Unplugging ... or not

Years ago a friend told me of a mutual friend who had taken a hiking trip out in the mountains somewhere.  "Yeah, they decided to take a cell phone," my friend said.

My immediate reaction was "What's the point? I thought the whole point of going out in the boonies was to get away from phones and such."  My friend explained that the phone was for emergencies, and 911 did work where they were (there was apparently a tower nearby).  I don't think they actually ended up using the cell phone.

As I write this I'm up in the mountains, though still more or less in civilization (different mountains, as it happens).  There is intermittent cell reception ... and wifi throughout the place.  The wifi is also a bit spotty, but not because of reception.  I have a nice clear connection to the wifi, but so does everyone else, and there are a lot of technophiles around.  Nonetheless it seems to be enough to get messages through to the outside world.  And to blog.

There are still significant parts of the world, even the more or less industrialized world, without internet or cell access, but it's shrinking.  Cell phone carriers would prefer to concentrate their resources where people are (I've heard that "we don't cover the cows" or something like that has been a motto, but Google doesn't seem to back me up on that).  This means that most people will be near coverage, but there's also a knock-on effect.

People get used to coverage, so they really notice when it's not there.  If your fun adventure in the backcountry is marred by not being able to call home in the evening, you may well report "poor coverage by my carrier" to your friends.  No one wants to be that carrier, so there's an incentive to build out coverage even in less profitable areas, an incentive that wasn't there in the early days.  There are still plenty of places where you wouldn't reasonably expect to see coverage, but I wouldn't be surprised if this effect has brought coverage to places that wouldn't have it based on a purely local economic analysis.

Having a mobile phone has long since gone from something that can be handy to something that has influenced our habits thoroughly enough to change our expectations.  For many of us, unplugging by traveling out of reach of the web is no longer an easy option.  If you visit your relatives' cabin at the lake, you probably still have bars.  That mountain retreat has connectivity because enough customers wanted it.  The only real way to unplug is to ... well ... not use the web for a while.  Which, come to think of it, shouldn't really have to be a special occasion.


While writing this, I looked up cell coverage in Alaska.  It looks like, not surprisingly, most of the physical area of the state is uncovered, but almost all of the population is.  It would be interesting to know more about the swaths in the interior that are covered.  I'd guess transportation is involved, just as interstates in the lower 48 tend to have towers at fairly regular intervals, even in unpopulated areas.

My phone, then and now (or: Maybe coverage is the new coverage?)

(August? Really?  This must be a record gap even for the new, unhurried Field Notes.  Oh well ... it's been busy)

Re-reading through the blog, I ran across a short post on wireless carriers' advertising having shifted from coverage to bandwidth.  Most old posts seem to hold up well, but this one seemed remarkably out of date:

• With 4G building out, coverage is very much an issue -- at least in ads
• At the time I was using a "feature phone", mainly as an alarm clock and ... as a phone.  I finally took the plunge with a proper smart phone a while back.  I use it as ... 
• An alarm clock
• A phone
• A GPS
• A way to check email
• A camera (but I also used the old feature phone as that)
• A way to browse news stories, check sports scores, weather etc.
• A way to text -- it's noticeably easier to text with autocomplete, though not miraculously so
• A way to schedule appointments and to check my schedule and reminders
• A way to look up stuff quickly on the web
• A few other random applications

It's interesting that even feature phones had several of those -- phone, clock, text, camera, calendar -- and probably more or less the right set of them to get the most out of the limited bandwidth and CPU.  The newer iterations are generally better (auto backup of photos to the cloud comes to mind), but not mind-blowingly, night-and-day better.

My attitude at the time was "Meh ... I'm usually near my laptop and it has a bigger screen"  While I find I use my phone quite a bit during the day, I'm still near my laptop most of the time, and I'd only really miss the phone for really "mobile" applications, like

• phone
• GPS
• camera
• receiving texts anywhere
• checking email everywhere

Oh ... and as an alarm clock.

Hedwig and the Mobile Web

I had no idea of this until I ran across it in a Sporcle quiz:  Actress Hedy Lamarr, best known for her Hollywood roles in the 40s and 50s, and inspiration for Anne Hathaway's interpretation of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, was also co-holder of a patent for "spectrum hopping" technology that eventually came to be used in WiFi, Bluetooth and CDMA.  The actual names on the patent are Hedy Kiesler Markey (Lamarr's legal name at the time) and avant-garde composer George Anthiel, a neighbor of hers who developed a means of controlling multiple player pianos.

This doesn't seem to be the first patent for such technology.  Earlier work by Otto Blackwell et. al. uses essentially the same idea.  Both use multiple frequencies, and both use a shared key to determine how to shift between frequencies.  The main difference appears to be that Blackwell uses telegraph tape as a keying mechanism while Lamarr and Antheil use player piano rolls.  However, there is little doubt that Lamarr's contributions to the invention were real and that the invention is significant.

It's interesting that both patents are presented as secret communication systems, as someone listening on only one frequency would only get part of the message.  However, it doesn't seem like it would take long for an enemy to hit on the idea of listening on more than one frequency and combining the signals.  So maybe I'm missing something [if power consumption isn't an issue, you could fill all the bands with padding -- anything that statistically looked like the real signal -- which would make the combined signal much less useful].  Today we use spread spectrum technology to increase bandwidth or decrease "power flux density" -- which I assume means about what it says.

It's also worth noting that Lamarr and Antheil didn't benefit significantly from their invention, which was not used in practice until after the patent had expired.  Lamarr did receive stock in a wireless technology company two years before her death, but it's not clear whether that came to anything.  Having made and spent millions over the course of her career, Lamarr spent much of her later years broke, and was twice arrested for shoplifting.

What do we mean "mobile device"?

It's pretty clear that mobile devices ... hang on a sec.  What's a mobile device?  According to Wikipedia, it's, um, a small electronic device you can carry around.  But not a laptop.  So a smart phone, a not-so-smart phone, a tablet computer, a camera, an MP3 player, a handheld video game, a pager ...

A few of those have been around a long time, at least by electronic standards.  Somehow, I don't think that most people have devices like this in mind when they speak of mobile devices.  For practical purposes, "mobile devices" means "smart phones, tablets and stuff like that".  More precisely, it's not just mobility that people care about.  It's mobile connectivity, the idea that your mobile device can connect to the world at large and interact with it in arbitrary ways.  The mobile web, that is.

So where was I?

It's pretty clear that mobile devices are playing a bigger and bigger role in people's lives these days.  Lots and lots and lots of people have cell phones, quite a few people have tablets, and more and more do every day(*).  It's also clear that people have adapted to having ready access to the web.  One sure way to know you're out in the boonies, whether for the good of getting away from it all or the ill of being cut off from it all, is not having any bars.

When I was a kid, not that long ago, I like to think, if you wanted to meet someone at a large public place, you would have to pre-arrange -- "Meet me on the west side of the station near the stairs for the subway line."  Now you can just call up your party and ask "Um, hey, where are you? ... oh, there I see you."  If you broke down at the side of the interstate, you'd have to wait for someone come by (unless you had a CB, and a lot of people did, though not necessarily for that particular reason).  Now you just call someone.  And, of course, all the behavioral changes brought on by the web, like pulling down news you're interested in instead of waiting for the evening paper or news broadcast, are possible whether or not you happen to be near home.

So if a mobile device is something mobile that can hook you up to the web, then what we have is a series of less-tethered-to-a-particular-place ways of connecting:

• Ancient times:  If you could connect to a remote system at all, it was through work, or a university or other such institution.  Maybe you could dial in to that system from home, using a honking big dumb terminal.  One way or another you were essentially going over phone lines (even the backbone of the time was a bunch of T1 lines, if I understand correctly).
• BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) and online services such as Compu$erve begin to appear and personal computers with modems become commercially available.  Now you can connect from home, generally to a world completely different from what you'd encounter at work, assuming your line of work even involved the internet.
• Laptops become widespread.  Now you can connect from anywhere you can lug your laptop, assuming you can tie up a phone line.  By this time you can also plug your laptop in to people's local networks.  Cell phones exist, but using them to connect to the internet is cumbersome at best, and almost certainly very expensive.  Internet cafes pop up.
• WiFi becomes widespread.  With municipalities airports, hotels and commercial chains putting up hotspots here and there, the concept of an "internet cafe" becomes somewhat moot.  Many people can connect from wherever they are much of the time.  Phones are becoming webbier, but in a limited way.
• Present day: Smart phones become widespread.  Apps are developed so that you can interact with your favorite sites without squinting at a web site through a browser.  Phones have enough horsepower to provide a nice, snappy experience, at least where you have coverage.

If mobile connectivity is more important than whether a device will fit in your shirt pocket, and I think in this context it is, then mobility starts somewhere around the spread of laptops.  Certainly by the time WiFi is widespread and home "broadband" access is commercially available, the difference from the present day is more degree than kind (understanding that a big enough difference in degree is essentially a difference in kind).

That's not to say we're not entering a new phase.  We are.  A location-aware phone that is always on and always with you is significantly different from a laptop you have to plug in, power on, log in, etc.  From a technical point of view, designing for a small touch screen is significantly different from a laptop screen, much less a 30" monitor.  Nonetheless, the current phase is just the latest in a series of steps making it easier and easier to connect from anywhere.

(*) It's not always clear what "lots of people" or "widespread" should mean.  Widespread among affluent technophiles?  Lots of people in the developed world?  Widespread in a large portion of the world -- which may be ahead of parts of the developed world when it comes to mobile communication?  I'm bravely sidestepping such questions here, but I wanted to at least call them out.

Time marches on after all

[File this one under "not in any way profound, but felt compelled to write it anyway," or maybe "just really wanted to meet my self-imposed ten-posts-a-month quota."]

A funny thing would happen every time I returned to my hotel on this trip. More accurately, the odd thing was what didn't happen. It doesn't seem so long ago, but it must have been years ago (I hadn't travelled that much in the last few years), that about the first thing I'd do on returning to the hotel room would be to check messages. After that, I might turn on the TV to find out what was going on.

Check messages? I didn't even touch the phone in the room, except maybe to move it aside to make room for the laptop. Why would anyone? Forget the hotel phone rate deathtrap. Who needs another number to keep track of and another mailbox to check? The cell phone worked just fine.

Of course.

Then one morning I wanted to know what the weather was going to be like for the rest of the day (drizzly or clear being the main choices). Not being awake yet, I turned on the morning news. And waited while they talked about something morning-news innocuous. And waited some more. And then they cut to commercial. At which point the rest of my brain woke up, I pulled out the laptop and went to the TV station's web site.

Of course.

If there's anything interesting in all this, it's that the web and mobile technology aren't turning our lives upside down so much as slowly infiltrating them. Yet more reason to believe it's better to be pervasive than disruptive.

Clip 10-cent coupons with this simple $300 device

I saw a piece on the local news recently about smart phone apps that will help you with your shopping. Use your phone's camera to scan a bar code and it will tell you if it knows of a nearby store with a better deal (its database of stores is limited). It will also sent you an image of a coupon, if there is one available, to scan at the cash register.

Ten years from now it will all sound laughably primitive (what, you had to have your phone show the scanner a bar code image, all to transmit a dozen or so bytes?). Right now it's pretty slick, but when I heard about it, some dim light went on in the back of my head: It's not the image on the screen, or the printed image on a paper coupon that matters. It's the magic number in the bar code ... oh, right ... the very first post to this blog was about just that notion.

It's probably also worth noting that the groundwork for this was laid quite a while ago, before the internet and before music or movies became digital, namely the introduction of bar codes in supermarkets. A pioneering piece of modern digitization, though of course digital communication itself is far, far older.

Google bites the wax tadpole

The whole "Coca-Cola in Chinese is 'bite the wax tadpole'" story is an urban legend, but according to ethnographer Tricia Wang, Google has come close to bringing the legend to life in China, quite apart from the current flap over censorship and cybervandalism. The piece is well worth reading in full, but some of the highlights:

• People are generally unsure even as to how to pronounce Google's name in Chinese, much less what characters to type in to get to it.
• Google has been completely out-marketed by Baidu, albeit with help from the Chinese government.
• Google's email-centric model is out of sync with China's instant messaging, cell phone-centric culture.

Wang's work is concerned with low-income internet users. She is well aware that academics in China love Google. Her point is that, in China as elsewhere, that's a narrow segment of the population.

From what I can tell, and Wang offers more data to confirm this, the cell-phone/IM model is the way most people in emerging markets access online. See this post and this one for a bit more on Chinese cell phones and the web.

Additive change considered useful

This post is going to be a bit more hard-core geekly than most, but as with previous such posts, I'm hoping the main point will be clear even if you replace all the geek terms with "peanut butter" or similar.

Re-reading my post on Tog's predictions from 1994, I was struck by something that I'd originally glossed over. The prediction in question was:

The three major operating systems in use today, DOS/Windows, Macintosh, and Unix, were all launched in the seventies. They are old, tired, and creaking under the weight of today's tasks and opportunities. A new generation of object-oriented systems is waiting in the wings.

My specific response was that object-oriented programming has indeed become prominent, but that for the most part object-oriented applications run on top of the same three operating systems. I also speculated, generally, that such predictions tend to fail because they focus too strongly on present trends and assume that they will continue to the logical conclusion of sweeping everything else aside. But in fact, trends come and go.

Fair enough, and I still believe it goes a long way towards explaining how people can consistently misread the implications of trends, but why doesn't the new actually sweep aside the old, even in a field like software where everything is just bits in infinitely modifiable memory?

The particular case of object-oriented operating systems gives a good clue as to why, and the clue is in the phrase I originally glossed over: object-oriented operating systems. I instinctively referred to object-oriented programming instead, precisely because object-oriented operating systems didn't supplant the usual suspects, old and creaky though they might be.

The reason seems pretty simple to me: Sweeping aside the old is more trouble than it's worth.

The operating system is the lowest level of a software platform. It's responsible for making a collection of hard drives and such into a file system, sending the right bits to the video card to put images on the screen, for telling the memory management unit what goes where, dealing with processor interrupts and scheduling, and other such finicky stuff. It embodies not just the data structures and algorithms taught in introductory OS classes, but, crucially, huge amounts of specific knowledge about CPUs, memory management units, I/O buses, hundreds of models of video cards, keyboards, mice, etc., etc., etc.

For example, a single person was able to put together the basic elements of the Linux kernel, but its modern incarnation runs to millions of lines and is maintained by a dedicated core team and who knows how many contributors in all. This for the kernel. The outer layers are even bigger.

It's all written in an unholy combination of assembler and C with a heavy dose of magical functions and macros you won't find anywhere else, and it takes experience and a particular kind of mind to hack in any significant way. I don't have the particulars on Mac OS and DOS/Windows, but the basics are the same: Huge amounts of specialized knowledge distributed through millions of lines of code.

So, while it might be nice to have that codebase be written in your favorite OO language, leaving aside that using an OO platform enables but certainly does not automatically bring about several improvements in code quality, why would anyone in their right mind want to rewrite millions of lines of tested, shipping code? As far as function is concerned, it ain't broke, and where it is broke, it can be fixed for much, much less than the cost of rewriting. Sure, the structure might not be what you'd want, and sure, that has incremental costs, but so what? The change just isn't worth it*.

So instead, we have a variety of ways to write desktop applications, some of them OO but all running on one of the old standbys.


Except ...

An application developer would rather not see an operating system. You don't want to know what exact system calls you need to open a TCP connection. You just want a TCP connection. To this end, the various OS vendors also supply standard APIs that handle the details for you. Naturally, each vendor's API is tuned toward the underlying OS, leading to all manner of differences, some essential, many not so essential. If only there were a single API to deal with no matter which platform you're on.

There have been many attempts at such a lingua franca over the years. One of the more prominent ones is Java's JVM, of course. While it's not quite the "write once, run anywhere" magic bullet it's sometimes been hyped to be, it works pretty well in practice. And it's OO.

And it has been implemented on bare metal, notably on the ARM architecture. If you're running on that -- and if you're writing an app for a cell phone you may well be** -- you're effectively running on an OO operating system [Or nearly so. The JVM, which talks to the actual hardware, isn't written in Java, but everything above that is][Re-reading, I don't think I made it clear that in the usual Java setup, the JVM is relying on the underlying OS to talk to the hardware, making it a skin over a presumably non-OO OS.  In the ARM case, you have an almost entirely OO platform from the bare metal up, the exception being the guts of the JVM].

Why did this work? Because ARM was a new architecture. There was no installed base of millions of users and there weren't hundreds of flavors of peripherals to deal with. Better yet, a cell phone is not an open device. You're not going to go out and buy some new video card for it. The first part gives room to take a new approach to the basic OS task of talking to the hardware. The second makes it much more tractable to do so.

What do the two cases, of Java sitting on existing operating systems in the desktop world but on the bare metal in the cell phone world, have in common? In both cases the change has been additive. The existing operating systems were not swept away because in the first case it would have been madness and in the second case there was nothing to sweep away.



* If you're curious, the Linux kernel developers give detailed reasons why they don't use C++ (Linus's take is particularly caustic). Whether or not we choose to count C++ as an OO language, the discussion of the costs and benefits is entirely valid. Interestingly, one of the points is that significant portions of the kernel are object-oriented, even though they're written in plain C.

** I wasn't able to run down clear numbers on how many cell phones in actual use run with this particular combination. I believe it's a lot.

More on Chinese cell phones. A lot more.

China has just announced that it has issued licenses for 3G cell phone service, suitable for streaming video and internet access. The numbers involved are typically big, particularly since cell phones may be the primary or even only way many Chinese connect to the web.

Think hundreds of millions of web-enabled phones. Granted, they'll mostly be behind the Great Firewall of China, but that's still an awful lot of web-enabled phones coming online.

CD Player. Comes with music.

This is take two of the post I was trying to write when I ended up writing about BodyNet instead.

Technically, there's not a lot of difference between a cell phone and a streaming audio player. Throw in some flash memory and downloaded tunes are no problem either. Add a screen and you can say the same thing for video. But how do you get the content to the phone? Two models spring to mind:

1. A big happy open web-driven marketplace. Surf wherever you want. Find something you like? Download it to your phone just like you'd download it to your PC. Pay whoever you need to when you download (or pay for a subscription). This is pretty similar to the CD/DVD market. Sounds nice, but as far as I know you can't do it. It's a lot easier to do DRM on a captive device like a cell phone, and cell phone makers are pretty aggressive about making sure you don't tamper with their devices.
2. A collaboration between the content owners (i.e., studios and record labels, not to be confused with singers, songwriters, screenwriters, actors etc.) and the service providers. Subscribe to a service and you can also download or stream content from whatever content owners the provider has partnered with. This is pretty similar to the cable TV model. It ensures that everybody gets a cut (as always, we can argue over who gets what cut) and a number of partnerships have formed.

There's another model that doesn't come to mind because when you try to map it back to "old media" terms, it doesn't really fit. Yet there are at least two examples going, one of them recent:

3. The cell phone makers sell the content. As the title suggests, this seems like selling a CD player and then selling the CDs to go with it. You see this in niches (e.g., Disney makes an MP3 player and sells plug-in cards with songs from their artists), and I wouldn't be surprised if some early phonograph maker tried it, but it doesn't seem like a great idea. Selling electronic widgets and selling bits are just two different things. Nonetheless, it certainly worked for Apple and the iPod/iPhone, and now Nokia is trying the same approach with Comes With Music (TM). It's not quite the same model as iPhone -- for a subscription fee, you can download all you want and keep it forever -- but it does share the feature of putting the phone maker in the content business.
   

So maybe they know something I don't. Wouldn't be the first time.

BodyNet fifteen years after

About fifteen years ago, Olin Shivers looked at a typical tech-savvy professional of the day carrying a pager (remember those?) a cell phone, a "digital diary", a keyless car remote, a notebook computer and a Walkman (remember those?) and concluded "That's one headset, two communications systems, four keyboards and five displays too many." You typically didn't have a good mobile web connection in those days, either. Shivers then went on to describe a more modular collection of pieces communicating through a short-range network he dubbed "BodyNet".

Fast-forward fifteen years. Are things any better? Well, yes. Did BodyNet happen? Well, depends on how you count.

These days you can get a portable thingie [see also "pocket-thing"] that will let you make phone calls, download and play music and videos, get and answer email, surf the web, keep your calendar and use GPS (or other means) to tell you where you are. You can also download other widgets/gadgets/apps/whatever-you-call-them that will let you do all manner of other things (or at least, play games).

There is even a short-range network standard, namely Bluetooth, that you can use to attach accessories to the thingie, including a headset that will let you talk hands-free, albeit at the cost of sometimes looking like you're having a conversation with the wall or your invisible friend Harvey the Rabbit. Except for its somewhat broader range, Bluetooth looks remarkably like the BodyTalk Shivers describes. I doubt that's a coincidence.

So: The hodge-podge of mobile devices one carries around have consolidated. There is now a short-range, personal, body-sized network. This network can connect to the Web. There is a market for devices to plug into that network. So BodyNet happened, right?

Not really. The original BodyNet was meant to be a mix-and-match affair in which you get the pieces you need a la carte and plug them together. Shivers specifically argues against a "monolithic" approach:

We do not believe in this [monolithic approach] over a broad class of users [...] Individual users will persist in remaining individual -- the system requirements of one will not satisfy the needs of another.

But the monolithic approach is just what we have today. "Phones" pack in more and more features. Worse (from the geekly perspective), they tend to do so in a very closed-system sort of way. The cell phone makers and service providers want very tight control over what you can and can't do with their product/service. True mix-and-match is restricted to accessories like headsets.

This seems to be a recurring blind spot for us geeks. We're taught "clean interfaces", "standard protocols" and "modularity, modularity, modularity." We forget that most people don't want to pick their favorite components and plug them together. The best selling stereos (do people still listen to stereos?) are all-one-piece. We have software "office suites" because no one wants to find out how well Word Processor A works with Spreadsheet B. Even on the wild and woolly web, people like portals and mashups that do the grunt work of pulling things together.

Phone makers sell all-singing, all-dancing phone/modem/GPS/email/web/music/video/... devices because people want them. They want the features, not the joy of putting them together.

Cox and cell phones

Frankly, I'm not up to speed on this one, but I saw it float by and thought I'd mention it. Cable provider Cox Communications is looking to get into the cell phone business. Since like most cable companies they're already in the broadband internet business, and they also provide wireless internet, this seems like a bid to expand its presence into yet another means of delivering bits.

I have no idea whether this will work. If it does, you've got one-stop shopping for pretty much everything people do with bits these days and it's a brilliant coup. If it doesn't you've got a company with more fingers in pies than it has fingers and it's a colossal blunder. Judgment will be delivered in retrospect, as usual ...

[The Wikipedia article on Cox calls it the third largest cable provider and the seventh largest telecoms provider in the country.  Looks like it worked out OK.  Even if on a later sweep through Cox is defunct, I don't see how you could blame it on the decision to enter the cell phone business. --D.H. May 2015]

More on Chinese smart phones

I previously wondered whether the lack of a full-sized keyboard on smart phones would be less of a problem in China than in the western world. So I asked a friend who analyzes the cell phone market and has recently been to China on just such business. He told me that a smart phone with a touch screen is a pretty good match for Chinese. There are two input methods, one more based on picking from a menu and the other on actually drawing the characters. Both seem to work well.

Leapfrogging the net in the world at large

I started out to write about O3b's initiative to radically extend the reach of the internet by a combination of satellites, WiMax and 3G cell service. I'll get to that [I don't think I ever did, but O3b looks to still be in business, so I guess there's still time --D.H. June 2015], but as so often happens I ran across something else while running that down. It's probably worth its own post, but it's in line with the theme of leapfrogging so I'll go ahead and mention it here:

There is now approximately one cell phone subscription for every two people on the planet -- pretty mind-boggling considering that about a quarter of the world's population is under 15. Now, I know for a fact that some people have more than one cell phone subscription and some portion of the under-15 set has cell phones, too, but still ...

Not only are cell phones competing vigorously against land lines head to head, to the point that many people don't even bother to set up a land line when moving into a new place, but they have a significant advantage in areas where wires are expensive to build out or simply haven't been. This includes large rural areas, mountainous areas, archipelagos (which, come to think of it, are just mountainous areas with a higher waterline) and much of the developing world.

This isn't just a cell phone thing. It's a general wires vs. wireless thing which should apply equally well to internet service. Which brings us back to O3b.

O3b is short for "Other 3 billion," though as far as I can tell there are more like 1.5 billion internet users (a lot, but fewer than have cell phones), which left me to wonder about the other other billion and a half. It turns out they mean the 3 billion for whom fiber is not likely to be an option anytime soon.

If you buy the premise that internet access is a good thing, and if you don't you're probably not reading this, then the bad news right now is that large swathes of the world lack the infrastructure to offer copper-based service to everyone, much less fiber. The good news is that whoever wants to build out the internet has a blank slate to work with and won't have to wrangle with telecoms and cable operators. Thus the notion of leapfrogging over the wired stage directly to wireless.

When I first read that someone was going to use satellites to cover previously uncovered areas, my thought was "why?" Putting birds up in orbit is expensive. Building radio towers on the ground is much cheaper. There have been attempts to bring the internet to rural customers via satellite, but as I understand it the results are cumbersome. Typically the satellite broadcasts your incoming data and everyone else's down and you use something low-bandwidth (maybe even dialup?) for the uplink.

But this is not what O3b is going for. Their tagline says it all: "3G / WiMAX Wireless Backhaul and IP Trunking." That's clear enough, right? If not, perhaps this Financial Times article linked from the O3b site will help. It certainly helped me. [you'll have to register unless their server arbitraily decides you've downloaded fewer than four FT articles in the last 30 days]

The problem these days is not getting billions of people wireless connections. Everyone has a cell phone, or soon will, it seems. The problem is, what is that cell connection connected to? Right now, in much of the world, the answer is "not much", or at least not much beyond the carrier's cell phone network.

This is where the satellites come in. The satellites connect the cell towers to the internet backbone. Since the messy work of gathering up the incoming data and dispersing the outgoing data has been done on the ground, the satellites just have to beam high-bandwidth, much more uniform traffic around to each other and to and from the backbone and cell networks. This seems like a much better match, to the limited extent that I can tell, and at least some major players seem interested as well (notably, Google).

If done right, this could be quite a Good Thing. Lots of people get cheap, fast internet access, the local carriers make some money, O3b makes some money and all those One Laptop Per Child laptops get something to connect to.

Three times the commercials! That's progress for you ...

There seems to be a buzz developing over phone providers' "three-screen strategy." The idea is that you'll be able to get video -- TV shows, "user generated" videos, whatever -- delivered anywhere you like, whether your TV, your PC or your cell phone. Underpinning this is a new kind of distribution deal. Previously, carriers and providers had negotiated separate deals for the three kinds of device, but the latest deals cover all three.

This is a perfect example of convergence from the vendors' point of view, and a small but necessary step from the consumer's point of view. Again, there's a tension between competing interests. On the one hand, the carriers would like to be able to provide a broad selection of programming, since that will attract customers. But if everyone is providing the same broad selection then the service becomes a commodity, consumers can easily switch providers and the providers' margins shrink.

Right now, we seem to be at the "baby steps" stage, with deals covering content like five-minute excerpts from popular shows. Perhaps it's a bit early to make too many predictions.

Myself, I don't feel a great need to watch TV on my tiny cell phone screen, particularly since advertising seems to be a major part of the current plans, but advertising isn't necessarily bad, and I'm sure a lot of people won't mind greatly. As always, it will be interesting to see how things shake out.

More on cell phones as tracking devices

It was this BBC piece on a recent study at Northeastern University that set me musing about tracking via cell phone.

The article is sort of a roller coaster ride of "yikes!":

It would be wonderful if every [mobile] carrier could give universities access to their data because it's so rich

The researchers said they were 'not at liberty' to disclose where the information had been collected.

... giving way to "that's not so bad":

[S]teps had been taken to guarantee the participants' anonymity

[W]e only know the coordinates of the tower routing the communication, hence a user's location is not known within a tower's service area

... and the occasional "hmm ...":

Nokia have put forward an idea to attach sensors to phones that could report back on air quality. The project would allow a large location-specific database to be built very quickly.

Ofcom is also planning to use mobiles to collect data about the quality of wi-fi connections around the UK.

Evidently the business of attaching interesting sensors to cell phones is expected to boom in the next few years.

The real punchline, though, was the unsurprising conclusion that most people's daily activities are pretty boring: "The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again. Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis[.]" Even those that travel further still tend to visit a small number of places repeatedly.

It's natural to be concerned about the ever-increasing speed of communication, and the prospect that at some point everyone might have access to everything known about everyone. But on the other hand it's comforting to know that one's own activities are probably too boring for most people to care about.

It's 2:00 am. Does your cell phone know where you are?

As I understand it, cell phones are called cell phones because the area of coverage is divided into (generally overlapping) "cells", each covered by a given tower. This means that if you're connected to the network, the provider will be able to tell, at a minimum, which cells you're in. By looking at signal strength from the towers involved one can get a much more accurate estimate. And as if that's not enough -- and apparently it isn't -- GPS is becoming a standard feature.

Having a precise, accurate location device on hand at all times can be handy and in some cases even life-saving. On the other hand, having an unobtrusive tracking device on one's person at all times raises some obvious privacy issues.

There are two contrasting extreme views on this sort of thing. The Utopian view plays up the "never lost" and "find a restaurant" features and goes on to argue that a world where everybody can locate everybody else is a fundamentally Good Thing.

The dystopian view plays up the privacy concerns, argues that The Man wants to know where you are and, further, wants to make it nearly-impossible to live without your personal tracker.

Naturally, I don't subscribe to either extreme view. I'm not really excited by the idea of a service that alerts me if a friend happens to wander into my vicinity (or vice versa), but neither do I see the whole thing as a step down the slippery slope towards Big Brother. I am a bit concerned that it's easy to forget, or never really realize, how locatable you are when you carry a cell phone, but that problem has been around for a while now.

On the balance I see it as technology taking yet another incremental step and life going on more or less as usual.

People v. UK cell phone providers

Following the recommendations of the IEGMP (a.k.a. the Stewart group), the UK government maintains a website called Sitefinder detailing the locations of cell phone base stations. The catch is that the database behind the site is populated voluntarily by the service providers.

Unfortunately, the providers stopped providing information to the database when the site's operators were told to make the stations' grid locations searchable online. The argument was that this would give sensitive information about the providers' networks.

Well, maybe, but I doubt this is a battle the providers will win. A nation known, among many other things, for trainspotting (the hobby, not the book/movie, or if you don't like that association, the Oxford English Dictionary) should have no trouble harnessing the efforts of interested individuals to compile an unofficial database comparable with, if not better than, the official version. "Crowdsourcing," they call it.

This iPhone will self-destruct in five seconds

Two questions come to mind about Apple's recent iPhone update which, as Apple had warned, makes hacked iPhones inoperable:

Who's better off for this? Owners of hacked phones now have $500 paperweights. Granted, they were warned and I would think were in violation of some license or service agreement. There are reports that some owners of non-hacked phones have lost contact data and possibly the use of their phones. Apple comes off looking like The Man instead of The Rest of Us, thereby calling down the wrath of hackers everywhere, but what were they going to do? The one group clearly to gain is makers of whizzy phones that aren't locked to a single carrier and/or don't self-destruct if you try to unlock them.

Just how does the self-destruct feature work? Apple asserts that the hacked phones are now "permanently inoperable". Did the update fry some hard-to-replace chip? If not, just what claim is Apple making? Clearly the self-destruct update will have left affected phones unable to receive further updates the usual way. But is it impossible even in principle to re-load the OS, for example by copying the image from a working phone? I would expect it to be difficult -- dongle-based copy protection is a lot easier to pull off for something highly integrated like a phone -- but could not even Apple do it back at the factory? [My understanding is that they just re-flashed the firmware and that Apple could fix such a phone at the factory (but has no reason to). In some cases, such a phone might also be fixable without help from Apple.]

4G, BodyNet and future web experiences

It seems the buzz in the wireless world is over 4G: ubiquitous, fast, IP-based connectivity that doesn't care what it's carrying or who's carrying it. You'll hear the word "convergence" swirling around this, which might bring back ugly memories, but there was never anything wrong with the premise that phones, TVs and computers were going to meld into each other. The problem was with the notion it was all going to happen tomorrow, smoothly and using some particular favorite technology.

Convergence is happening, but by fits and starts, with mixed support from various industry players, over relatively long periods of time and in not-always-predictable ways. At least, I'll happily claim ignorance as to exactly how it will all play out.

Meanwhile, smaller-scale technologies like bluetooth and to some extent WiFi have helped decouple devices from each other. My phone -- a pretty basic model -- doesn't care whether it's using its builtin mic and speaker, my headset or the system in the car. I believe it also has some limited MP3 capability. This is just a taste of what Olin Shivers outlined in 1993 in BodyNet, though as always it's interesting to compare the vision with actuality.

Put those two trends together and assume that the market and we geeks will somehow make all this happen, and we could end up with a pretty slick setup. Everything is IP, so there's no such thing as phone service or TV service per se. It's all just bits. Peripherals like displays and speakers that today are just starting to be net-aware are net-aware by default. Transceivers like phones and routers use SDR (software-defined radio) to not care whether you're talking son-of-GSM, son-of-CDMA or something else entirely.

Here's a sketch of what it might look like. I make no claim of originality here. All the ideas are already in the air, and many of them already exist in some concrete form:

I'm at home getting ready to leave on a business trip. I'm listening to a radio news program (since it's news, it's probably live, but it could just as well be a playlist from my collection). In my pocket is something that looks more or less like a present-day phone or PDA. I slip on some sort of headset assembly with ear buds and microphone. My news program is still playing, but it's on the headset. The house speakers go mute as I leave.

I go out and get in my car. The thing in my pocket tells my car that it's satisfied that I'm with it -- maybe I pressed my thumb against it, maybe it uses some kind of magic. They use appropriate PK mojo to establish trust in one another. The car opens up and I get in. I have the option of leaving the sound in the headset (say, if I'm carpooling and the art of conversation has died) or putting it on the car speakers (as I do on this trip since it's just me).

I get a phone call. The audio stream pauses while I take the call and resumes when I'm done. The navigation system notifies me that there's a traffic jam on my usual route and suggests an alternate. I've only recently subscribed to this service. Just this morning, in fact. It wasn't a feature that the car's manufacturer planned for. Quite possibly the thing in my pocket is doing most of the negotiations behind the scenes and the car's navigation system is just following its cue, but I neither know nor care.

I get to the airport and follow the car's guidance to a good parking place. I'm not carrying a laptop per se. I'm carrying a keyboard/pad and display, though I contemplated leaving them behind. I get them out while I'm waiting at the gate and work on my presentation. They use the thing in my pocket for CPU, local cache and connectivity. At home, the system might use my router and non-mobile connection for better bandwidth or possibly because it's cheaper, but again I neither know nor care.

I get on the plane. The thing in my pocket tells the plane that I'm here. The plane knows I'm ticketed. The pocket-thing may also help me through security, but they may want better proof than a possibly-hacked piece of hardware. My keyboard and display are packed away because the ones provided on the plane are a nicer fit for that space. I board, settle in and finish up a last bit of work before I pick out a movie from my collection.

Another phone call comes in, the caller ID flashing on the screen. It's not urgent so I let it ring through. It's a short flight and I want some shuteye, so I pause the movie. The plane lands. I get off and follow the instructions from the voice in my headset to the train platform. Once I'm seated comfortably, I check my voicemail, deal with the call, then pull out my display and watch a bit more of the movie. Or maybe I'd rather just watch it on the small screen of the pocket-thing.

At the client site I pull up a desk, pull out my keyboard (because I like it) but use the display on the desk (because it's bigger and sharper than my portable one). It'll be a similar story at the hotel. I'll say hi to the staff, go up to my room, which will let me in on cue from the pocket-thing and lock behind me when I go. I'll watch the rest of the movie on the in-room gigundo-screen surround sound system. Nice perk, that. But first I'll call home and videoconference with the family, then do a little web browsing on the long-term effects of living in a constant radio bath.

Most likely, though, I'll still have brought a book along.