrastructure costs are less than GSM and if you read my post on how carriers could use the volume of home WiFi hotspots to build out their network, FVNO , then it should be compelling. Katie at GigaOm had written a good lowdown for those who want to be in the know on UMA [ not Thurman ]

After a recent article about Virgin deploying WiFi on their trains in the UK I was very surprised to find that ye olde GNER network already had it installed. Blogging from Coach B of the Edinburgh to Peterbrough service. All in all not too bad, apart from the price of GBP 2.95 for 30 minutes (plus 5 minutes free). They add the free minutes to allow for the predicted degradation of speed. Having flown Easy Jet from Luton to Edinburgh I thought I would take the train back. For close travel dates the train was actually have price, plus I can take liquid on board and as my luggage as I want (Easy Jet let you have one piece and then every bag after that is GBP 10). Total travel time, if you include the drive to the airport and the mandatory wait at the terminal, means the journey is about the same. Anyway don't want to sound like a "spotter" so on to the point. At my seat I have power to compensate the poor battery on my company laptop :( and the ability to walk around

Paul Jardine once coined the phrase "the other network" when talking about the mobile operators in the UK spending vast amounts of money to build out their networks when there was already a network that could (with some thought) have been used. By this he meant the slowly decaying Public Phone network. Now I am working with a fixed line operator here in Thailand that still maintain a pay phone infrastructure, this is barely used due to the proliferation of mobile phones; a trend that is bound to be repeated in countries all over the world. So what can the Telco's do about it? In my converging ideas posting I highlighted the innovation that I had long been thinking of that New Zealand Telecom are driving forward with. This was the natural expansion of two previous ideas that I had expanded on and is a WiFi twist on the other network idea of Paul. The basic concept is that the pay phone becomes a node in the MuniNet (Municipal Network). This could equally be using

In the second part of my three things series I would like to focus on three things that I would like to own to add to my current toolkit . Nokia 770 Nokia E60 Jabra SP500 Bluetooth speaker phone. Why? Nokia 770: apart from the fact that it looks cool :) there is a real use for this sort of device. Now that it has significantly improved and new applications are creeping into the domain I can see me using it in one of two modes; and not necessarily exclusively Communication: Gizmo phone and the ability to use Gmail and GoogleTalk mean that I have a means of communicating in my palm. This becomes useful when I am on a client site; like today where I need to be on their network to get to their servers but I need to use an external wireless network because their firewall and proxy doesn't allow me to use some sites. In this mode I can leave the 770 connected to the external network and still have my laptop connected to their LAN. The size lends itself to being used on the hoof a

I am a firm believer in Linux, or at least the idea of Linux. I have used Red Hat at work; I then favoured Ubuntu as an all in desktop with good server support as well. I have now installed SuSe 10.1 on my server at home. All of these platforms have a common flaw, the lack of or at least the general lack of WiFi support. Part of the problem is the slow adoption of WPA-PSK on Linux. Until very recently WEP was the only security (other than MAC address filtering) but this is old and so the move to WPA is essential if Linux is to move up to XP again. Ubuntu Dapper and SuSe 10.1 are very good replacement desktops and I would easily jump across permanently if only we could solve the WiFi issue. With SuSe the D-Link card I have is potentially supportable with Madwifi or Ndiswrapper. I couldn't get either to work at all. Then some more googling later I [finally] discovered that version C of the PCI card was not Atheros but Ralink. A quick trip to the site (via my laptop and trusty U

Not long after Nokia announced it's plans to release a non-phone I was keeping my eye on the project. Living in neither the UK or US I haven't been able to buy one yet but a good friend did buy one whilst on a trip in November. I played with it for a bit as was mostly disappointed. The screen is amazingly clear but there was limited functionality and the WiFi connection was clunky and unreliable. Now with the release and installation of Maemo 2.0 the tablet has really come into it's own. The connection is far more reliable and the new range of applications makes it a truly useful piece of hardware rather than just a play thing. The inclusion of Gizmo for 770 is a nice addition and the ability to use GoogleTalk would now give me a full range of communication options. Even when outside the range of a WiFi hot-spot with a suitable phone (something like the E60, which I am still waiting to buy) I can pair it up and use the GPRS connection over a bluetooth bridge to stay conne

The mighty Om thinks that WiFi location based services will be the next kickstart in the industry. I agree that this could be the killer app, the SMS of WiFi/Max, that could really be a key integration point for Muni nets, FON networks and the newest WiFi enabled handsets. He mentions Loki so I went off to have a quick look. It seems pretty interesting and it made me revisit a previous idea for book readers . Combining LBS with a brand like The Lonely Planet would be a pretty powerful partnership; apply the whole thing in a PDA or some other WiFi enabled device that makes book reading easy (something like Nokia's 770 ) and you have your own tour guide in your pocket that is as close to being smart as you can get. It will be able to know which country you're in and allow you to subscribe to the guide for that country, or mini-guide for that city. Once walking around the LBS granularity would enable a smart book mark to move you to the section of the guide for where you

Once more I find convergence, and I don't mean FMC or any of those other Telco terms, I have found Idea Convergence. Some time ago Paul Jardine talked about "the Other network" an idea he had many years ago, now we have NZ Telecom doing just that. On this blog I have extended the ideas of the Wifi Lightpost and fixed wireless access and Paul raised the idea of TescoMax . Right now WiFi access in Bangkok is far from prolific but with the license given to TTT Broadband they could use some of these ideas to broaden the access to their network. Throughout this sprawling city you can rely on finding one of two things: A petrol station - PTT, Caltex, Shell, Green Leaf etc 7-Eleven - the ubiquitous convenience store And in many locations you can find both i.e. a 7-Eleven at a petrol station. Tie in to these two infrastructure nodes and you have a pretty good grid for your network nodes. Both places by default are in built up urban areas with homes greedy for internet acces

Flown Singapore Airlines recently? they were one of the first carriers that I knew of that had in-flight internet access; using the Boeing Connexion service. OK so it's not cheap, I did hope that you would be allowed to use those accumulated airmiles as a payment method but it hasn't happened yet, but it could be a premium service people might want to use. Heard of a SlingBox yet? got one? want one? So you're on your flight from Singapore to London and you'd like to catch up with some TV programmes that you missed. Browse from your laptop via the Picocell connection (Connexion) and hook into your SlingBox feed. Now slide over to Yahoo and re-programme your TiVo to get your favourite programs ready for the return flight.

Having experienced two extremes recently it got me thinking about Fixed Wireless Access. Not so many months ago I finally got my PSTN service connected to my house in Bangkok. This was after almost one year of waiting for someone to either cancel their service or for one of the two main providers to install more hardware to expand capacity. As you can imagine both scenarios are extremely unlikely and if a circuit did become available it was not guaranteed to be close enough to have good performance on ADSL service piggy backing on the same line. So that's scenario 1: massive population with little incentive by the operators to expand and invest in copper wire. Scenario 2: just go back from a two week holiday in New Zealand, awesome place, and scattered townships of small populations separated by hundreds of kilometers of scenery. Very nice for the camera, not so good for the telco. Having said that NZ Telecom have made substantial investments in both wired and wireless access.

Many people are expecting book readers, ebooks, digital books to take off this year. It's been happening in Japan for more than one year and some of the gadgets being seen in Las Vegas, like the Sony reader , demonstrate a growing awareness of the trend. This isn't new; some PDA's have been supporting downloadable books for some time. The earliest evolution was the audio book be it a CD or tape for the car or the train commute and then later on MP3 files for your iPod or similar device. In a recent Wall Street Journal Asian edition there was an article that highlighted a new comer to this arena in Playaway . The main difference is that the playaway device is pre-loaded and is a one book read. You cannot update the media, it literally is an electronic book in the same way that you can't change the print in your Tom Clancy paperback. Playaway is aimed at people who want the convenience of electronic media but are too scared or simply don't want to know about downloads

The recent announcement by The Cloud to launch City-wide WiFi will herald a new era in the UK and Europe. OK so the basic message is pretty much the Muni-Net story widely commented on; no great news there, why the interest? I think it's pretty smart of them to partner with BT in the early stages as this is where the biggest opponent could come from, although further deregulation in the UK to further increase competition will do that anyway. The real interest for me is the pressing need for roaming agreements between WiFi partners and in this case the ability to roam from one country (UK) to another (e.g. Sweden). In most cases this should be a simple fixed fee, unlimited usage deal but nothing I've seen yet determines the pricing model; I wait with anticipation.....

Scotland once again rises as developers of great technology (OK so it's been a while since the TV but what the hey). This article from the BBC highlights the basic idea of using lampposts in Dundee to provide WiFi. I think there is a gap here in that the system uses solar power. I think it would be a great use of BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) as all of the lampposts are already plugged in to the power grid anyway. I'm currently in Taiwan where WiFi is prolific, in fact in Hotels it's free. I don't know how sustainable this will be as people like me using Skype over the free WiFi must be starting to eat into the revenue stream of calling out of the hotel, but it's great while it lasts. Especially given Paul Jardine's recent problems in Portugal . Still even here in Taipei there are nowhere near close to getting some sort of public network and like in many major cities around the world space is at a premium. Something like the Internet Lamppost could rea