I was a happy user of AT&T GoPhone for the past three months. That ended today.

Up until November 12, AT&T provided unlimited monthly data service as a pay-as-you-go option for $19.99 per month. Once you bought this service, you could use either the 3G or EDGE wireless data networks.

I was gladly buying this service package each month because I was able to use the really fantastic JoikuSpot application to turn my Nokia E71 into a 3G-powered ad hoc WiFi access point that I carried in my pocket.

I guess enough bloggers talked about what a great deal the Go Phone monthly data service package was, because AT&T did away with this package on November 12. Some people in the blogosphere heard about this in early October, as evidenced by the article AT&T hangs up on unlimited data GoPhone option that appeared on jkOnTheRun.com. I missed it because, as you know, I've been really busy.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My latest post on O'Reilly's Inside iPhone is A Glimpse of Our Tethering Future where I recount my experiences working with a Nokia E71 and an application called JoikuSpot that turns the E71 into a 3G-powered ad hoc WiFi access point that you can carry in your pocket.

My use of the Nokia E71 is courtesy of the Nokia Blogger Relations Program.

After a solid week of 3G phone use with laptop (and iPhone) tethering, I've convinced myself that my concerns about iPhone battery consumption while running an application like Netshare from Nullriver are overblown. This can work and any increased battery use can be managed.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't really talked about AirCell or its Gogo inflight Internet access service since it first became available on American Airlines. But Andy Abramson turned me on to a little experiment with the service that he and Laptop Magazine's Joanna Stern did yesterday that is absolutely worthy of mention.

Andy reports that he and Joanna were able to carry on a voice conversation via Aircell Gogo while Joanna was on an American Airlines flight to New York. The service was designed to make voice communication "impossible" at the airlines' requests, but Andy concluded that it would be possible if he used a Flash-based voice application like Phweet and he was right.

Joanna liveblogged the flight. Her post goes through all the different communication services she tried over her five-hour flight, and how they performed.

Kudos to Andy and Joanna for their persistence. They proved once again that "impossible" is a hard claim to make about any aspect of technology. This is proof of the old saying, where there's a will, there's a way.

Andy likes to tell people that he's not an engineer type of person, but he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the wireless services and applications that are available.

I reached out to Andy over this past weekend to ask what he thought the best way to access the Internet was from a moving train along The Northeast Corridor. Before speaking to him, I was lead to believe that I needed a wireless data card for my laptop, a $60 per month service plan, and a two-year contract.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There's been a lot of discussion on Mac-related websites about whether the iPhone 3G should support tethering to a laptop or desktop computer. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, Wikipedia defines tethering as follows:

Tethering in cellular wireless is the connection of a non-mobile device (e.g. desktop computer, notebook computer, laptop computer), to a mobile device (e.g. cell phone) PDA like Palm Treo, Motorola Q, BlackBerry or Air Card for the purpose of wireless Internet access by the non-mobile "tethered" device.

Several phones already on sale on the AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint networks already support tethering. The unlimited data plan rates charged by the carriers for devices that support tethering are significantly higher than the proposed data plan rate for the iPhone 3G. As a result, some people who are planning to buy an iPhone 3G say that they will pay a higher data plan rate if they are allowed to tether their new iPhone to a laptop.

I don't think iPhone 3G owners would be happy with the performance of their iPhones if tethering were allowed. The reason is that tethering would consume a great deal more of the iPhone's power than most people realize.

I've made several trips from Trenton, NJ to New York Penn Station on the New Jersey Transit Northeast Corridor rail line over the past month. Each time I arrive in Manhattan, I am surprised that the battery level on my iPhone is low. The reason is that there are dead spots on the AT&T network that overlap the Northeast Corridor right of way, and the iPhone boosts its signal to stay connected when in those areas.

Continue reading "Why Tethering an iPhone 3G to a Laptop Doesn't Make Sense" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

In the aftermath of the iPhone 3G announcement last Monday, a lot of people who are considering purchasing an iPhone for the first time are looking for information about AT&T rate plans that cover the iPhone 3G.

I've had an iPhone for a year, so I am very familiar with AT&T's total charges. Although iPhone 3G rates will be structured similarly, there are a few increased charges.

At the end of this article, I estimate that my monthly charges for using an iPhone 3G will be about $86. That's up $15 to 17 dollars per month from what I pay today.

Read on for the rate details and my complete monthly service cost estimate....

Continue reading "iPhone 3G Rate Plan Estimated Monthly Costs: About $86 for 450 Minutes and Unlimited Data" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Once iPhone 3G lands in customers' hands, I think AT&T is going to have some never-before-experienced issues with saturation of the backhaul supporting its mobile phone network infrastructure. A great example will be what happens at the Moscone Center next January when the Mac user community convenes for Macworld Expo 2009.

At yesterday's WWDC keynote, everybody was worried about the resiliency of services like Twitter and Yahoo! Live which people were using for live blogging. But the mobile data bandwidth needed to support the hundreds of iPhones in the room is a fraction of that which will be required for the iPhone 3Gs that will be present in the same place seven months from now.

I'm not the only one who thinks this is an issue. Over on Gigaom, Om Malik raised this issue in his article Is 3G Ready for the iPhone Stress Test?. Om said:

...With the 3G iPhone, there is little desire to wait for a Wi-Fi connection and hitting the high-speed 3G connection directly for whatever you want to do. It has happened to me: Once I got EVDO, I stopped looking for a hot spot to connect my Lenovo X300, which has a built-in Verizon connection... A flat-rate 3G data plan on iPhone would mean that the usage would start to shift from Wi-Fi to 3G...

Most of the problem, if any, will crop up at the backhaul level. At present, the current 3G networks have a backhaul capacity of between 10-to-15 megabits per second, which is enough for the very short term, but it could become a big issue as more and more 3G iPhones and other new 3G phones go online....

There are some excellent charts in that article that illustrate the potential problems, and compare the per user bandwidth use of EDGE, UMTS, the three flavors of HSDPA (which is what AT&T is calling 3G), and something called LTE which supposedly supports 100 Mbps.

If AT&T has 10 to 15 Mbps backhaul capacity in most places that are 3G capable right now, I'm guessing that 20 concurrent iPhone 3G users consuming an average of 500 kbps could make the wireless data service appear sluggish to everybody using it including iPhone EDGE users, BlackBerry users, and data card users. Not everybody will use the network that intensely, but I'm convinced that quite a few people will find a way to do it.

See the problem? Let me know if you think I'm off base.

The places I think that are going to see this stress first are:

• Sports arenas, stadiums, and other venues where public events take place in a confined area,
• Shopping malls and shopping centers designed to look like traditional downtown areas,
• Office buildings,
• Certain neighborhoods in cities where lots of technologically savvy people live or work.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the things that I was wondering when watching Steve Jobs' keynote at the Apple WWDC yesterday was, "How much will AT&T charge me for data if I upgrade from my current iPhone?"

Note to Readers: This article is about the rates AT&T will charge for data service on the iPhone 3G. If you need a total monthly service estimate, look at iPhone 3G Rate Plan Estimated Monthly Costs.

At first it appeared that the data plan price would increase from $20 to $30 per month. That's what AT&T plans to charge iPhone customers for unlimited 3G data. However, I subsequently read Om Malik's interview with Ralph de la Vega, the president and CEO of AT&T Mobility. What de la Vega said in this interview made me revise my monthly data plan price estimate from $30 to $35 per month:

Has there been a change in the cost of data plans?

The data plans are different on the 3G iPhone vs. the 2G iPhone. Consumers will pay $30 a month every month, while enterprises will pay $45 a month. This is what you pay us on other PDA devices such as BlackBerry Curve. The SMS messages are not bundled anymore, and you pay for what you want. Again, the prices are based on what you buy.

Continue reading "The iPhone 3G Rate Plan for Data is Probably $35 Per Month If You Still Want 200 SMS Messages" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before I hit the hay on Friday night, I want to point out Jonathan Greene's blog article Nokia N78 - Feature Pack 2 and plenty to love. This is a great first look at the newest N-Series phone and includes a nearly 20 minute long video of him putting the N78 through its paces.

He has a lot deeper knowledge of the Nokia N-Series handset line than I do. I can tell this because he talks in depth about the new features in the N78 that stem from Symbian S60 Feature Pack 2. He explains that the software is more user-friendly than that which has been included on phones like the N95. He's right.

He also points out correctly that the N95 is intended for a technology-savvy person, while the N78 is aimed at someone who wants many of the same features but with fewer controls and complex options.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over on Wi-Fi Net News, Glenn Fleishman pointed out the release of a 13-minute documentary on the Wireless Philadelphia Project.

Change is in the Airwaves: A Documentary about the Philadelphia Wireless Initiative from George Rausch on Vimeo.

Wireless Philadelphia is a city-wide WiFi project that began in September 2006. The leading provider to the service, Earthlink, has decided to shutdown the network on June 12, 2008.

This is a partially-finished documentary, which is appropriate considering the fact that Wireless Philadelphia is a partially-finished network that never achieved its goal of providing digital inclusion to the city's under-served communities.

As somebody who spends a fair amount of time in Philadelphia, I am sorry that Wireless Philadelphia hasn't taken off. Its primary goals are noble. However I think Philadelphia doesn't have the critical mass of home web users in the service areas who were willing to depend on this Wireless Philadelphia for access. Earthlink also made some huge mistakes in estimating the infrastructure needed to provide WiFi access over such a wide area.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Wednesday, I visited the Panera in Levittown, PA to sip a diet soda and use their WiFi. This is supposed to be an amenity for customers. I had never taken advantage of it before.

I saw a Twitter post (aka "tweet") from someone I am following in my Twitterific window, and I wanted to know what they were talking about. I clicked on the URL that was embedded in the tweet and saw this {see the first screenshot}:

SonicWall CFS Blocking TinyURL.com:
This makes Twitter almost unusable, in my
opinion. [ Screenshot: Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

For the record, the URL depicted resolves to a YouTube copy of a Cheetos commericial. I didn't find that out until I got home and had time to look, probably 12 hours after the situation I'm describing.

At the time I thought, "There's pretty much no way I am going to remember this later today. I'll have to reread all the tweets on my 'with friends' timeline and hope that I remember this specific one." I was sure I wouldn't remember because I had a meeting with a potential client in Center City Philadelphia scheduled for around lunchtime, and those types of meetings have a tendency to clear my head of previous ancillary thoughts.

Twitter is basically unusable in this environment from a followers perspective if SonicWall decides it's not going to allow requests for any URL issued by TinyURL.com.

I considered my options and none of them looked good. I guess I could have written the tweet down and some information about the context if that was important, but I didn't think of that.

Submitting a URL Rating Request:
"... It's unfair to assume that tinyurl used in this
context is a means of obfuscation." [ Screenshot:
Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

I decided to take SonicWall's advice and submit a URL Rating Review request. In the HTML form shown in the second screenshot, I made the case that access to TinyURL should be allowed. My complete statement is as follows:

"URLs in the tinyurl.com domain are utilized by services such as twitter.com in order to minimize the total length of messages transmitted on their service. There is no way to determine what the content or nature of the ultimate destination site is. It's unfair to assume that tinyurl.com used in this context is a means of obfuscation."

I went about my business of researching my potential client and forgot about the situation until I got home. Now that a few more hours have passed, I have a couple of questions:

1. How many other actively-managed content filtering systems ban TinyURL just because it can be used to mask nasty things?
2. How does this affect penetration of Twitter into Corporate America and institutions such as schools?
3. What happens in more restrictive countries such as China? Do they ban services like TinyURL because of its potential to undermine the authority of official sources of information?

I guess it takes an experience like this for me to realize how fragile freedom of access to services on the Internet is. What I'm illustrating here is clearly a side-effect of an overly restrictive policy, but you can see the potential for this access hurdle to exist in its present form indefinitely.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On our trip to Buffalo this weekend, Kathleen, Jimmy, and I stayed in two Marriott properties that had public WiFi networks. The thing I didn't like about them is that they are wide open networks which means anyone can join and do pretty much anything they want locally.

I have my MacBook Pro setup the way I want to use it when I am on my home office network. This means that I have iPhoto and iTunes sharing enabled, and a public folder available so that my wife can grab files from me or give me files without my intervention. I don't want these services to be advertised an available when I'm on a foreign WiFi network.

I turned off iPhoto and iTunes sharing manually when I went on line at the hotels. This only took a minute or two, but I don't want to have to remember to do it or to think about it. I'm almost positive that I'll forget to turn these services back on in many cases when I get home.

In order to batten down the hatches on my Mac, I need a couple of discrete pieces of software:

• Software to make my Mac "context-aware". The leading choices seem to be Marco Polo and Home Zone. My personal preference is for Marco Polo at the moment.
• Rules to identify when my Mac is at home and when it isn't at home. The easiest way to do this is to detect the MAC address of our Airport Extreme base station.
• Scripts to turn on and off the iTunes, iPhoto, and networking services, based on the context. I probably also want to step up the aggressiveness of the software firewall running on my Mac.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Big hockey weekend: This weekend the USA Hockey Women's Nationals are taking place in West Chester, PA, the USA Hockey Tier III Junior Nationals are in Marlboro, MA, and the NCAA D-I Men's Hockey Regional Tournaments are on in four cities around the country. More hockey tournament info on rinkatlas.com/blog.
• Yes, Running Can Make You High - New York Times in The New York Times: "Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect." [ via Lifehacker ]
• New Jersey Apple Store ready to open on TUAW: "Doesn't 'Cherry Hill' sound lovely? It will sound even sweeter for Cherry Hill, New Jersey-based Apple fans this weekend when a new Apple Store opens {at Cherry Hill Mall}, next to A|X Armani Exchange and M•A•C Cosmetics (that's right, a Mac store next to a MAC store). The doors will open at 10:00 AM on Saturday, March 29th." Cherry Hill will probably be lovely again, as soon as they finish building the Nordstrom's.
• Wi-Fi Networking News: Sebastopol, Calif., Looks Gift Wi-Fi in Mouth, Declares Harm on Wi-Fi Net News: "The northern peninsula town of Sebastopol gave up free Wi-Fi in favor of fear mongering...."
• Are CIOs Losing Influence? on The Wall Street Journal Biz Tech Blog: "...And in a sign that CIOs may know that fighting the influx of consumer technology into the workplace is futile, only 36% of CIOs say the computing environment they offer employees at work is better than the ones workers have at home." [ Thanks Martin O'Donnell ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Stuff We Like: The Dave Laptop Stand on Lifehacker: "The Dave (oh Ikea, you and your names!) features adjustable height and angle, and can double as a TV tray or simple end table when you're not computing. If you've been looking for a better way to surf the internet from the comfort of your couch, the $25 Dave might be just the ticket."
• Optimizing File Sharing on Your Home Wi-Fi Network on Web Worker Daily: "A lot of people who have successfully put in a Wi-Fi network neglect to optimize the way files are shared between computers in a home or workgroup. You can choose ways to organize shared files, and ensure that files are shared securely or not visible to other users on your Wi-Fi network very easily...." Good instructions on how to do this whether you have Windows or Macs
• StrechCordz Short Resistance Training Belt on Cool Tools: "The StrechCordz resistance training belt makes expensive, complex, "endless" pools obsolete. At one end of a 4-foot, black rubber tube is a nylon belt with a simple plastic snap-clip that slips around my waist. On the other end is a loop I attach to the deep-end ladder of our modest home pool. That's it... just tether up and start swimming. Swim as hard and fast as you like yet stay in place."
• Cycling Photography Tips: Shooting Head On on Spare Cycles: "Shooting head on is both difficult and easy: difficult in that the rider is moving at you very fast so your margin for error is very little, but easy in that you don't have to move your camera very much at all."
• Easter's early this year. Deal with it. on God Plays Dice: "...the cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000." [ via Slashdot ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Top 7 Web Applications for Sending Large Files on Geekpreneur: "If you’ve ever had to send a large file to someone, you know the hardships that arise. Email services keep strict limits on attachment sizes. What’s more is that it’s often hard to send more than one attachment at a time. This kind of disservice has made email quite unpopular for sharing files- and thus, we have entered the age of hybrid email. The premise is simple: cut out the bulk, and just give us an easy way to send files over the internet!"

• Torvalds: Leopard file system "utter crap" on MacNN: "Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently blasted Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard for having a file system that is 'complete and utter crap' at a Linux conference in Melbourne."

  The Leopard file system, technically known as HFS+, has been around in some form since the last time I was a Mac developer-- 1992. Of course Apple would like to move to something more robust. They've been building up to switch to ZFS, or some other sophisticated file system, for some time now.



• Turn Your Nokia Phone into a Wi-Fi Hotspot with JoikuSpot on Lifehacker: Who needs tethering when you can make your Series 60 phone into an ad hoc WiFi base station for your laptop? Wow.


• How to record a kickass podcast between two macs — and cheap! on A Whole Lotta Nothing: "A lot of people ask me how I do the MetaFilter Podcast.... I know they ... mean... 'what software and hardware does it take to make a decent sounding podcast?' After almost a year of regular podcasts and trying out different software and equipment, I’ve gotten the workflow down cold and I wanted to share the my way of making a good sounding podcast on the cheap. This works perfectly well for me being in Oregon and talking to my friend Jessamyn in Vermont over Skype, recording at both ends, then tossing it all into Garageband to complete the podcast." [ via 43Folders ]


• Nike SPARQ Parachute Makes You Run Faster, Eventually on Gizmodo: "The Nike SPARQ Parachute is designed to create drag 'to force athletes to push themselves harder to achieve speed' and look like a moron in Central Park." Can I use this thing on the ice sometime?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• RPI Plays Princeton tonight in the 31st Annual Big Red Freakout. RPI needs the win. In other news, the White beat the Red in the Alumni Game 9-8.
• Kipkay's Video Tips & Tricks on Instructables: "Here are 5 easy and cheap tricks for anyone who uses a camcorder. Total cost for all 5 is under $10!" [ via Lifehacker ]
• New Devices and Applications on the Wi-Fi Front on Web Worker Daily: "While many Mac-based users already have next-generation, draft 802.11n Wi-Fi technology in their homes (because they use Apple’s Airport Extreme routers) lots of other folks still use slower 802.11g Wi-Fi. This year is when official certification of 802.11n Wi-Fi is supposed to arrive, and the month of January brought some product announcements that point to what the widespread arrival of 802.11n technology might mean...."
• Review of the Nike Amp+ iPod Control Watch: "... the Amp+ isn't designed to be an all-around running or fitness watch. It's specifically designed for runners who already have the Nike + iPod kit. Similar to the Timex iControl we recently reviewed, the Nike Amp+ is a remote control for your iPod Nano, however unlike the Timex, the Nike Amp+ uses the existing Nike + iPod gadget that plugs into your iPod, so you're actually adding the iPod remote control to the Nike iPod system." [ via TUAW ]
• Crazy Apple Rumors on Hiatus on TUAW: CrazyAppleRumors.com is a site I just found out about recently. It's articles are what you might read in The Onion if they covered Apple more aggressively. Sorry to see it go dark.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I expected to be wowed by Steve Jobs' 2008 MacWorld Expo Keynote a lot more than I actually was. However, I was doing other things while the event was going on (real work), and the products that I was most interested in (mainstream Mac laptops) didn't get addressed in this keynote at all.

Bummer for me. I could have bought my MacBook Pro two weeks ago if I had known that the Penryn upgrade wasn't immediately forthcoming.

Here are my comments on the other aspects of the keynote:

• iTunes Movie Rentals / AppleTV Take 2: Clearly the announcement with the most business disruption potential. I agree with one of the commentators on MacBreak Weekly who suggested that Apple is making a play to be the digital media hub in the house, usurping services like Netflix, as well as Television services providers such as Comcast and Verizon FiOS.
• MacBook Air: This is a machine aimed at people who travel a lot or who want a portable machine that is a shadow of their desktop Mac. I could see some very well off Mac users owning the big iMac and a MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is incredibly thin. It's hard to believe a machine with a laptop-like display and keyboard could be any thinner than this and still be usable.

• Time Capsule: This is an interesting extension to the AirPort wireless base station line. Time Capsule is an AirPort Extreme with a 500G or 1T hard disk in it, functioning as Network Attached Storage (NAS).

  My first reaction was, "Bummer. Kathleen just bought me the AirPort Extreme." But then I realized that I would prefer NAS that used RAID 1 or RAID 5 storage anyway. It also costs more than we want to spend on network appliances at this point.



• iPhone 1.1.3 Update: There's some good stuff here. I loaded it on my iPhone already. The cell tower triangulation in the Maps application works pretty well. That feature makes the iPhone version of RinkAtlas viable. Expect an announcement from me on that front soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

At The Home Office, the week of gadget craziness continued. On Sunday night my son Jimmy wanted to watch Teletubbies on FiOS Video On Demand before he went to bed. (Kathleen suggested it and Jimmy got excited about the idea, so that was the plan.) Anyway, we brought up the FiOS VOD subsystem on the television in the living room, and a message says that On Demand isn't available at this time. Try back in a few minutes.

Kathleen said that this happened a couple of days ago, and I should put a call in this time. I called Verizon and was walked completely through a testing process and a set top box reboot by an automated voice response system. It said that my set top box would reacquire the program guide and all would be well again in a few minutes. But, if for any reason the problem wasn't resolved, my call and the details of what was done would be noted in my account to expedite the process of speaking with a live support person.

"This is progress," I said to Kathleen.

Thirty minutes later, the program guide and our DVR functions hadn't reappeared. Jimmy was watching a DVD instead. Kathleen wanted me to call Verizon back and get the problem straightened out.

When I made the call, the computer estimated that I would be on hold for 41 minutes. The alternative offered was for the system to call me back in 41 minutes when a support person became available. That would have been too late for me, so I hung up.

The set top box didn't reacquire the guide all day on Monday, so I called support at about 9:00pm. The wait was much more reasonable. It turned out to be under five minutes, although the computer's initial estimate was longer.

I went through a guided reboot of my router and my set top box. Eventually the set top box reacquired the guide, so I ended up being happy that the problem was solved.

A new problem developed with our Local Area Network. Apparently the process Verizon used to reset my router and set top box blew away my router's configuration, including its password. I had to troubleshoot my LAN to determine that the LAN's IP address range changed, then I realized that the password on my router changed. Eventually I realized that the router had just been reset to the default settings. So I reconfigured it to the way the network was before the problems occurred, and now I hope that everything is working once again. (I know that the Internet is working, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this article right now.)

The lessons I learned from this process are:

• Don't use FiOS' automated voice response system to troubleshoot your TV while someone is watching it. You will probably temporarily lose additional services for at least as long as an automated system test takes.
• Document your LAN configuration in case Verizon decides to reset your router to its initial state.
• Keep that LAN configuration at your fingertips when calling Verizon FiOS support even if the call is about TV or telephone.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Kathleen gave me an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station for Christmas. I installed and configured it tonight while we were watching ER on our DVR.

I was impressed with the improvement in the performance of our wireless network that immediately occurred when the AirPort Extreme started working. Configuration of the AirPort Extreme was by far the easiest of any wireless network base station I've ever installed.

I got the impression from articles I read on the Internet that it would be complicated to bridge the FiOS router (an Actiontec MI424WR) with the AirPort Extreme, but it was as simple as:

1. plugging the AirPort Extreme into the FiOS router using a Category 5 cable,
2. letting the FiOS router assign the AirPort Extreme an IP address using DHCP,
3. logging into the FiOS router and shutting off the integrated wireless base station on it.

(Note that I had earlier determined that the Actiontec MI424WR had to stay on the network because it serves as a bridge between coaxial cable and Category 5 cabling in our FiOS installation, and it also acts as a receiver for FiOS TV guide information and FiOS Video On Demand. Therefore, I never attempted to attempt to fully replace the router Verizon gave us, just to beef up the wireless network we're running here in The Home Office.)

I didn't spend much time using Kathleen's MacBook with the new router, but I'm sure they will perform better together than the MacBook did with the wireless network provided by the Actiontec router itself.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

• Bills return to Buffalo by bus after loss in Cleveland, The Associated Press on ESPN.com: "Mother Nature sure had it in for the Buffalo Bills this weekend."

  "Bad enough that a blizzard contributed to Buffalo's loss at Cleveland on Sunday, ending the team's playoff chances. Then, following an unscheduled overnight stay because of bad weather, the Bills were forced to bus home Monday after their charter plane got stuck in mud off a runway in Cleveland...." [ Thanks Julie Howson ]



• Who's #1? on ESPN.com: ESPN Classic's "Who's Number One" show will be running down the most important technological advances in sports on ESPN Classic, 10:00pm ET, Dec. 19, 2007. This is definitely something I'll have to TiVo if I can't watch it live.


• Why Wireless Isn't Wide Open on BusinessWeek.com: "Even as the wireless industry chants a new gospel about opening mobile-phone networks to outside devices and applications, some of the biggest U.S. carriers are quietly blocking new services that would compete with their own...." [ via Andy Abramson on VoIP Watch ]


• Canadian surprised by $85,000 cell bill on SeattleTimes.NWsource.com: "Piotr Staniaszek normally pays $147 a month for his cell phone. So he was more than a little surprised to learn his November bill had ballooned to $59,000. And then it got worse. When he called to inquire about the high figure, he was told that his bill this month was $83,000." [ Thanks Martin O'Donnell ]



• Verizon FiOS with only a Apple Airport Extreme {sic} on Elecktronkind.org: Excellent article on the things you need to do to replace the ActionTec router that Verizon provides to most FiOS users with an Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station. Something we hope to do in The Home Office in Newtown sometime after Christmas.

  One key fact to note from this article: You do need to keep the ActionTec router on the network if you have Verizon's digital cable service that's delivered over FiOS. Hopefully we can turn off the wireless capability of the ActionTec and put the AirPort Extreme Base Station behind it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of friends of mine asked me to what I thought of the Amazon Kindle at lunch before Thanksgiving. I said that I was aware of it, that reviews and comments from blogs that I read had been more negative than positive, but I would keep my eye out for interesting articles and blog postings. Here are a few of the things I've found:

• Kindle can light up your life by Andy Ihnatko in The Chicago Sun Times: Andy points out that the secret sauce of the Kindle is that EVDO access via Sprint is free and the Kindle has a serviceable web browser. As such he thinks it's worth the $400 cost without regard for its usability as an e-book reader.
• Amazon Kindle: the Web makes Amazon go bad crazy by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: Cory Doctorow hates Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. Keep that in mind when you read his comments: "Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won't be buying it -- it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), it prevents you from selling or lending your books, and the terms of service are nearly as abusive as the Amazon Unbox terms (and worse than the thoroughly dumb-ass Amazon MP3 terms)...."

These comments are pretty much polar opposites of each other, with every other review falling somewhere in between.

My friends also suggested that I discuss another e-book reader called the Iliad from iRex Technologies. More on that product later.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back on January 10, I asked Is OS X the Key Component of the Apple iPhone? The first point I made in that article was about multitasking:

Elegantly-implemented multitasking on a handheld device: Windows Mobile handhelds have this capability already, but none devices I've seen have a UI that comes close to what Jobs demonstrated. Treo handhelds from Palm running the PalmOS don't do multitasking at all. It isn't clear to me whether RIM or Nokia have true multitasking OSes on their smartphones, and I've used both quite extensively.

I'm pointing this out for two reasons:

1. I've got an iPhone, and I'm more impressed with the multitasking capabilities of the iPhone after actually using it.
2. Marc Hedlund from O'Reilly Radar brought up multitasking on the iPhone last week as a "new-ish" thought about the iPhone. I'm not sure it qualifies as a newish thought anymore.

I think Hedlund's article is very insightful for some of the other points he makes. He compares the iPhone to several of the Treo's best features, and tells why the iPhone comes out pretty favorably. He's saying a lot of things that I haven't had time to say, probably better than I would have said them.

The only thing he doesn't mention that I think is a significant advantage to using an iPhone instead of a Treo is the $20+ discount you get on "unlimited" wireless data plans that AT&T gave me when I switched from my Treo 650 to the iPhone. I kid you not.

I think AT&T offers less expensive data plans for the iPhone because they realize that the iPhone will be in the hands of more individuals who pay their own mobile phone bills. These people will have a harder time expensing the monthly wireless bill than the average Treo or Blackberry user. That's my theory anyway.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was possible to buy either iPhone model last night in Central New Jersey.

My iPhone moments after I purchased it at the
Freehold, NJ Apple Store on June 29. See more
photos of my iPhone in my Flickr photostream.

I bought mine at the Apple Store at the Freehold Raceway Mall in Freehold, NJ about 7:45pm. The Apple Store appeared to have plenty of stock at that time. That didn't surprise me because I had read that the 140+ Apple Stores around the country would be staying open until midnight. Why would Apple bother doing that if they thought that they would sell out at most of their locations?

First Stop: A Sold Out AT&T Store

Before I went to the Apple in Freehold, I drove to the AT&T Store in West Windsor, NJ. This is a small store that I thought might not attract a huge line. I have no idea how many people were in line before 6:00pm, but when I arrived there at approximately 6:25, the store was already sold out.

What blew my mind was the number of people who stayed in line after the store manager announced that they were sold out. (I had just arrived when he made this announcement.) He told the people in line that they were welcome to stay and his staff would take orders from them. Many of the people were staying in their place in the line when I hit the road for Freehold.

Continue reading "I Got My iPhone Yesterday, Maybe It Will Work Today" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Let's face a few of facts:

1. A lot of media outlets are going to publish articles designed to provoke FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) in the hearts of iPhone fans.
2. This is going to continue and grow in intensity up to and beyond June 29.
3. The motives for publishing this type of article are not all evil.

A great example of an article that spreads FUD but isn't entirely evil is the article called Companies Hang Up on Apple's iPhone published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal. This article claims that Apple is working to integrate the the iPhone into corporate email systems because IT management says that the iPhone isn't compatible with corporate email systems.

The truth of the matter is a bit different.

The Journal article pretty much says that the corporate email systems they are talking about are based on Microsoft Exchange. Exchange has the ability to support both IMAP and POP3 protocols, but support for these protocols was turned off by default in Windows 2003. Since a lot of people in corporate IT departments know little about non-Microsoft-centric infrastructures, many of them probably concluded that IMAP and POP3 are inherent security risks.

I sincerely doubt that Apple will make any attempt to integrate the iPhone by adding support for Good, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, or any other middleware that's been blessed by the CIOs of major companies. This is because the iPhone is aimed at individuals, not corporate users. Making the iPhone acceptable to many corporate IT groups would require too much variation in terms of the hardware configuration and the software feature set.

John Gruber from Daring Fireball wrote a great piece that makes many of these same points. His coverage on that website of the reaction to this Wall Street Journal article is well worth reading.

When you read articles like this one that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, consider the writer's perspective. The writers of this article are general business reporters that sometimes cover the technology industry. This article wasn't written by someone at the WSJ like Walter Mossberg who has a complete picture of technology products and how to use them productively. General business writers don't write about how to solve problems, they point out potential problems.

There are still a lot of questions about the iPhone's real world capabilities. The ability to seemlessly integrate with Microsoft Exchange isn't one of them. If all the other usability and performance issues that may limit the iPhone's usefulness turn out to be non-issues, working around the limitations of Exchange will be well documented because thousands of iPhone owners will develop workarounds for every conceivable Exchange configuration. [ Paid subscription required to read most articles in The Wall Street Journal. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

WebWorkerDaily.com provides a great list of franchised businesses in the USA that provide reliable WiFi at all of their locations. According to the author, Judi Sohn, "Admittedly, these are franchises with locations in the Northeast United States." She goes on to describe the ambiance of the Panera bakery on Nassau Street in Princeton, so she must live and work around here.

Other businesses she points to as having reliable WiFi in some or all locations are Starbucks (obviously), Borders, Barnes & Noble, McDonalds, and Cosi. Note that she is not talking purely about places with free WiFi. In fact, most of these establishments charge for WiFi access in some fashion.

There's good reader comment here about other businesses where free agents and other business travelers can get online around the USA and the world.

Update: Andy Abramson expands on the information provided by Judi Sohn by telling which providers have good throughput in addition to basic WiFi access. Throughput is the name of the game. Who cares if you can get on a network if the responsiveness of the Internet is lousy from that network?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Nokia N93 produces DVD-quality video, has a
terrific MP3 player, and includes wireless
broadband and WiFi capability. It's great for people
who want a phone that can be used in relatively
serious video production. [ Photo: Dave Aiello ]
[ Check out my Nokia N93 photo set on Flickr. ]

A friend who works with Nokia chose me to be in the Nokia N-Series blogger program and has been sending me high end phones of all shapes and sizes for several months. The latest phone I've received is the Nokia N93, which I like to think of as the Swiss Army Knife of GSM / UMTS Multimedia Phones.

The N93 folds and unfolds in many different ways. Depending on which way you choose to hold it, it can be a video camera, a still image digital camera, an MP3 player, a wireless Internet access device, and a video phone. And I forgot to mention-- it can also be a plain old voice-oriented mobile phone.

The N93 has every feature I can think of for a state-of-the-art multimedia device:

• DVD-quality video with a 30 frame per second recording rate.
• 3.2-Megapixel primary camera with a 3x optical zoom and a Carl Zeiss glass lens. (0.3-Megapixel secondary camera for video calls.)
• 2.4-inch high definition color display.
• Adobe Premier Elements 2.0 video editing software.

On top of all of that it's a mobile phone with Bluetooth and WiFi. About all its missing is a full alphanumeric keyboard.

There are way too many features and dimensions to the Nokia N93 to cover in one article. I'm planning to do a small series of articles that will appear here on Operation Gadget, including as many samples of photos and videos as I think are necessary to demonstrate the features of this incredible device.

Technorati Tags: Nokia N93, N-Series, Adobe Premier Elements, UMTS, Bluetooth, WiFi, multimedia handsets, mobile phones

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Martin O'Donnell sent me an article that reported wireless broadband services offered by Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint Nextel are being adopted by some road warriors, but that adoption has been mainly limited to outside sales people, building contractors, insurance claims adjustors, and first responders.

There are a lot of other businesses where 3G data services for laptop users ought to be taking off but currently aren't. For instance, wireless broadband would be a great solution for journalists covering sports events like pro cycling. Cingular HSDPA wasn't deployed during the 2005 Tour de Georgia which I covered in person, but a service like that would have been really useful because I could have easily worked from my hotel room and restaurants when I was not in the media center. I would say that if I were to attend the race next year, a broadband wireless card would be a must.

If I had a job with a long mass transit commute, as I did prior to 9/11, I think high speed mobile data would be worth the estimated $60 per month expense. If I worked in Manhattan and had to commute via New Jersey Transit's Northeast Corridor Service, think of how much work I could do on Operation Gadget while sitting on the train?

I'd also be interested in broadband wireless service if I were a field engineer for a software or networking company. Why waste time at the beginning of a client visit acquiring WiFi or a hard Ethernet connection when you can just open up your notebook and be on-line. (Maybe you need corporate Intranet access, so that might be a reason.)

Beyond the estimated $60 per month cost, there are some surprising issues with buying wireless broadband service. It's really hard to find wireless broadband network cards on Amazon.com. These are still niche products, so maybe this is to be expected. However, it's even difficult to determine which notebook computers in Amazon.com's store have mobile broadband capabilities built-in.

For all the talk of Dell's commitment to wireless broadband, there still isn't a lot of clear information on the subject on their website. I had to delve deep into the options when specing out a notebook for purchase before I saw the words HSDPA and EV-DO for the first time.

Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel each have mobile broadband cards available on their websites, but again, they aren't very prominently featured.

So I guess my question is, how committed are the carriers to pushing this technology to the masses if they don't make a large marketing commitment to it?

Technorati Tags: mobile broadband, Cingular, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, HSDPA, EV-DO.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A page one article in today's Wall Street Journal discusses the technological threats that are developing to the television industry's business model. One example given in the article is that Major League Baseball's MLB.tv video streaming service collected $265 million from 1.3 million subscribers last year, but still blocked subscribers from watching coverage of their own local teams over the Internet. The reason they did this is because any decrease in the likely audience for a game broadcast over a local cable or over-the-air channel reduces the amount that these affiliates are willing to pay for transmission rights.

The article goes on to point out that The Slingbox (a device that allows you to stream content from your television to your PC and other devices via the Internet) and the Video iPod are considered important new threats to the television industry's business model because of the ability they give owners to place-shift their viewing. Place-shifting is potentially a bigger threat to the television industry than time-shifting because place-shifting seems to reduce the viewer's reliance on a local television station. So, if you choose to buy episodes of Lost from the iTunes Music Store, the local ABC affiliate in your city would probably say that you've decreased the value of that episode to them and their local advertisers.

A lot of people think of themselves as the broadcaster's customer when they watch a television program, but this isn't the case. Access to viewers is a service that broadcasters deliver to their advertising customers.

A year and a half ago, Operation Gadget reported on the battle between the National Football League and TiVo over TiVo-to-Go. Back then, TiVo-to-Go was considered a potential piracy threat because the service was designed to allow up to 10 "affiliated devices" to receive stored content from the TiVo DVR. The thought was that the affiliated devices might not all be owned by people in the same family.

That debate took place before Apple shipped iPods with the ability to play back good-quality video. Now that the TV industry is sensitized to the notion of place-shifting, the loss of program value to the local affiliate would probably considered a bigger issue. [ Subscription required to read many articles in The Wall Street Journal. ]

Technorati Tags: Slingbox, MLB.tv, Lost, Video iPod, iTunes Music Store, TiVo

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cingular BroadbandConnect HSDPA
3G Service is rolling out in 16 U.S. metro
areas. [ Image: Cingular Wireless ]

Cingular Wireless announced yesterday that it launched BroadbandConnect, a third-generation high speed wireless data network using HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) technology. According to the Cingular 3G Network Press Release:

Cingular BroadbandConnect is a super-charged enhancement to the company’s nationwide EDGE network, the nation’s largest wireless high-speed data network. When coupled with a compatible device and service plan, the service provides average mobile data connections between 400-700Kbps (kilobits per second) on the downlink and bursts to more than a megabit per second.

Cingular is offering unlimited 3G data service for $59.99 per month with a qualifying voice plan.

BroadbandConnect is deployed initially in the following metropolitan areas:

• Austin
• Baltimore
• Boston
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Houston
• Las Vegas
• Phoenix
• Portland, OR
• Salt Lake City
• San Diego
• San Francisco / San Jose
• Seattle / Tacoma
• Washington D.C.

Unfortunately New York and Philadelphia didn't make it in the first round, so I won't be able to use my Nokia N90 to test it immediately.

Technorati Tags: Cingular, Broadband Connect, 3G, HSDPA, Nokia N90

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I4U.com reported yesterday that Vodaphone is offering a global mobile TV service including content from HBO and Eurosport. Vodaphone's press release specifies the following programming:

• "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under" from HBO
• Eurosport
• MTV
• Specially edited for mobile, Seasons 1-4 of "24", featuring Kiefer Sutherland, from Twentieth Century Fox Television
• UEFA Champions League (European soccer)
• Discovery

I recently received a Nokia N90 mobile phone for review purposes. It supports 3G mobile service, to which I don't have access because Cingular has not yet rolled out 3G in my area. If I had 3G service, I'd love to try what Vodaphone is offering and I think the N90 would be a great device on which to try it.

Technorati Tags: Vodaphone, Vodaphone Live!, 3G, Sex and The City, Six Feet Under, HBO, Eurosport, MTV, 24, UEFA Champions League, Discovery Channel

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Thanksgiving, my cousin Brian Lynch and I exchanged emails about our dilemma as owners of DirecTV Series 2 digital video recorders. Brian said:

My DirecTV Tivo has two USB ports in the back. The instruction book says the ports are for "future use". Do you think I can hook a USB cable from the Tivo to my computer and get movies & shows from Tivo to my computer? My laptop has a DVD burner... So that would be valuable to me.

He and I are in similar situations because I have a Philips DSR708 which was sold to me by DirecTV in July 2005. My response was:

... it's unlikely that {the USB} ports will ever work unless you hack the OS. DirecTV forked the OS before TiVo rolled out many Series 2 features.

I looked into this back in July when we moved to Newtown. Someone has done an unofficial kit to upgrade the DirecTiVo to Series 2 features, but I wasn't interested in doing that level of modifications at the time. We could look at it again now that DirecTV has {stopped selling} TiVo-based units.

I went back and reviewed the information available on the Internet, and found that PTVupgrade.com offers some upgrade kits that enable many Series 2 features. These upgrades are about as plug and play as you can get. You simply open up the enclosure following the instructions, install the replacement hard drive, reassemble the enclosure, attach a compatible wireless network adapter, and restart the DirecTiVo.

Matt Haughey of PVRblog reviewed the PTVnet DirecTiVo drive upgrades back in February 2005, and he was impressed. He includes screenshots of most of the new features that are enabled by the upgrade.

As good as this upgrade looks, it still voids your DVR's manufacturer's warranty, so make sure you understand that you are taking a risk before ordering an upgrade.

Technorati Tags: DirecTV, TiVo, TiVo Series 2, TiVo upgrade

Continue reading "DirecTiVo Owners Have a Pretty Simple Upgrade Option to Get Series 2 Features" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nikon has released two digital cameras with built-in WiFi capability. The Coolpix P2 is silver and has a 5.1-megapixel image sensor and a 3.5x optical zoom lens. The Coolpix P1 is black and has an 8-megapixel image sensor and a 3.5x optical zoom lens. Both cameras have nice-looking 2.5-inch LCD displays.

Wilson Rothman of Time Magazine featured the Coolpix P2 as the Time.com Gadget of the Week back in September. He felt that the camera was a little less capable than it should have been, because its WiFi reception wasn't as strong as two laptop computers that he was using in the same part of his house.

He considers this is a problem because he wants to use the WiFi capability to transfer photos to a computer while he continues shooting. I believe that the WiFi capability is actually intended to be used to wirelessly upload your photos to a PC after the photo shooting session is over. Therefore, WiFi would only be used for short periods of time, and somewhat weaker reception could be tolerated because the camera would be close proximity to a PC and a WiFi access point.

Wireless photo upload with WiFi makes a lot more sense than Bluetooth when you think about it. I transfer a lot of data with Bluetooth when I sync my Treo 650 to my Blogging Workstation. I can't imagine trying to transfer a 256-Megabyte SD card full of photos using Bluetooth. Bluetooth just doesn't have the bandwidth to make big data transfers quickly.

I think wireless photo uploading will make sense to a lot of people, and the Coolpix P1 and P2 can deliver on that expectation. I don't think the functionality is there to upload photos directly from the camera to Flickr, muchless to do moblogging or photo journalism from the local Starbucks.

Technorati Tags: Nikon Coolpix P2, Nikon Coolpix P1, WiFi, Bluetooth

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I've been grinding away on my consulting projects, Palm has apparently put the final touches on a Windows Mobile-based Treo that will support Verizon Wireless's implementation of EV-DO.

The first solid indication of an announcement was Engadget's first look at the Palm Treo 700w, published on Thursday. This was followed an announcement from Palm investor relations that Palm, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless would make a joint announcement on Monday, September 26 at 12:00 noon EDT. This press release came out at 4:05pm on Friday, minutes after the close of the regular trading on the NASDAQ.

Palm's advisory was followed by an article in The Wall Street Journal reporting that Palm is set to use Microsoft code on Treo Phones. In my opinion there's a big difference between speculation about a Windows Mobile-based Treo by gadget-related blogs is less significant than a news article in publications like the Wall Street Journal [ Subscription required. ].

I'm very optimistic about the market prospects for a Windows Mobile-based Treo. I think that Palm would not be releasing it if it didn't meet their high user-experience standards. The Windows Mobile platform has been in desperate need of a manufacturer like Palm who are committed to adding value instead of just rolling out a compatible handset.

As for the future of Treo's based on the PalmOS, we'll have to wait and see. I don't think that Palm will ever integrate Treo functionality into the PalmOS Cobalt operating system, but subsequent PalmOS implementations based on Linux resulting from PalmSource's acquisition of China MobileSoft may be more to their liking. My experience with the Treo 650 is that there are times when it's really obvious that the phone could use an operating system capable of multi-tasking, and PalmOS based on a Linux kernel may be a good solution.

Technorati Tags: Treo 700w, Treo 650, Windows Mobile

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Velo'v Grand Lyon is a bike rental network in Lyon, France. Wired News published a great little article about the system works and how technology is being used to try to ensure that it stays solvent.

To use Velo'v in Lyon, you have to make a €150 deposit via check or credit card. This allows you to go to one of the stations and borrow a bike. If you don't return the bike to a station within 24 hours, the deposit is forfeited. The bikes themselves are loaded with sensors that help make the system as automatic as possible.

The owners of this system are JCDecaux, a French company that is primarily in the advertising business in the USA. They are most prominent in a business they refer to as Street Furniture: everything from signs on city streets displaying information to bus shelters.

I have no illusions of this type of bike rental system working in most cities in the United States, but the design of this system seems unique and is certainly worth reading about. [ via Engadget ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazon.com put many APC products including Genuine APC Replacement Batteries on sale. I discovered that I needed a replacement battery the other day when the power at the Home Office sagged for a moment. All of the computer equipment in the basement including my Linux development server, VoIP Telephone Adapters, DSL modem, firewall, network switch, wireless access point, and phone system spontaneously restarted.

When I saw this I said, "I must need a new battery, but why hasn't the UPS been beeping at me?" I ordered a replacement battery the next day. That night at 1:30am, I woke up because I heard the UPS alarm beeping in the basement.

If you run your home or work phone service using Voice over Internet Protocol, make sure you have a UPS providing power to your DSL modem and VoIP Telephone Adapters. If you already have a UPS, make sure your battery is good.

I like to buy Genuine APC Replacement Batteries for two reasons:

1. Genuine APC Replacement Batteries preserve any applicable warranty coverage.
2. APC sends a shipping label with Genuine APC Replacement Batteries so you can send the spent battery back for proper disposal.

Technorati Tags: VoIP

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Jonathan Maus told us that Inveneo has developed a bicycle-powered, Linux-based VoIP phone system for use in developing countries. No kidding.

I found an explanation of a Pedal and Solar Powered PC and Communications System on the Inveneo web site. This article does not discuss the inclusion of the Asterisk open source PBX system, so this may be an elaboration on the design.

This reminds me a bit of the ad for ESPN SportsCenter that starred Lance Armstrong that was aired in 2001 and 2002. I wonder if the folks at Inveneo were in some small way inspired by it? [ via Engadget ]

Technorati Tags: Lance Armstrong

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The working environment for credentialed members of the media when I was at the Dodge Tour de Georgia was different every day. We worked in two different offices, a hotel conference room, the theater in the observation tower at Brasstown Bald, and a conference room at women's club, depending on where the stage finished.

The two constants in our work environment were electricity and a WiFi network. Cramped working conditions and long walks with all of our gear just to arrive at some locations meant that having the laptop with the biggest display and desk footprint could be a drawback. Hassle-free wireless network capability was the key.

In a report from Rome called WiFi Working Again for Me, I lamented the fact that my laptop didn't have built-in WiFi. My D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG Wireless Card that had worked well for a year became so flaky that it was effectively unusable. I had to replace it. I replaced it with the same brand and model WiFi card, but that didn't work until I downloaded and installed a new driver off the Internet using a hard Ethernet connection.

It would have been a lot easier to cover the Tour de Georgia with a compact, easy-to-use laptop with built-in WiFi, and the laptop of choice in the media center was an Apple Powerbook.

I would have chosen a 12-inch Apple PowerBook with a 1.5GHz G4 processor, an 80-Gigabyte hard drive, and an 8x-Speed SuperDrive (DVD+RW/CD-RW). The small form factor would have worked well at the top of Brasstown Bald or at the women's club in Dahlonega where we worked in pretty close proximity to each other. The 12-inch display still gives you 1024x768 resolution, which is good for the small size of the notebook itself, and would be good enough for photo selection and editing.

I would have teamed this up with a multi-function USB 2.0 memory card reader to make camera memory card handling painless.

These gadgets would have made me the master of the Tour de Georgia media work room.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was just talking to Bridget Bentz from the Team.Discovery.com website, telling her that my story of the Dodge Tour de Georgia seems bound to be one where technology problems hinder my coverage. The good news is that I finally got my new D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG 802.11g Wireless Cardbus Adapter working in my laptop. I had to replace my old one because it started to die on me here at the Tour de Georgia, and the Media Center runs on WiFi.

This is not really a problem as long as the Media Center stays at the Rome News-Tribune offices here in Rome, GA. They have WiFi throughout the building, but also an abundance of Ethernet connections. [ Thanks for your help guys, you've been terrific. ] When the Media Center moves tomorrow to the Women's/Community Center in Dahlonega, we will probably go back to WiFi as our only source of Internet access.

I got about one year out of my last D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus Adapter. I first started using it back in April 2004 (see Finally Working with Wireless Network at the Home Office). I had it installed on my laptop for virtually the entire year with hardly any problems. I hit the road last week for my trips to Chicago and Georgia and it started flaking out on me. I bought a new one while I was here in the Atlanta area, thinking that would minimize any driver-related problems that I might encounter.

The new DWL-G650 didn't want to work yesterday, and that appears to be the result of trying to continue using the old version of the D-Link driver. I upgraded to the new version, rebooted, and the new DWL-650 started to work!

The folks from the Tour de Georgia seem to be packing up. I hope the Rome News guys let me stay a while. I've still got some photos to upload and caption.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I have no idea what happened but I couldn't get on-line at my hotel in the Chicago suburbs until this morning. The D-Link AirPlus DWL-G650 WiFi card that I have has been flaking out ever since I took it out of my laptop to put the laptop in the bag, with the card losing power occasionally while I sit and type. That, however, was not the core issue with getting on the hotel's WiFi network.

I couldn't get the operating system on my laptop to recognize the network although my signal strength meter on the screen was showing about 70 percent of maximum strength. The instructions I had from the hotel was to set a specific SSID and turn off WEP, and I had done that. No idea why it didn't work at one point and now it's fine. Go figure.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Levi Wallach of Twelve Black Code Monkeys made a good point in a comment he posted to End User Awareness of Bluetooth on the Rise According to Survey. Levi said:

I would have to agree with you. I recently went out with some friends for dinner who are not techie at all and they knew what the bluetooth headset was that I was wearing, although I'm not sure all of them knew the actual term "bluetooth."

Bluetooth headsets like the Motorola HS810 are popping up more and more, and people often ask, "What's that?". After you give the headset's elevator pitch, they often ask, "What's Bluetooth?"

Bluetooth has such an odd name that it's hard for a lot of people to forget once they've heard it. Of course, I talk about Bluetooth so much that I forget that headsets are the things people see early adopters using the most. Of course the headsets are the key drivers of awareness of this technology.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

BargainPDA reports that Bluetooth awareness is growing among individuals in the United States. This may be due to the fact that many laptops and PDAs sold in the last year come with Bluetooth on board. According to the Bluetooth SIG who sponsored the study, awareness of Bluetooth reached 42 percent in 2004. That's roughly the same percentage of the American population that's aware of WiFi.

The study results are confirmed by a recent article in the Chicago Tribune, After years of promise, Bluetooth hits its stride. The article quotes representatives of Motorola and market research groups like IDC who indicate that awareness is translating into accessory sales, which results in development of additional Bluetooth products.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Feature published an article by David Pescovitz that calls for a new authentication protocol to prevent thieves from stealing credit card data or user identities using rogue WiFi access points. According to the article, the network login page used by a rogue access point may appear to be secure, but in most cases you as the user don't know if the access point is itself legitimate.

I don't spend a lot of time on public WiFi networks, but I have seen enough other people that use them say, "Look-- there are multiple networks here and one of them is totally open! I'll use that one, what difference does it make?"

Now that I've read Pescovitz's article, my reaction is that we should exercise greater caution around open WiFi networks in public places. Who says that an open WiFi hotspot is being operated out of altruism? It could be operated for the purpose of stealing passwords or credit card data.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Levi Wallach published a good comparison of wireless data plans from the major U.S. mobile phone carriers. If you want to know what the cost and features of the wireless data offerings from T-Mobile, Cingular / AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint PCS, this article is a good place to start.

One of the things that harder to gauge by reading this article is the extent of coverage that carriers are currently offering. Wallach says, "Cingular... already has a national EDGE network built out with great coverage...." and refers you to this very complex, PDF-based coverage map from Cingular.

I can give a more concise example of the coverage of Cingular's network in comparison to that of T-Mobile, the other GSM-based national carrier in the USA; Cingular has voice service and GPRS service in some built-up areas of Vermont. T-Mobile, on the other hand, doesn't offer voice service in Vermont at all. When my wife, Kathleen, and I go to Middlebury to spend some time where she went to college, we make sure we bring her mobile phone which runs on AT&T Wireless.

Is Cingular's faster, more available mobile data service worth the premium that they charge above T-Mobile? You have to decide that. The same thing goes for the price difference between Verizon and Sprint PCS, since they also run technologically-comparable wireless data networks.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

BargainPDA.com published a useful review of wireless data solutions that are available from mobile phone carriers and hot-spot providers. The article focuses on the technologies deployed by each wireless data provider, then goes on to talk about the connection methods available to get your mobile device on-line. The three connection methods covered are WiFi, Bluetooth via a handset, and PC cards dedicated to wireless data network access.

There are few specifics about available billing plans, at least when this article is compared to other articles that approach the subject from the opposite direction.

BargainPDA uses the new Intellitxt contextual advertising system. I hadn't noticed the degree to which this changes the nature and purpose of links on a blog. I will have to watch carefully for when this service is in use in order to decide whether I like it. In this article, I found it slightly confusing.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MacMinute pointed out that Apple has pre-announced a sale that will take place on the day after Thanksgiving, Friday, November 26, 2004. The sale will involve both the Apple Online Store and Apple Retail Stores throughout the United States.

The "Black Friday Sale" has a dedicated page on the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/retail/thanksgiving/. I could use an iPod, if anyone's buying.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Associated Press reports that Philadelphia is considering deploying WiFi throughout the city. Dianah Neff, CIO of the City of Philadelphia, said that access to the service would be offered either for free or for substantially less than the rates charged by commerical WiFi access providers. The article estimates the total cost of a city-wide deployment is $10 million.

Mayor John Street announced an exploratory committee for the Wireless Philadelphia initiative last week, but it's only getting press attention now. [ via Slashdot ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the latest Personal Technology column in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg reviews the Apple AirPort Express and comes away disappointed with its performance.

Unlike a few people editing gadget-oriented websites, I have a great deal of respect for Mossberg's opinion, because I know that he is writing for a readership with moderate technical knowledge, at best. His chief complaint about the AirPort Express is that it "lacks any remote control or remote user interface". He says that it's unacceptable for a "music-streaming product" to lack these features.

When I read comments like this, I wonder why a person who has access to a wireless network and purchases an AirPort Express would not also have a laptop running on that network. I would assume that:

• iTunes would be running on that laptop,
• the laptop would be somewhere nearby, and
• songs or playlists could be changed relatively easily.

But, let's say that it's just not convenient for you to look at your laptop right now. If you're computer runs Mac OS X 10.2.8 or better, you can take your phone or PDA out of your pocket and change songs or playlists with the Bluetooth digital hub software called Salling Clicker. With all do respect, DIY integration like that can't be assumed in the Wall Street Journal reader demographic.

Let's accentuate the positive aspects of Mossberg's review:

• "it works just as well with Windows PCs as it does with Apple's own Macintosh computers",
• it can be used as a base station, repeater, or streaming-music accessory,
• it can be used to create a wireless network in practically any setting in minutes, and
• it interoperates with WiFi devices from other manufacturers.

For the purposes of the Operation Gadget readership, this review might as well be a rave. Read it and see if you don't agree with me.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Aperto Networks announced today that France Telecom is using Aperto's PacketWave 802.16 Broadband Wireless Access gear to create portable broadband wireless networks at the Tour de France media village as it moves from stage to stage. You can see Aperto PacketWave antennas atop many mobile television production trucks such as the one operated by Digi TV Mobiltelevision [ cycling production photos ], shown here in the media village at the end of a recent stage.

Update: Several television networks are using the PacketWave network, including TV2, OLN, ZDF, and France 2. Journalists from the Associated Press are also participating.

Aperto Networks is a provider of broadband wireless access equipment to telecommunications companies throughout the world. Its products are in use in a major wireless IP trial in the Brittany region of France and a fixed network under development in the Parkersburg, West Virginia area, to name just two high-profile projects. The Tour de France effort is confirmation of France Telecom's faith in the reliability of Aperto's wireless infrastructure gear. [ photo courtesy of Aperto Networks ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple Computer reported that it is now shipping AirPort Express with AirTunes. AirPort Express is the first 802.11g wireless network mobile base station to include USB printing and analog and digital audio outputs to interface with a traditional home stereo.

Apple disclosed that it has received over 80,000 advance orders for the product, since it was announced on June 7. AirPort Express with AirTunes has already reached #6 on the Early Adopter Computers List at Amazon.com. [ via Designtechnica ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, Apple announced the AirPort Express, a wireless network access point priced at $129 that includes innovative features like an audio cable port to provide a simple way to connect a home stereo to your wireless network (using the new iTunes feature called AirTunes). It also has a USB port to allow it to serve as an inexpensive print server.

The flexibility of the AirPort Express is the striking feature. This access point looks almost exactly like my wife's iPod's AC adapter. It's clearly designed to be tossed into the briefcase by travelers, or to be plugged into the wall behind the home theater and forgotten about. It looks like a great design for either purpose.

I think Apple has really thrown a monkey wrench into the home media server market. A lot of companies were building more complicated devices to play MP3s and serve digital photos that were meant to fit into the home theater device stack and cost more than $129. The AirPort Express doesn't do all of the things that the other devices set out to do, but it trumps them all with simplicity.

Brian D. Foy wrote thoughtfully about the AirPort Express today, when he said:

I am right at the center of the market for this thing. I travel a lot and already lug around an Airport Base Station that I expect to get crushed and destroyed in some way.

My plans for re-configuring my home network have just gone down the drain. We wanted to share our printer through the airport, and I was going to pull some cables to put the airport nearer the center of our apartment, then pull some cables to network our printer with the Airport's extra ethernet port. Now, I am just going to get an Airport Express and use USB printer sharing.

[ Image courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wi-Fi Networking News reports that a consultant has discovered a "moderately critical" security vulnerability in the Linksys WRT54G router. According to the report, the Linksys WRT54G "allows remote, over-the-Internet administration login even when remote management is turned off." This means that an automated attack could be mounted against WRT54G routers that were installed in their default configurations.

If an attack of this nature were to occur, it would pose an inconvenience to users who are accustomed to being able to use WRT54G routers for LAN or Internet access. The router could be reconfigured so that it was unusable by the people that originally installed it. Under that circumstance, control of the router could be regained by performing a "hard reset".

A more sophisticated attack might involve parsing the HTML from the WRT54G administrative interface to recover WEP or WPA keys. The existence of such keys would mean that the configuration had been changed from the default, however. It's unlikely that a user would turn on WEP or WPA and leave the admin password set to the default.

In any case, it's a very good idea for WRT54G users to review the configuration of their routers at this time.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In researching the Philadelphia outdoor hotzone article, I looked at NYCwireless and subsequently found The Wireless Node Database Project called NodeDB.com. This site began as an attempt to document public access WiFi in Sydney, Australia, but was expanded to attempt to cover the world.

NYCwireless has their nodes listed on NodeDB, but many other public access WiFi sites in the United States are not there. For instance, there's nothing listed in New Jersey that's outside the New Jersey - New York area. The most expansive definition of that area is the northern third of the state.

I haven't been wardriving lately, but, there have to be some public access WiFi nodes south of Exit 9 on the New Jersey Turnpike. I talked about a public access point in downtown Princeton here on Operation Gadget. It's at the Panera on Nassau Street. I'm sure other parts of the country are represented just as poorly.

If you are operating a WiFi hotspot that anyone can use for free, do the community a favor and create an entry for it in NodeDB.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Comcast and T-Mobile announced a WiFi hotzone in Philadelphia that will be located at Headhouse Square Plaza that's the intersetion of Second and South Streets. This is the site of a historic marketplace along Philadelphia's hippest street and is one of that city's major landmarks.

I agree with Glenn Fleishman of WiFi Networking News. We're both wondering why Comcast and T-Mobile decided to co-market this hotzone and why they chose this location in Philadelphia over many other landmark locations? Perhaps this was the best known, large public location along South Street, a neighborhood that has demographics that are compatible with WiFi use?

There are a ton of access points in Philadelphia and South Jersey, but the only public access WiFi organization appears to be something called Phillymesh which doesn't have a website. This doesn't compare well with communites like NYCwireless in New York.

The Headhouse Square Plaza location will be free for six months, but then it's expected to be made part of the T-Mobile Hotspot Network. Let's hope this is the beginning of something big anyway.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wi-Fi Networking News reported that Cometa will wind down its WiFi network which had an estimated 250 locations here in the New York Metropolitan Area and Seattle. The model that they were using was to be a "wholesale" public WiFi operator, meaning that they would build and operate public WiFi networks for resale by their partners, including companies like Barnes & Noble and McDonalds.

One of the things that came out in CNET's coverage of the announcement is that many analysts feel that public WiFi access only works as an add-on to other wireless services that a customer already subscribes to. This may be true at the moment. It's hard to get people other than technical sales people, real estate agents, and other mobile professionals to pay for hot spot access right now.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't had time to discuss the WiFi Clear Channel Assessment vulnerability that has been identified by researchers at Queensland University of Technology. When I first heard about this, I immediately thought that the most likely exploit of this vulnerability would be at a technology conference or a trade show.

Late last night, I found an article in Infoworld that quoted Rich Mironov from WiFi security vendor AirMagnet, indicating that a Denial of Service situation had occurred at a MacWorld Expo in New York:

At the Javits Center in New York at an Apple show, somebody was wandering the show floor with a broadcasting card in his laptop. Everywhere he went he shut down the network for a couple of hundred feet by crowding out traffic in all directions. His device was randomly running up and down all the channels....

I installed a WiFi network in my home office that includes a D-Link DI-624 AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless Router and D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless PC Card. Since the DWL-G650 has an Atheros chip set and I run Fedora Core 1 Linux most of the time, I had to install the MADwifi driver. Part of this driver is a hardware abstraction layer which is only released in binary form. This is unusual for Linux drivers, so I looked for information about why this had been done.

In my research, I learned that the Atheros chip set is fully programmable for radio channel and broadcast power, and that the FCC will not allow the free distribution of tool kits for programming the Atheros chip set. So, the developer of the MADwifi HAL made a binding agreement with Atheros to make a partially closed-source, Linux compatible driver. Now that this WiFi vulnerability has been documented, it's pretty obvious to me why the FCC has taken this position.

I feel like the report from Queensland University of Technology provides specific details about a limitation of some WiFi technologies that many of us already knew about. But, this new information should not dissuade us from deploying 802.11b or a or g networks, because the productivity and flexibility that wireless provides still outweighs the security and availability risks.

I have visited sites where networks have been built that are entirely dependent on 802.11 wireless technology. Many setups like these are in people's homes, and they have been built for practical, logistical, or aesthetic reasons. Although the likelyhood of intentionally jamming a home network is small, the possibility of a disruption as a result of equipment malfunction is larger, particularly where the wireless network is in a densely-built area. If your network is 100-percent wireless and you need to ensure availability, it is probably a good idea to have a small, wired Ethernet segment that you can plug a PC into during a disruption.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Regular Operation Gadget readers know that I recently picked up a Nokia 6600 to do a long term evaluation. One of the things I discovered after receiving the 6600 is that it syncs to a PC like other smartphones, but it does it without wires. You need to use infa-red or Bluetooth in order to make a connection.

I decided I wanted to try to use Bluetooth to sync the 6600. This was a bit of an arbitrary decision because I have never worked with Bluetooth and I am familiar with IRDA from my work with my Treo 180 and Polar S-Series heart monitors. The biggest problem I anticipated was the fact that none of my Windows PCs have Bluetooth support built in.

Belkin has two Bluetooth USB Adapters with similar features at different price points. The less expensive of the two, the Belkin F8T003 Bluetooth USB Adapter, is the one you would want to connect with a Nokia 6600. The main difference between the F8T003 and the more expensive unit, the Belkin F8T001 Bluetooth USB Adapter, is that the F8T003 only supports 10 meter (33 foot) connections while the F8T001 supports connections from up to 100 meters (330 feet) away.

The reason you don't need the F8T001 is that the Nokia 6600 user manual says that the maximum connection range is 10 meters.

Before you buy a Bluetooth adapter for your PC, make sure that you know what connection profiles your Bluetooth phone needs. The Nokia 6600 supports:

• Dial-up networking profile (DUN) as a gateway,
• Fax profile (FAX) as a gateway,
• Object push profile (OPP) as a client and server,
• File transfer profile (FTP) as a server,
• Hands-free profile (HFP) as an audio gateway,
• Generic object exchange profile (GOEP),
• Generic access profile (GAP), and
• Serial port profile (SPP) with the PC connectivity software.

The product information on Belkin's web site lists supported profiles for each Bluetooth USB adapter. The F8T003 Bluetooth USB Adapter product information indicates that it matches up with the Nokia 6600 on the DUN, FAX, FTP, OPP, and SPP profiles. As a general rule, don't buy a Bluetooth adapter without knowing whether it is compatible with your Bluetooth device's supported connection profiles.

I need to pick up a Bluetooth USB adapter in order to continue my Nokia 6600 testing. The Belkin F8T003 supports the operating system that I'm using on my PC. Once I get it, I'll be sure to tell more about how well it works.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

MobileWhack reports on a problem with email use at sites that are part of T-Mobile's HotSpot network. James Duncan Davidson reports that T-Mobile's SMTP server, the only one that is reachable via the normal TCP port from one of their hotspots, gets confused by SMTP-AUTH information that is intended for a user's normal mail server.

SMTP-AUTH is an email protocol extension designed to stop SPAMmers from exploiting well managed SMTP servers. I've enabled SMTP-AUTH on my company's mail server, so everyone that uses my mail server would have the problem that James Davidson is reporting.

The reason this has become a critical problem recently is that T-Mobile's current configuration is less secure than most corporate mail systems because their SMTP servers accept email messages without authenticating the sender. As a result, their hotspot network can be used for spamming in some cases.

Davidson's article is a good one because it explains the current problem in an easy to understand manner, and goes on to explain what he has done in order to work around it. His is not the only possible solution, but it is a reasonable one for users who have administrative control of their own mail servers. But, since most readers probably don't have their own mail server, or don't have the time to make configuration changes to their mail server for this limited purpose, I'll offer another alternative.

The easiest path to avoiding the T-Mobile SMTP blacklist problem may be to use a webmail tool to send email and your normal email client to receive email. It's pretty easy to get a webmail tool set up these days on most commercial email servers, if your company is willing to devote the sys admin resources to install and support it. There are many possible configurations for Open Source MTAs like Sendmail and Postfix, and a lot of them are freely available.

Let's hope that T-Mobile engineers a better solution to sending mail from their network of hotspots. The current situation can't be maintained for long. If customers can't send email reliably, the value of the network is severely compromised.

We should all be rooting for public WiFi network providers, because it's in all Operation Gadget readers' interests for these companies to solve the technical and economic problems associated with their services.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Wi-Fi Networking News reports that Atheros is shipping a one chip 802.11g implementation that is expected to be incorporated in forthcoming network equipment manufactured by D-Link and possibly other companies as well.

You may remember that I installed an 802.11g-based network in my home office earlier this month. The equipment I used to build the network is the D-Link DI-624 AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless Router and the D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG High Speed Wireless PC Card. They contain the current Atheros chipset, and they perform well in both Windows 2000 and Fedora (Linux) operating environments.

I'm looking forward to seeing how much less expensive manufacturers can make network equipment that contains the new Atheros single chip 802.11g implementation. With fast routers already below $80 and PC cards below $60, where's the price floor going to be for the next generation of equipment?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wi-Fi Networking News reports that Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, and Cingular are lowering wireless data prices to compete with Sprint PCS and T-Mobile, who have staked out the value-oriented end of the market. This is a quiet revolution, none of the price cutters are advertising their changes on TV or radio.

The Wi-Fi Networking News article is worth reading because it further clarifies the pricing stratification and ties it specifically to performance of each carriers' network. It also provides links to good articles at The Feature and TechDirt. Rather than link to those articles from here, I suggest you read them after reading Wi-Fi Networking News in order to get the proper context.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in January, I mentioned that Linux Unwired was just about ready to ship from O'Reilly and Associates. It turned out that Amazon.com's product availability information was wrong, and this book just came out. You can get it now through Amazon and many other booksellers.

If you followed the progress of my wireless network deployment in the Home Office, you already know that I got it working two weeks ago and so far it's been great. My laptop is reporting 54 Mbps throughput, and performance is so good that I haven't used the 100 Mbps PC card in my laptop since then, because I haven't noticed any real loss of performance.

I got some level of security running on my wireless network on April 8. Since my laptop runs Fedora, I had to read through its documentation, as well as that of the MadWiFi Project, which is the name of the driver that supports my D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG PC Card. I opted for WEP initially, because my network is not as exposed as it would be if I lived in a denser area, and because I wanted to get some security up as quickly as possible.

I intended to pick up Linux Unwired as soon as I could, because it appears to be a one-stop source for Linux wireless networking tips. I think it will be a good companion to the Wireless Networking Starter Kit that I mentioned in a previous article on Operation Gadget. Linux Unwired is probably also the quickest path to getting a higher level of security in place on my network.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

GearBits pointed out that Panera offers free WiFi access at a number of their bakery stores. I live in an area with a number of Panera locations, so I consulted at the Panera store locator to see if this is something I could try out. Panera's locator indicates which stores have WiFi installed.

Of the five locations within 50 miles of my home, only one, the Nassau Street location in Princeton offers WiFi. This is a relatively small, extremely busy location where my wife and I have often had difficulty finding a table during lunch. Others, including a very large restaurant in West Windsor which is ideally suited to people lingering and working there, don't currently have WiFi available. Does that make sense to you?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CNET News.com reports that McDonald's has chosen Wayport to provide WiFi service in its U.S. restaurants. They intend to make the service available in 3,000 restaurants before the end of 2004, and will "eventually" serve the remaining 10,000 locations in the United States.

McDonald's customers will be able to use the WiFi service inside a restaurant for two hours for a charge of $2.95. Wayport will also offer a number of different billing arrangements directly, including $29.95 per month for access at any location they serve, including those not inside McDonald's restaurants.

I've read comments indicating that this is not going to attract more customers to McDonald's, but I wonder about that, particularly as they roll out past the initial target of 3,000 restaurants. There are a lot more McDonald's out there than Starbucks.

The big question in my mind is whether McDonald's will be quiet enough for people to concentrate during the middle of the day. Ever been to a McDonald's with a PlayPlace at about 1 PM?

I noticed that the McDonald's USA restaurant locator lists Playland/PlayPlace, Drive Thru, and store type, but not WiFi availability. I think they should put a WiFi availability attribute into the locator, and make the locator more accessible from handhelds and mobile phones.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My friend Nick Martini from GCF has been reading about my new home office wireless network and asked, "What kind of access point should we get for our office?" As is the case with a lot of small and mid-sized businesses, he'd like more security and accountability than you can normally get when you buy an access point that's suitable for home use.

As you know, I have a D-Link DI-624 AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless Router, which offers WEP encryption and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) support for both 802.1x and WPA-PSK. The DI-624 is also capable of supporting government-grade AES encryption and the proposed 802.11i standards. These technologies encrypt communication taking place between the computers and the wireless router. At most, they provide what's called "shared secret" password capability, meaning that all authorized users provide the same password(s) to gain access. If you want to fully control access to the router, you have to limit access to authenticated users.

Tom's Networking reported that Gateway has developed an inexpensive wireless access point with a built-in 100 user RADIUS server. The Gateway 7001 802.11G Wireless Access Point costs $299, but it lets you deny users who are not authorized to access your network. Other systems that allow you to do this cost more and generally involve system integration.

The Gateway 7001 is a brand new product, so keep a lookout for more information about it. But, it's definitely a step up from the low end access points.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

TidBITS recently published an article by Adam Engst, the co-author of The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, about assessing the need for security on your home wireless network. Engst uses "three Ls" in his methodology:

• Likelihood: "How likely is that someone will violate your privacy, steal your belongings, or otherwise exploit you?"
• Liability: "What is the realistic liability if someone were to record all the traffic that passed across your wireless network?"
• Lost Opportunity: "With home wireless networks, the opportunity cost comes mostly in the form of troubleshooting irritating problems, which is more necessary and harder when security is on, and in the annoyance of dealing with passwords with new machines or when you have visitors."

This is a thoughtfully written article that's worth passing along to people who just plugged in their WiFi router, configured it, and forgot about it. [ via Wi-Fi Networking News ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Most Operation Gadget readers probably forgot the thread I started about setting up a wireless network in my home office. I received my router and WiFi card way back in mid-January. Today, D-Link sent me the $40 rebate that they promised when I bought the D-Link DI-624 AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless Router and an 802.11g wireless card, which means I've had the gear for quite a while. So I figured I'd better get with it.

I followed the advice that I found in "The Wireless Networking Starter Kit" and began by getting the network working without any special security settings. This was a good idea because it made it easier for me to see whether things were working well before I tightened things up. I'm not done securing things yet, but I am using the WiFi connection to post this story.

I'll do a little more configuration over the next couple of days and report back on how things are going.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nechbi.com points out that RuttenSoft has released a utility called Activesync-Disconnecter that lets you turn Activesync off on a Smartphone running Smartphone 2003 without removing the phone from the cradle or stopping Bluetooth. Apparently, there are situations when it would be helpful to do this, but I hadn't considered the possibility until now.

RuttenSoft also has software to let your Smartphone act as a remote control for Windows Media Player or a remote control for PowerPoint when the applications are running on a Bluetooth-associated PC.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guideline Research released a report on the America's appetite for multifunction wireless devices. According to the news release, 49 percent of those surveyed have "no desire" for devices that allow them to multitask with their gadgets-- either make phone calls, in the case of mobile phone, or hold data, in the case of PDAs. James Belcher, co-administrator of the survey, said:

Multifunction devices don't reflect the consumers' preference for dedicated, simple devices. With the exception of the PC, most consumers just don't want to do multiple things with a single device.

In spite of the apparent sweeping conclusion, the article goes on to point out that 40 percent of survey respondents were "anxious to have a multifunctional device" and 10 percent already own a multifunction device. Last time I checked, 40 + 10 = 50. Isn't that just about even, 49 versus 50 percent?

I think that the survey underestimates the public's appetite for multifunction gadgets because it neglects some critical issues:

• knowledge of the features of specific handhelds versus hypothetical feature pairings,
• availability of third party software and services,
• pricing of handheld devices, and
• pricing of wireless services.

Operation Gadget readers are clearly in that 50 percent that either is anxious to have a multifunction device or already owns one. We know that our gadgets simplify our lives, even if they confuse some of our relatives and friends. We didn't buy our Blackberries and Treos for them, we bought them for us. [ via BargainPDA ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Netgear is running a mail-in rebate program for wireless networking products purchased through the end of February. When combined with the sale going on at Amazon.com, this means that a good 802.11b wireless cable/DSL router like the Netgear MR814 can be costs less than $30.

Rebates also extend to compatible 802.11b cards for laptops, like the
Netgear MA521 802.11b Wireless PC Card, and 802.11g gear like the
Netgear WG602 54 Mbps G Access Point and the
Netgear WG511 Wireless 802.11g PC Card. The 802.11g gear doesn't really cost that much more money and can provide a lot more throughput, if it's configured correctly.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some Operation Gadget readers may be wondering why this site has been so quiet this week. One reason is that a consulting client of mine has had me working on relocating their e-commerce site to a new hosting provider. If you've ever done anything like this, you know it's almost always more time-consuming than you expect (no matter how conservative you were with time estimates). It's always tough when your day job negatively impacts the things you do for fun.

The level of work at CTDATA has also impacted the implementation of the wireless network at the Home Office. In my last article on this topic, I strongly suggested following the recommendations of experts when building your first wireless network, particularly with respect to getting the network working before turning on security. I followed my own advice, and then started trying to get my laptop to work with my new D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless PC Card.

If your laptop runs Windows XP or Windows 2000, getting the DWL-G650 to work is probably pretty easy. But, I run Red Hat Linux on my laptop (for business reasons), and this makes getting my laptop to connect to the wireless network a lot more complicated. I'm putting in some time reviewing the Linux & Wireless LAN Documentation and, more specifically, the MadWiFi FAQ that answers questions about the driver for the chipset in the DWL-650.

The DWL-650 is a really powerful way to connect to an 802.11g network, and I recommend it highly. It's just that getting this type of device to work on Linux is a little bit of a challenge.

I have some extra time to do office work this morning, and the e-commerce work for my client is in good shape for Monday, so I'm going to do some more research and see if I can get the laptop up and running.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just noticed that Amazon.com is taking orders for a new book by Roger Weeks, Edd Dumbill, and Brian Jepson called Linux Unwired. It is reportedly to be published on February 1, 2004 by our friends at O'Reilly and Associates.

There's very little information available about the book right now. As far as I can tell, it's not mentioned on O'Reilly's site yet. Originally, Amazon reported that this book's author was Rob Flickenger, the author of Wireless Hacks, among others books. Dumbill, Jepson, and Weeks have also written or co-written a number of books for O'Reilly that are quite popular.

Linux users are about the only people who will not have all of their small office and home wireless networking questions answered by The Wireless Networking Starter Kit. I think the Linux users in our community will have their remaining questions answered by Linux Unwired.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I spent most of last evening diagramming my office's LAN, performing the initial setup of a D-Link DI-624 AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless Router, and seeing if I liked the results. I followed most of the advice offered in The Wireless Networking Starter Kit. But, typically for me, the piece of advice I didn't follow was one of the more basic and important suggestions.

In Chapter 17 ("Setting Up a Gateway") of The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman talk about creating a "Secure Network Setup". Their advice begins:

If you want your wireless network to be more secure, you must configure some additional settings:

1. Perform the instructions in "Simple Setup" and make sure everything works properly before enabling security settings.

The emphasis in the text above is mine.

In my zealous attempt to create a secure network right away, I decided to turn on all of the available security settings before I got the wireless network working. After all, we've all heard stories about people who run through some sort of router installation wizard, got their laptop connected for the first time, and left the new wireless network wide open to unauthorized users.

But there is another group of wireless network users that we hear less about. These are people who think ahead, design their networks on paper, and then try to do the entire configuration at once, including comprehensive security. I wanted to be one of these people. The only problem with this approach is that you can end up having problems making your first wireless connection to the new router.

Continue reading "When Building a Wireless Network, Follow the Suggestions of Experts" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today UPS delivered a D-Link DI-624 AirPlus Xtreme G Wireless Router to the Home Office and I'm about to embark on the implementation of a wireless network. I am following as much of the advice that Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman provided in their book The Wireless Networking Starter Kit as I can. My first step is to diagram the redesigned office network before I make any changes.

I'll update this site as I progress through the installation of the new WiFi router. I hope to make at least one more posting before I shut down the network as it has been configured up to now.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day, I bought a copy of The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, Second Edition, read a significant part of it, and browsed through the rest. I think that this is one of the best books on wireless networking that has been published recently in terms of bredth of topics covered and readability.

I think this is the first time that Operation Gadget has ever reviewed a book. This is partly due to the fact that so many of the products discussed here are simple enough to use with minimal supplimental reading. While you can plug in wireless networking equipment at your home or office and start using it immediately, this is a bad idea from a security standpoint. I also think that there are enough subtle issues in WiFi that can influence how responsive your computer is when you are connected, that you ought to do some advance reading even if you are willing to take your chances with minimal security.

Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman have done their homework in writing this book. In 488 pages (I left out the pages in the glossary and the index), they manage to cover wireless basics, connecting a computer, building a wireless network, security, WiFi on the road, long range connections, technical configuration, and troubleshooting. The book covers issues associated with desktop PCs, laptops, PDAs, and other wireless network devices like webcams and network printers.

One of the book's big strengths is that it covers both Windows and Macintosh computers well. It also has some information about Linux and FreeBSD, although the book primarily provides information about which OpenSource projects deal with which WiFi chipsets and points readers in the right direction for more info.

Continue reading "The Wireless Networking Starter Kit Second Edition is a Great Help to Get Started with WiFi" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A week before Christmas, Doug Bedell and Victor Godinez tested a number of pieces of consumer 802.11g gear and reported the results in an article that appeared in The Dallas Morning News. They generally liked the D-Link DI-624 AirPlus Xtreme G Router although they had difficulty setting up advanced features like WiFi Protected Access security. They also talked about the Actiontec 54 Mbps Wireless Access Point, but I had more difficulty finding this product at on-line electronics sellers than I did the D-Link.

The D-Link DI-624 looks like a really competitive 802.11g router. It's being heavily discounted, with prices in the $50 to $60 dollar range after mail-in rebates. It also got a good review from CNET Labs.

The authors also point out a number things to keep in mind when purchasing 802.11g wireless gear. For example, the frequency used by the network (2.4 gigahertz) may conflict with cordless phones already in use in your home or office. I use a 900 megahertz digital spread spectrum cordless phone, so I probably won't experience those problems.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)