Don't Sell Wireless Short … Whaleback Spouts Off … Mobile TV just Won't Go Away
Don’t Sell Wireless Short While those radical Yankees in Amherst may be enamored of VoIP over fiber, 70 percent of colleges and universities surveyed by the Association of Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education (somehow known as ACUTA), are planning to expand or upgrade their campus wireless networks in the next six months. Of the surveyed colleges, which represented both private and public institutions, 50 percent have wireless networks that cover just a few buildings or a portion of the campus, 27 percent have about half the campus covered, and only 23 percent have networks that cover the entire campus and some off-campus areas. Besides showing room for wireless expansion on campuses, these statistics also verified that math is still a strongpoint with educators. Notice how the percentages totaled 100. Whaleback Spouts Off Whaleback Systems has introduced the first managed business phone service expressly designed for small-medium businesses (SMBs) and has nailed a deal with Points Nor’East Properties, a leading residential and commercial real estate firm in Portsmouth, NH. Of course, you already knew those were in the works if you’ve been reading this space faithfully. Mobile TV just Won’t Go Away Speaking of following this space, a whole panel at last week’s Media Summit New York—sponsored by the McGraw Hill Companies—devoted itself to mobile TV. This space, of course, devoted two issues to the same subject. The panel’s overall conclusion was summed up pretty well by David Bluhm, CEO of GoTV Networks, who said, "Our business is really trying to figure out what mobile television is." Shooting from the Hip Motorola has apparently started to believe its own "Hello, Moto" advertising campaign, designed to show how hip and cool the company’s cell phones are. How else would you explain a news release about a live demonstration of "leading-edge IMS applications integrated with the latest third party solutions" that included the line: "The wickedly cool experiences include …." Note to Moto PR, the "Flying Tomato" doesn’t read your releases—only us poor, unhip techno-grade journalists. To be fair to the Chicago mavens, though, even if the Tomato isn’t juiced about the company, President Bush thinks they’re neater than a pin. He’s honored Moto with a National Medal of Technology recognizing its "outstanding contributions to America’s technological innovation and competitiveness." Vonage Goes Public As just about everyone but the Flying Tomato expected, Vonage last week filed with regulators to raise as much as $250 million by selling shares of itself in an initial public offering (IPO). Wireless Mesh and Cellular Backhaul BelAir Networks,the Canadian company that’s managed to pick Comcast‘spockets for some spending money—and which has a Comcast person sitting on its board keeping watch over that money—has announced the availability of what it calls the industry’s first wireless mesh backhaul solution for mobile network operators. The solution answers the problem of directly connecting to GSM or 3G microcell and picocell base stations through a T-1/E-1 Circuit Emulation Module (CEM). We know this is a problem because the company says it has a solution that, in plainer English, lets operators using wireless mesh rather than leasing or buying expensive wireline links …. And in other wireless mesh news, the Yankee Group has named SkyPilot Networks the leading provider of carrier-class broadband wireless mesh networks among Wi-Fi mesh vendors ahead of other vendors that include Tropos, Cisco, the wickedly cool Motorola, Nortel, Strix and even the aforementioned BelAir. The Yankee Group report, "Myths and Realities of Wi-Fi Mesh Networking," praised SkyPilot for using synchronous protocols to create a 5 GHz directional and deterministic mesh with integrated backhaul. The report stopped short of calling this "wickedly cool."
