wireless network

In response to last week's Sprint/Clearwire agreement claiming they will unveil the nation's first 4G network two years ahead of any other mobile provider, AT&T has announced that it will dramatically increase its network speeds starting next year. While the new Clearwire company expects to deliver network speeds up to 6 Mbps to 140 million people by 2010, AT&T plans to deliver speeds of 20 Mbps by next year and a whopping 100 Mbps by 2010. AT&T currently offers DSL-like speeds where it has HSDPA deployed.

The announcement came yesterday at a presentation to Wall Street analysts. While AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have all chosen to use the not yet standardized LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology, AT&T

The NASA Ames Research Center announced that it is partnering with GPS sensor company M2Mi to develop small satellites known as "nanosats." The satellites will be part of a low-Earth orbit telecommunications network that NASA is planning for use in the commercial sector. According to Ames Center Director Pete Worden, "NASA wants to work with companies to develop a new economy in space."

NASA has been working with M2Mi for at least two years on developing machine to machine communications, or machine to machine intelligence (M2Mi). The two entities recently signed a third

In a recent demonstration researchers in Europe showed that, in an emergency situation, mobile wireless networks could be much more efficient and provide invaluable information as compared to the typical fixed communications network. The scenario in the demonstration involved a road tunnel fire that had already destroyed fixed communications lines. Emergency workers would be very ineffective in such a situation - they would not be able to locate the fires or the victims. A wireless network of sensors could, however, move in and out of danger, adapting to the situation, and relay vital information to a central command which, in turn, could relay the information to emergency crews via hand held devices. For example, maps could be provided to emergency workers with data about temperatures, visibility and the locations of fires, vehicles and people.

The idea of such a mobile network revolves around the fact that we are surrounded by "embedded systems" in everyday life. Security cameras, traffic lights, mobile phones, webcams, weather instruments, to name a few, are constantly gathering data for a variety of applications from traffic control

Researchers at IBM have developed a prototype of an an optical network that is both extremely fast and energy efficient. The new technology, which uses lights to transmit data rather than wires, could deliver huge amounts of bandwidth to a variety of devices, from supercomputers to cell phones.

This technology is capable of transmitting data at a rate of eight trillion bits (terabits) per second, the equivalent of about 5,000 streams of high definition video, using only the power of a single 100-watt light bulb. This kind of speed could potentially bring high definition video to mobile phones. The energy efficiency is consistent with recent green computing initiatives as well. The "green optical link"

As part of an effort to bring increased mobility to its campus, Duke University, in conjunction with Cisco, is ready to deploy a campus-wide 802.11n wireless network that will feature more than 2,500 Wi-Fi-certified Cisco 802.11n Aironet 1250 Series access points. Covering 6 million square feet of its downtown Durham, N.C. campus, Duke's network will be the largest and one of the first of its kind in the world.

802.11n technology increases both the speed and reliability of traditional networks. 802.11n can achieve a maximum data rate of 248 Mbits/s while its predecessors 802.11b and 802.11g have max rates of 11 Mbits/s and 54 Mbits/s respectively. 802.11n also offers nearly twice the range of the

At first this sounds like some preposterous scheme that only a villain from the Adam West era of Batman would cook up. A second look, however, reveals that it is actually a pretty good idea, and Google seems ready to move on it. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is considering either a partnership or a buyout of Space Data Corp., a company that currently provides balloon-based wireless networks.

The idea is simple - balloons are launched carrying transceivers for the network. The balloons are monitored second to second by the Space Data Corp team so they always know where they are, where they are going, battery life, ballast, etc. Engineers use this data to manipulate the balloons and keep

As you may have already guessed CarTorrent will be a peer-to-peer network like BitTorrent, with the peers being cars. Mario Gerla and Giovanni Pau of UCLA Engineering's Network Research Lab team came up with the idea in 2004 when peer-to-peer networks first became popular. They wanted civilian applications for the technology and thought the car would be a good starting point. The idea of CarTorrent is to have a network of cars continuously relaying information to each other and to wireless internet access points.

The shared information would come in three categories: content distribution (local information such as upcoming attractions, advertisements, etc.), safety/navigation (road conditions, accident and traffic

As 2008 drew near and the ball was falling in Times Square millions of people on the east coast were sending their happy new year messages via text. In fact, so many texts were flying around that the networks were overloaded and, consequently, many messages arrived hours later or were dropped altogether. Basically the networks became like the turnpike at rush hour.

The same problem occurred on 9/11, during the 2003 blackout and during Katrina, and since those disasters the number of cell phone subscribers has nearly doubled from 128 million users in