Recently in Wireless Category
An article on silicon republic points out that Irelands lack of rural broadband is keeping us below 20% penetration. I spent most of 2005 to 2007 working on my comnunity's behalf to get broadband for our area. My experience points to the fact that rural broadband is badly funded and being mismanaged by the Dept of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources.
The key stumbling block with the group broadband scheme was the simple fact that payments were made on the number of users connected regardless of location. So if you provided broaband for a town you received the same grant as those who attempted to bring broadband to isolated rural communities. There is considerable expense involved in bringing broadband to a rural area due to the number of links and APs required to propagate a wireless signal to remote locations. Yet the Dept did not want to consider this. Instead the accountants decided that a nice easy way was to count the number of subscribers only i.e. treat it like a water scheme.
Previous Article : Its a Group Broadband Scheme not A Group Water Scheme
I was delighted to here the news about the 151 jobs announced for Limerick this week. I worked in Limerick for several years and experienced the dot com boom and burst while being employed in the private sector.After the dot com bubble burst a number of my friends had to leave Limerick to find tech and sw jobs else where. For a number of years Limerick was in the doldrums from and R&D perspective, but slowly over the past 18 - 24 months it has experienced a turn around.
100 jobs with electronic payment systems software firm ACI Worldwide - R&D, software, tech support and finance.
30 jobs for Masters graduates with Rovsing - software development centre in Limerick specialising in the creation of specialist software tools for satellites and ground systems for spacecraft.
21 jobs with AR Corporate’s new European distribution headquarters - The company develops, manufactures and distributes high-power broadband radio frequency (RF) amplifiers.
In car sat nav is becoming a rapid reality in Ireland with the widespread availability of units from electrical retailers. The higher specced units from companies such as garmin and TomTom offer a TMC facility.
The Traffic Message Channel (TMC) is a specific application of the FM Radio Data System (RDS) used for broadcasting real-time traffic and weather information. Data messages are received silently and decoded by a TMC-equipped car radio or navigation system, and delivered to the driver in a variety of ways. The most common of these is a TMC-enabled navigation system that can offer dynamic route guidance - alerting the driver of a problem on the planned route and calculating an alternative route to avoid the incident.
TMC is not supported in Ireland. Traffic updates are a necessity for commuters this is evident as all the major radio stations have AA traffic update slots on their radio programmes. A TMC map of Western Europe highlights the fact that Ireland is the only country in Western Europe that has no plans or does not support this facility.
In order for TMC to become a reality the Irish Government need to fund this venture so that a private company such as the AA can be employed to provide the information and have it relayed by the national broadcaster such as RTE radio.
Local Fianna Fail TD's are trumpeting the announcement of Tipperary towns and villages getting Broadband from Eircom. There is one important piece of information missing from their press release / vote for me message.
The vital piece of info missing is the install date. There is none. Therefore there is no commitment. Damien Mulley already covered this missing piece of vital information.
What Fianna Fail fail to grasp is that we could all have broadband if we had a scheme that encourages rural communities to be connected by independent broadband providers from the local area.
The Government i.e. Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats made a total mess of this as the community broadband scheme pays out on the number connected not on the expense of connecting isolated rural communities.
Previous article
Its a Group Broadband Scheme not A Group Water Scheme
MeshTech'07
First IEEE International Workshop on
Enabling Technologies and Standards for Wireless Mesh Networking
http://www.ing.unipi.it/meshtech07
jointly organized by
Nokia Research Center, Finland
University of Pisa, Italy
RWTH Aachen University, Germany
co-located with IEEE MASS 2007
sponsored by IEEE, IEEE Computer Society,
IEEE TC on Distributed Processing, and IEEE TC on Simulation
in-cooperation with ACM SIGMOBILE
October 8, 2007
Pisa, Italy
Wireless Mesh Networks are emerging as a key technology for next
generation wireless networking. As such, they are currently inspiring a
lot of research activities and also experiencing a very fast deployment
in many today's environments, such as public city-wide broadband WiFi
networks, rural networks, private neighbourhood communities, or private
business networks that are characterized by frequent topology changes,
cabling troubles, or hard environmental conditions.
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions
(NSDR 2007 with ACM SIGCOMM 2007)
Kyoto Japan, Monday 27th August, 2007.
http://nsdr.dritte.org
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The ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions
(NSDR) will provide a venue for researchers to propose and discuss ideas
and to participate in the sustainable development and deployment of
Internet and communication technologies for developing countries.
Benefits of the Internet and communication technologies are limited to a
fraction of the world's population e.g. according to a 2006 survey Internet
penetration in North America is 69.1% of population compared to 3.6% for
Africa and 10.8% for Asia. Cost factors, low literacy, and limited access
to power and bandwidth in developing regions seem to suggest that there is
a need for communication technology research specifically aimed to meet the
special needs of developing regions.
The great and diverse needs of developing regions (e.g. economic problems,
social issues) call for a multi-disciplinary research agenda. However, the
focus of NSDR is on communication and networking aspects of developing
regions research (e.g. communication infrastructure in rural areas, systems
build using such infrastructure that solve some specific problem).
TIPPINST - Lidl will have their lidl satellite system on sale tomorrow. They seem to be packaging everything together as one unit. The system on offer has a dual LNB which allows for a second receiver.
Instructions for installation and alignment can be found here
I have just lifted my head from my phd thesis to notice that Fran Rooney is behind the new Wireless ISP (WISP) called ICE Broadband. At the moment they are covering North Dublin and Parts of Kildare. This will be an easy start for them as they won't have to many hills / mountains to deal with. Their home package is 2mb down and 256 Kbps up uncapped for 37.99 a month.
