2008 January | VoIP-Facts.net: The Blog

Terahertz Wireless through Quantum Tunneling

Jan 312008

Jason Lee Miller from Web Pro News recently wrote about a company that is using Quantum Tunneling technology to develop microchips that would operate in the Terahertz region, wirelessly transmitting huge amounts of data at blazing speeds.

The appropriately named Phiar Corporation, located in Boulder Colorado, is developing metal insulator diodes that can be integrated into existing CMOS technology, resulting in what is basically a chip with an antenna. As posted on the thznetwork.org weblog, “Phiar and Motorola Labs (Tempe, Ariz.) recently completed joint development of a 60-GHz antenna based on Phiar’s metal-insulator diode in a bid to enable multigigabit wireless radios that would stream multiple channels of uncompressed high-definition video”.

The diode is compliant with the emerging IEEE 802.15 T3Gc standard, or WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network). WPAN is concerned with the use of the unlicensed 60GHz spectrum for high speed wireless data transfer between devices, theoretically up to 7 Gbps. According to a report previewed on TMCnet.com, the 60GHz band is the only range capable of transferring uncompressed HDTV signals.

Unlike WiFi, WiMax, and the 700MHz spectrum, the 60GHz band does not penetrate barriers, and in fact, would be confined to a single room. Interference with other radio signals is pretty much a non issue, as well as neighbors piggybacking on your network.

While the idea of being able to transfer an HDTV movie to your handheld in seconds is certainly appealing to the consumer, Phiar has other ideas for their Quantum Tunneling technology as well.

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Jaduka’s EarthCaller Delivers Voice Quality, Free U.S. Calls and Lowest Cost International Dialing

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Jan 302008

Reliability and quality have been VoIP’s achilles heel. Even with recent improvements, if you rely on VoIP calls, you know that the voice quality is nowhere near the quality of landline phones. That’s because landline phone calls run over the public switched phone network (PSTN) and those systems have improved over decades to include mechanisms that ensure quality control – measurements that have, to date been lacking in VoIP.

Jaduka, recently named one of Red Herring’s Top 100 Global Emerging Technology companies, has launched EarthCaller, a new PC-to-phone service that enables calls to any landline in the U.S. for free along with super low international rates.

EarthCaller runs its calls over the Public Switched Phone Network (PSTN) backed by Jaduka iQT™, a patented call quality control interface. Users are reporting calls to be cleaner, clearer and more reliable than VoIP.

EarthCaller also offers a prepaid international service that enables calls at a cost 30-40% less than popular VoIP services. Mexico rates per minute rates are as low as $0.024/minute, India at $0.0682/min, and the Philippines at $0.1172/min. A full rate card is available online.

Jaduka’s parent company, NetworkIP (http://networkip.net), provides the backend that makes EarthCaller work so well. As the network provider to leading prepaid phone card distributors, NetworkIP provides direct connections to over 100 carriers directly into 39 different countries. Their platform is running about 2 million transactions per day and volume of over 1 billion minutes per month.

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WiMax Forum Looking at FDD Profile

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Jan 252008

Earlier this week, the CTO of WiMax vendor Airspan, Paul Senior, told telcoms.com that the WiMax Forum would have an FDD profile for Mobile WiMax within the next six months. The Forum was quick to back off, a spokesman saying later that while it has been discussed, no timeline has been set.

Mobile WiMax, as of now, uses Time Division Duplex (TDD) in which uplinks and downlinks are given time slots on a single channel. The Telcos and standards committees have gone with Frequency Division Duplex (FDD), where uplinks and downlinks are paired on two different channels, for its 3G and 4G networks. Most of the spectrum available is configured for FDD, as is the 700MHz band being auctioned by the FCC.

Apparently, the difference in the two technologies makes TDD more “data-centric”, whereas FDD is better oriented towards voice, today’s networks being considered more “voice-centric”. ThirdPipe.com believes that “a new variation in the Mobile Wimax spec…will likely be ready for prime time before 4G gets off the ground”.

Senior says they have been working on the profile for the past twelve months, but have kept it under the table for fear of upsetting their chances of getting the IMT-2000 approval for Mobile WiMax. The ITU endorsed WiMax in May of last year for the 2.6GHz swath of spectrum, thinking that TDD WiMax would sit in 50MHz between two 70MHz bands configured for FDD. With an FDD profile in place, Mobile WiMax could score a coup for the whole swath.

The next generation of WiMax, called WiMax2 or WiMagic (802.16m), has already been accepted by the European Commission for research, and is expected to stand up well to the 3GPP’s 4G Long Term Evolution standard, with speeds up to 100Mbps mobile and 1Gbps fixed. LTE has been said recently to be on track for deployment in 2010, whereas Mobile WiMax is expected to be ready for widespread deployment in 2009, just about the time that television leaves the airwaves.

Proponents of WiMax suggest that with an FDD profile being ready by 2009, the technology would be well positioned for use in the 700 band of spectrum being auctioned off now by the FCC. Of the two major WiMax players in the U.S., Clearwire is not bidding, and Sprint Nextel, having all the WiMax spectrum it can handle, is also not in the game. Nevertheless, the winning bidders can use whatever technology they choose, as long as it conforms to the FCC’s rules and regulations.

We already know that the two major Celcos participating in the auction, AT&T and Verizon, will be using LTE for their 4G networks. Maybe we’ll see some of the winners of block B, broken into 734 local regions, opt for Mobile WiMax technology. A new generation of WISPs entering the wireless marketplace could be just what we need to bolster development and competition, something badly needed in U.S. wireless industry.

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Clearwire, Nortel Partner for VoIP over a WiMax Network

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Jan 242008

Wireless Broadband provider Clearwire Corp. announced this week that it was partnering with Nortel Networks to offer VoIP telephony services to its customers over its own network infrastructure. Presently, the WiMax Internet Service Provider offers VoIP in 37 of it’s 46 markets through partnerships with 3rd party carriers.

The VoIP solution will include Nortel’s Application Server 5200, delivering services such as voice, desktop video calls, presence, and other applications based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Nortel’s IP multimedia softswitch, Communication Server 2000, will handle calls to the PSTN and number portability.

“Clearwire’s customers require high quality voice service in addition to the robust broadband data service we provide,” said chief technology officer of Clearwire, John Saw. “Nortel’s market-leading voice technology best meets Clearwire’s current needs while providing a simple migration path for our future voice communication requirements.”

Nortel and Clearwire see this as a first step, leading to the deployment of new products and services as they become available, with the potentiality of attaining a fixed/mobile convergence on the WiMax network.

Clearwire currently offers a voice and Internet bundle for $29.00 a month with an activation and cancellation fee of $50, according to VoipReview.org. The Clearwire Internet Phone Service user rating on the site is 3/5, with sound quality and customer service seemingly lacking.

As an emerging technology, it has been said that 2008 is to be the year of WiMax. Early adopter Clearwire has called its wireless technology “WiMax like”, and it did indeed start out as proprietary. With the WiMax Forum just recently announcing it would begin testing devices and applications for WiMax certification this year, Clearwire has been working hard to get into the standards fold.

Last summer, Clearwire struck a deal with Satellite TV providers DirecTV and Echostar that would allow each of the companies to sell a bundle of Internet, voice, and TV services. If they can make it work, another player in the triple play market can only be a good thing for the consumer.

Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile on White Spaces

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Jan 212008

Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile have their own ideas of how white spaces in the TV spectrum should be used. According to RCR Wireless News in an article posted January 4th, the two companies want the FCC to approve the use of white space between channels, becoming available in 2009, for wireless backhaul services on a fixed license basis.

As noted in my previous post, the White Spaces Coalition, a group that includes Google, Microsoft, and others, would use the unlicensed spectrum for building out wireless broadband networks. Because of the properties of this spectrum between the 2-698MHz range, the WSC believes it would be ideal for offering affordable Internet access to densely populated cities, as well as vast geographical areas that today have access only via dial-up.

The Association for Maximum Service TV opposes the use of the unused spectrum for unlicensed broadband, fearing it would cause interference in the digital TV range. Sprint and T-Mobile appear to be siding with the AMST, maintaining that only licensed use should be permitted, in that unlicensed devices could cause “harmful interference to important incumbent operations.”

For these Cellcos’, gaining the use of these swaths of spectrum for expensive backhaul, or data transfer operations, would indeed be a coup of sorts. Blogger Brough Turner of NMSCommunications believes that they should use dark fiber for backhaul, and leave the white spaces for more innovative technologies.

The FCC, who will begin testing wireless devices in the spectrum on January 24, now have another option for how to use the white space. Will they stand by their commitment to eliminate the Digital Divide in the U.S., expanding broadband Internet access for all nationwide? Or will the allure of licensing the spectrum and pumping more money into the Treasury sway them to further embed the cellular monopolies into the publics’ electromagnetic radio waves?

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White Spaces Coalition Stumbles, Tries Again

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Jan 182008

As recently alluded to in a previous post, the White Spaces Coalition wants to use the spaces between local television channels, which are becoming available in 2009, to bring inexpensive wireless broadband access to the masses. Today, the FCC announced that on January 24th, it will launch a 6 week lab test, followed by 6 weeks of field testing of devices that would allow the unused spectrum to be used for wireless broadband.

The main obstacle for the technology, and the reason for the testing, is that unlicensed broadband devices could creep into the neighboring spectrum, causing interference in TV and wireless microphone radio waves wreaking havoc, for example, on a local broadcast of a sporting event. Needless to say, the Broadcasting industry is totally against anything that would interfere with “their” spectrum. Some in the Healthcare Industry have also expressed their concerns that white space broadband could cause interference in hospitals

The WSC, a group comprised of such techies as Microsoft, Google, Intel and others, contend that the technology is there to detect the existence of the broadcast signals, thus keeping the offending broadband signals out of their space.

The FCC, seeing the potential for a badly needed expansion of broadband access in the country, agrees. This is not the first test.

In the spring of last year, Microsoft put forth a prototype for testing by the FCC that ended in failure, as the device was not adequately able to detect broadcast transmission waves. Later it was said that one of the devices was broken and was subsequently replaced, but never tested.

The new round of tests will be more open than before, with prototypes from Adaptrum, Microsoft, Phillips, and Motorola going through a rigorous test by the FCC, first in the lab, and then in a real life like environment.

The technology would work best in localities that have fewer television stations, and thus larger swaths of white space. In larger Metropolitan areas, the more channels you have the tighter it would get, but the WSC seems convinced they can make it work.

Like the 700MHz UHF band of spectrum, these lower (2-698 MHz) radio waves travel far and penetrate deep, making them ideal for large rural expanses, as well as densely populated cities. It has been said by some that this spectrum could provide speeds up to 80mbs, and that access could be as low as $10 per month.

FCC 2008 700MHz Auction Overview

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Jan 162008

The upcoming auction by the FCC concerns the band of spectrum between 698MHz and 806MHz, and is divided at 746MHz into what is called the lower 700 and upper 700 megahertz bands, encompassing the UHF channels of 52 through 69. Some of this spectrum is already owned from previous auctions, most predominantly by Aloha Partners, who plan to use channels 54 and 59 for their HiWire MobileTV. Qualcomm’s MediaFLO Mobile TV network owns channel 55. The remaining spectrum is divided into 5 blocks and has been mandated by the FCC to fulfill a number of needs and services.

Block A is 12MHz in the lower 700MHz and is broken into 176 regions that the FCC calls Economic Areas (EA). This is the current channel 52 and 53
Block B is also 12MHz and is broken into 734 localities deemed cellular market areas (CMA).
The C block is 22 MHz and is set aside for commercial purposes, broken into 12 regional licenses, and is subject to the FCC’s open access rules.
Block D is a nationwide commercial license of 10MHz, to be paired with the12MHz that is set aside for public safety and is also mandated as open access
Block E is 6MHz broken into EA’s.

Excluding the Public Safety Block D, any winning bidder can end up with multiple regional or local licenses.

The blocks that are of the most interest, and indeed have generated the most controversy, are the commercial block C, and the Public Safety/Commercial block D.

The FCC Auction of the 700MHz Spectrum

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Jan 142008

On January 24 the bidding begins for what has been described by the FCC and others as “beachfront property”: the 700 MHz band of the electromagnetic spectrum. These Ultra High Frequencies are what is now known as channels 52 through 69 on your television dial, and are mandated by the FCC to become available on February 19th 2009, as television broadcast networks switch from analog to Digital TV. The auction has drawn 266 applicants and is expected to dump upwards of 15 billion dollars into the U.S. Treasury.

The hype leading up to the auction has spurred coalitions of strange bedfellows, pitted free marketers against proponents of open source, and brought the Net Neutrality debate to the wireless arena. Some say that the auction has the potential to reshape the face of telecommunications in the U.S. as a diverse stream of participants, including Google, Qualcom, Cox Communications, EchoStar, the Public Broadcasting Service, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, challenge cellular giants AT&T and Verizon head on for a swath of this oceanfront spectrum. So what’s all the fuss, and why so much interest in this piece of radio real estate? Continue reading »

Comcast Slides into Fourth Place as Largest Phone Service in U.S.

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Jan 112008

Comcast announced this week at CES that it has surpassed first Vonage and now Embarq, to become the fourth largest residential phone service provider in the U.S., behind Verizon, AT&T, and Quest. According to CEO Brian L. Roberts, Comcast is the fastest growing residential phone service in the country, now offering its triple play of voice, video, and broadband Internet access to over 40 million households.

Comcast likes to point out that they are not like the independent pure play service providers, in that they use their own private network, not the Internet to route their VoIP calls. Wait a minute! Just how far reaching is their network? While it is true they have more control of QOS and such on calls within their pipe, once the packets go off network, they are subject to all the instabilities of any other voice traffic on the Internet.

Also announced were three new features to be integrated into the triple play:

Universal Caller ID allows subscribers to see caller information on their phone, TV, and computer.
The Smart Zone™ Communications Center as a web base app will let you manage email, voicemail, and a universal contact list on any computer anywhere, with remotely programmable DVR’s coming soon. How cool is that?
Comcast has also come out with a new gadget: the Enhanced Cordless Telephone lets you access email, voicemail, the yellow pages, your universal address book, and even has instant messaging capabilities. Visit Rich Tehrani’s Blog for a closer look at Comcast’s Enhanced Cordless Phone.

Yes, telecom conglomerates better take heed as the sleeping giant awakens nipping at their heels. With four million CDV subscribers and counting, the face of the marketplace – it is a changin’!

CDV Three Year Growth Chart…courtesy of Comcast

The Face of Telecommunications in 2008

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Jan 082008

With the transition from circuit switched technology to packet based VoIP well under way, the focus on telecommunications in 2008 turns to the wireless industry, as broader, faster pipes enable wireless broadband networks to deliver voice, multimedia, and data applications to a wider range of businesses and consumers.

First out of the gate in 2008, and a good indication of the shape of things to come, is the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas going on this week. With Verizons announcement last year embracing the open source community, the CES is already teaming with new mobile devices and applications developed to run on unlocked phones over a variety of wireless technologies. Sony introduces its PlayStation Portable with a firmware upgrade allowing gamers to talk to each other over Skype, and Motorola, among others, takes the iPhone head on with its ROKR E8 touchscreen mobile device. Samsung is also demonstrating its Mobile WiMax technology using its SPH-P900 mobile phone/wireless broadband device, and the M8100, a WiMax enabled PDA.

Older Entries

VoIP-Facts.net: The Blog

Terahertz Wireless through Quantum Tunneling

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Jaduka’s EarthCaller Delivers Voice Quality, Free U.S. Calls and Lowest Cost International Dialing

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WiMax Forum Looking at FDD Profile

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Clearwire, Nortel Partner for VoIP over a WiMax Network

Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile on White Spaces

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White Spaces Coalition Stumbles, Tries Again

FCC 2008 700MHz Auction Overview

The FCC Auction of the 700MHz Spectrum

Comcast Slides into Fourth Place as Largest Phone Service in U.S.

The Face of Telecommunications in 2008

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