MuniWireless » Events

FCC and Knight Foundation: America’s Digital Inclusion Summit on 9 March 2010

Esme Vos — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:51:11 +0000

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Knight Foundation will hold “America’s Digital Inclusion Summit” on Tuesday, 9 March 2010 from 9:00 to 12:30 at the Newseum, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC. There will be a videocast at the FCC Commission Room, 445 12th SW, Washington DC. If you prefer to watch the event from the comfort of your desk, bed, living room or favorite cafe, there will be a webcast. You must register, even for the webcast, at www.digisummit.org.

The summit will present an overview of recommendations in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan meant to ensure that all Americans are included in the broadband era. As the FCC prepares to deliver the Plan to Congress on March 17th, hear perspectives from Chairman Genachowski, members of Congress, the Knight Foundation and people from across the country that have benefited from broadband. Help create solutions that drive broadband adoption for all Americans. Detailed agenda to follow.

Visit http://www.digisummit.org/

National strategies for ultra-broadband infrastructure deployment: Berlin, 26-27 April 2010

Esme Vos — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:25:20 +0000

The Wissenschaftliches Institut für Infrastruktur und Kommunikationsdienste (WIK) is holding a conference on “National strategies for ultrabroadband infrastructure deployment: Experiences and challenges” in Berlin on 26-27 April 2010 at the Radisson Blu Hotel. The conference brings together experts from Japan, Germany, Sweden, France and other countries to share their experiences in this field. Check out the program on the WIK website.

Excerpt from the conference website:

Many carriers in the world are today investing in high bit rate broadband infrastructure or are planning to do so. In parallel, many governments in North-America, Asia and Europe have initiated ambitious broadband deployment strategies. Against this backdrop WIK is organizing an International Conference to analyse the different strategic elements of these approaches. The Conference continues WIK’s previous successful events in March 2007 and in March 2009 where the focus was specifically on VDSL and FTTB/H deployments, respectively. The high-level experts on politics, economy, regulation/competition policy and science from around the globe at the 2010 Conference aim at addressing important issues such as:

What are the key objectives, elements and instruments of the different national broadband strategies?
What is the actual role of the state across the different national broadband strategies?
What are the key elements of public and PPP-operator models?
What role can “universal service obligations” play to reach national broadband coverage objectives?
Which options are there to secure “openness” of high bit rate broadband infrastructures? What role does “separation” play in this context?
What do we really know about costs and benefits of a (near) ubiquitous national high bit rate broadband infrastructure?

Go to: National Strategies for Ultrabroadband Infrastructure Development Conference

Event: NewTeeVee Live, 12 November 2009, San Francisco

Esme Vos — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:41:08 +0000

GigaOM Networks is holding its NewTeeVee Live 09 conference in San Francisco on 12 November 2009. This is a very timely conference as the boundaries between traditional TV, online video, and mobile video blur. Indeed, it’s no surprise that the core topic this year is “TV Everywhere.” On MuniWireless, we have written a lot about wireless video applications, not just in the public safety arena, but also in end user and enterprise applications. It’s impossible to plan a network today, wired or wireless, without an eye towards the amount of bandwidth and latency that your network will need to have to accommodate video applications. Unless you know what your users are doing on your network, the types of applications they are using and the experience that they want to have, you cannot deploy a network that will meet their needs.

I urge people to attend this conference because I think it will be very interesting. NewTeeVee has assembled key executives from Comcast, Facebook, Microsoft, MTV, Vizio, Epix, and many more. Tickets cost $595, but early birds can get them for the special price of $295 before September 25th.

Save the date: NewTeeVee Live, Nov 12th, San Francisco, 9am – 8pm.

Further details on: http://live.newteevee.com/

4GWE: Developers have the upper hand in 4G apps ecosystem

Paul Kapustka — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:06:18 +0000

Two afternoon panels Tuesday at the 4GWE conference here in Los Angeles made it clear that software developers, and not carriers, will drive innovation when it comes to 4G wireless applications of the future. The big, unanswered question is if, how and when two very different camps — developers and service providers — will work together in a fashion profitable for both camps.

There was more than a little animosity on display during the panel talks, and perhaps it was a good idea to keep developers on one panel, and service provders (and their large-equipment vendor partners) on another. Francisco Kattan, who is newly signed on at Alcatel-Lucent as senior director of the company’s developer ecosystem, said that while in the past developers “had to beg” to get on any provider’s mobile application “deck,” with the iPhone and its revolutionary App Store, “the tables have now turned and competition for developers is at an all-time high.”

But while device manufacturers (Nokia, RIM) and large service providers (Verizon) are trying to catch up to Apple by establishing developer programs and appliction stores, developers aren’t so sure that the old guard are the best leaders for the 4G app development future. “Maybe operators shouldn’t be running an apps store,” said Shai Berger, CEO of Fonolo, which builds applications that allow users to bypass automated dialing systems. “It’s not really in their core competency.”

Operators and their providers, however, seemed more willing than ever to work with software developers, including talking about plans to open APIs into network knowledge (billing, presence, location) that developers might use to build even more useful 4G applications. But Kittur Nagesh, Cisco’s director for service provider marketing, said that developers have to remember that partnerships can be much more successful than attempts to build products that only work over the top of provider services.

“Operators are not used to thinking that application developers can be part of a new revenue stream,” Nagesh said. Developers and providers, he said, “should jointly develop over the top services and share the revenues.”

FCC broadband workshop on applications and devices: 27 Aug 2009

Esme Vos — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:05:48 +0000

FCC is hosting a Broadband Workshop on Technology Applications and Devices on 27 August 2009 at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. Here’s a description of the workshop from the FCC site:

“The goal of this workshop is to explore trends in the use of and development of broadband applications and devices. The workshop will identify the technologies and packages of technology pieces that comprise the “killer app” trend-setting broadband applications driving broadband use. It will also identify these technologies’ requirements for broadband infrastructure and devices. Understanding both the trends and needs that facilitate growth in broadband applications and devices, the workshop will aid Commission efforts to identify metrics and data-gathering techniques to track and evaluate broadband infrastructure deployments, and develop key broadband policies to foster broadband application and device investment, development, and use.”

The event will be streaming online at Broadband.gov and the FCC will be fielding questions for the panelists from the online audience at Broadband.gov, as well as through the FCC’s Twitter account @fccdotgov. The hashtag for question submissions to the panelists is #BBwkshp. More info on the workshop can be found at:

www.broadband.gov/ws_tech_applications.html

Among the panelists are Sunil Daluvoy (Google), Bill Gurley (Benchmark Capital) and Jeremy Liew (Lightspeed Partners).

For a more comprehensive list of the FCC’s other workshops, please see: www.broadband.gov/workshops.html

Conference: Mobilize in San Francisco on 10 September 2009

Esme Vos — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:01:55 +0000

Mobilize 09 by GigaOM

The Future of the Mobile Web

The Age of Ultraband is coming — the era of an ulta fast, ultra connected mobile web.

Mobilize 09 is a one-day conference that brings together the thought leaders and practitioners of the mobile web and telecoms ecosystem for talk, demonstrations and debate. We’ll examine what it means to have wireless broadband speeds at the Gigabit scale and how the explosion of open platforms and hardware beyond traditional handsets create new opportunities, for entrepreneurs, investors and consumers. Join us for a look at emerging devices, from netbooks to smartphones and beyond. Examine the potential presented by application stores and the rapidly expanding variety of mobile tools. Sort through information on users and their needs. We will find the early indicators for opportunity in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the mobile web. We’ll also identify bumps in the road ahead — and help players in the wireless ecosystem see the opportunities they present.

Topics

Next Generation Networks – Ultraband, UWB, Wi-Max, LTE, 4G, Broadband
Application portals and application stores
Design and ethnography — usage, lifestyle trends, technology adoption
Next-generation handsets — design and technology
Netbooks and Ultraportables
Mobile web enablers – browsers, software, services.
Context and location-based services
Non-traditional wireless devices — machine-to-machine, gaming, e-books, DASH etc..
Mobile development platforms: iPhone, Symbian, Linux, BREW, Widget Platforms
Next-generation chipsets
Enterprise mobile applications
Venture capital and economics of the mobile web
Stealth startups and quickly growing ventures

Get a 10% discount off the Mobilize 09 registration fee.

Clearwire shows strong hand at Vegas launch event

Paul Kapustka — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:39:35 +0000

Our quick impression from a full day and a half spent inside the Clearwire bubble, at the company’s “official” market-launching event in Las Vegas on July 21: The nascent national WiMAX-providing company seems well past its sometimes-confusing stumbles of 2008 and into full execution mode, showing it can put on a confident, coherent local event even as its overall marketing, pricing and demographic messages remain somewhat a work in progress.

The ability to stage a fairly seamless, fun and informative day on the small stage of Las Vegas still doesn’t answer how Clearwire will fare when it takes on the bigger challenges of market launches in places like Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia, which still lie ahead on the company’s ambitious 2009 rollout schedule. But embedded within the Vegas-flavored parts of Tuesday’s proceedings were some new, strong marketing messages, which, if coupled with continued execution on the networking side of things, should bring cheer to Clearwire investors, partners and customers as the WiMAX express rolls onward.

While we’ll dive deeper into some of the proceedings and interviews we conducted during the event in later posts and reports, Clearwire followers should remember the line “more for less,” which we heard quite often Tuesday and will likely hear again and again at subsequent launches. Until now, a big problem with Clearwire’s WiMAX offering has been that the company itself didn’t know how to best position it — how exactly do you best pitch a service that delivers wireline-like broadband with the mobility of a cell phone? Before the Vegas event, you could and often would get different answers depending on which Clearwire executive you spoke to.

Tuesday, several different executives all seemed to be “on message” with the cost-saving idea, making it pretty obvious to anyone listening that Clearwire’s promise was mainly about giving you more of what you need — mainly Internet access — for less. By de-emphasizing the mobility part of the message (for now) in favor of the flexibility of WiMAX’s portability and even more in favor of the overall cost, Clearwire has something that sounds more appealing than past muddled pitches, especially in the current economic downturn.

As more devices like Samsung’s impressive Mondi mobile Internet device start to pop up on the Clearwire radar screen, perhaps the company can and should increase its mobility messaging. But until WiMAX gets a device as powerful and easy to understand as the iPhone, it probably makes more sense to stick to the budget-saver mantra while making sure the markets keep launching as planned.

Need to Know more about Clearwire? Order our CLEARWIRE NTK report, or Clearwire “need to know,” for just $4.95 — cheaper than a single hand of blackjack at most Vegas casinos. And a guaranteed win!

(All photos copyright Paul Kapustka/Sidecut Reports (c), 2009)

Thomas Friedman keynotes Freedom to Connect Conference, March 30-31, 2009, Washington DC

Esme Vos — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:23:06 +0000

Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist, has been selected as keynote speaker at F2C: Freedom to Connect, a conference organized by David Isenberg every year in Washington DC. The aim of the conference is to connect beltway tech policy wonks with telecom practitioners and infrastructure builders across the United States and Europe.

Friedman will speak on “Green Innovation,” a topic that amplifies the major themes of F2C: Freedom to Connect. F2C is about building an open, abundant Internet as a central component of a thriving economy and a clean environment. Several F2C speakers will address successes and failures of broadband implementations around the world. F2C will cover the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package and the $110 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that also may be used to build broadband connections to the Internet. Several of the networks they have built serve as models for stimulus funding.

Thomas Friedman joined the New York Times in 1981. His two most recent books, “The World is Flat,” and “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” show how technology can address energy and environment issues and lower many barriers that divide the world’s peoples. “Tom has a genius for telling compelling stories about geeky topics,” said Isenberg, who has produced F2C for five years. “We’re looking to Tom for lessons about how to tell our story effectively.”

More information on F2C: Freedom to Connect is at http://www.freedom-to-connect.net.

Panel on Municipal Wireless Networks

On Monday, March 30 from 13:00 – 14:30, I am speaking on the fall and rise of municipal wireless networks – what went wrong, what cities are doing right (including updates on Philadelphia’s network) and what muni wireless 2.0 will look like. Other people on the panel at Sascha Meinrath (New America Foundation), Ken Biba (Novarum), Aaron Kaplan (co-founder, of FunkFeuer.at, the first fully meshed, free wireless community network in Austria) and Dewayne Hendricks (Dandin Group). Our panel will address: the impact of 802.11n on lowering the cost and improving performance in muni Wi-Fi networks, community mesh Wi-Fi networks in Europe, models that work in the US and abroad, the convergence of Wi-Fi, WiMAX, 3G and LTE in building truly ubiquitous wireless broadband coverage).

Freedom to Connect update: how to qualify for a broadband stimulus grant

Esme Vos — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:21:02 +0000

We’ve added another session to the agenda of the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington DC (March 30-31, 2009): “How to Get and Spend $7,200,000,000.00: What the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or 2009 Means for Netheads.” This session will cover how to qualify for the Act’s $2.5 billion from Agriculture and $4.7 billion from Commerce. Disbursement begins in May. Most monies must be disbursed within 18 months. Local governments qualify, as do non-profits, coops, and other entities. Large telcos “generally not eligible.” Exciting stuff! Beltway insider Harold Feld writes that the Act, “. . . value[s] broadband for its transformative effect rather than for its consumer value and place[s] it within the communities we hope to positively transform.” (And there’s more: the Baller Herbst Law Group identifies another $110 billion indirect broadband-related funding, e.g., in transportation, education, smart grid and health technology.) Panelists are among the most knowledgeable insiders in the Washington DC telecom/Internet community. The entire revised agenda is at http://freedom-to-connect.net/agenda.

Additions to the list of speakers

F2C has not yet confirmed (but expects to any day) the participation of Herman Wagter and Dirk van der Woude of Amsterdam’s Citynet Fiber to the Home initiative. Dirk says he’s pretty sure they’re coming. If they come, they’ll bring the dynamic Dutch attitude that, once exported, made New York City great, and stands to do the same for U.S. Internet infrastructure.

F2C has confirmed that Dan Gillmor, the renowned new journalism activist, former tech columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, will be coming to F2C. Dan will interview Kevin Werbach, Obama FCC Transition co-leader, about the transition and the next FCC. The list of speakers is at http://freedom-to-connect.net/speakers.

Emerging Communications Conference, March 3-5, 2009 San Francisco

Esme Vos — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:41:01 +0000

There’s a very interesting conference taking place from March 3-5, 2009, Ecomm 2009, which will be held at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. Among the trends that Ecomm’s speakers will address are:

Telecom is becoming software
The cash cows of telephony and SMS will dry up long term
“Phones” are turning into general purpose computers
A march is underway to change how spectrum is allocated and utilized
Applications innovation is being democratized
The media industry is converging with personal communications
Search engines and computer manufactures are encroaching into the space
The telecom kingdom is fragmenting daily.

I looked through the Ecomm agenda and these are the presentations I would attend:

(1) Reframing the Net: Moving Past the Language and Concepts of Telecom

Doc Searls, Editor/Fellow/Writer/Author/Consultant, Harvard University/UC Santa Barbara

Date: Tuesday, March 3, 9:15 – 9:30 AM

How can we unleash the power of the Internet while we talk about it as the third act in a “triple play?” How can we talk about “open” and ”emerging” communications when we still think and talk in terms of ancient businesses, economic models and regulatory frameworks? How can we can we walk a new walk on a path paved with old talk?

The short answer is: We Can’t. Concepts like “backhaul,” “loop,” “play” — and even “broadband” – are all bricks in the walls of the conceptual box we need to blow up before we can exploit the boundless opportunities opened by the Net. In this session we’ll talk about conceptual frames that open up this new world, rather than keeping us trapped in the old one, even as we talk about “change.”

(2) No Numbers and My CallerID: The Receivers in charge!

Stuart Henshall, CEO, Phweet

Date: Tuesday, March 3, 11:00 – 11:10 AM

The solution for the future of telephony is not in the number, or in a single or unified directory service. The solution is in a simple URL where each URL represents the potential for an “exchange”, where there is no cost to raise the exchange and independent parties decide the interconnect arrangements. Introducing Phweet where CallerID’s are controlled by the users and may draw from one or more social networks. Where every call is preceded by the “context” for the call and the records for the call may be live, shared and acted on while it is in progress. The users benefit from choice, privacy and control. In fact the “signaling” for the call may take place outside the telecom structure all together.

(3) Digital Democracy or Plutocracy: Open Technology and the Future of Wireless Communications

Sascha Meinrath, Research Director, Wireless Future Program, New America Foundation

Date: Wednesday, March 4, 8:45 – 9:15 AM

The fight for open spectrum will significantly determine the future of communications. What if anyone could access spectrum anywhere at anytime; a world with no spectrum scarcity? It’s often claimed that established interests are fighting to prevent widespread access to the public airwaves. We’ll explore the regulatory issues, technologies, and key players involved in this critical inside-the-beltway battle.

(4) Mobile Phones Reveal the Behavior of Places and People

Tony Jebara, Chief Scientist, Columbia University & Sense Networks

Date: Wednesday, March 4, 12:15 – 12:35 PM

As more of us generate GPS data with our mobile phones, how can this aggregated information give us an unprecedented new understanding of the people, places, and rhythms that make up our cities? How can we index the real world using location data? Location data combined with learning algorithms lets us cluster different places and people into social categories and tribes. By harnessing this rich, natural and anonymized data, unprecedented possibilities emerge for user modeling, marketing, advertising, recommendation, search and collaborative filtering. Using machine learning algorithms, we can infer the context of a place and the tribe of a user from just their location data. It turns out that the flow and movement of people through the city (who is where and at what time) defines places and their character. Similarly, a person’s movement trail through the city reveals their personality and tribe. With location data, we build a network of places (how similar is place A to place B) and a network of people (how similar is person X to person Y). These networks let us cluster places and people as well as compute next-generation demographics and analytics. As your cell phone learns about you, it helps you find people, places and things you are interested in and your phone’s mapping software becomes your personal social navigator.

(5) iPhone Cloud Telephony Mashups: How to Build a Sophisticated iPhone Telephony Application in Less Than One Day

Irv Shapiro, CEO, IfByPhone

Date: Wednesday, March 4, 7:30 – 8:30 PM

This tutorial will cover everything you need to know to build an iPhone application that integrates with a cloud telephony service to deliver cutting edge telephone applications. By carefully building a native application view, residing on the iPhone, and integrating it with a cloud resident model and controller, attendees will learn how to deliver telephony applications unavailable natively on the iPhone. Sample applications such as voice broadcast, conference calling and calling trees will all be discussed. Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro will walk through code from both the iPhone and the cloud components and provide online access to examples and free Ifbyphone accounts as an example of what developers can do to build their own applications quickly and affordable. (In fact Ifbyphone built their iPhone apps for less than $5K!).

(6) Suing AT&T for a Trillion Dollars While the President Tries to Stop You

Brad Templeton, Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF has filed a lawsuit against AT&T)

Date: Thursday, March 5, 11:55 – 12:15 PM

The story of the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for performing wiretaps on their main data fibers without warrants when asked by the NSA, and the subsequent lawsuit against White House officials when they managed to get congress to pass a law granting retroactive immunity to the phone companies.

Including:

* What we know went on inside AT&T
* What we suspect went on inside AT&T and other companies
* How the law was structured to prevent it
* How it failed
* How they tried to stop us with an act of congress
* How we hope to prevail anyway
* Ramifications for telecom policy, encryption and more

(7) Where’s the money in Voice 2.0?

Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy, BT

Date: Thursday, March 5, 4:00 – 4:15 PM

In the Voice 1.0 world — a trillion dollar business — the revenues came from selling minutes and calling features. In future, a very different business model will drive growth. Value increasingly comes from managing interactions between businesses and consumers — getting the right people together on the right medium at the right time; and from transactions during those interactions. Martin shares some of the latest research and ideas on how this will happen.