Technik News

Das Blog zu IT, Mobilfunk & Internet

Why the Apple iPhone may not fail

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Reading an article in The Register by Bill Ray, he thinks the Apple iPhone will fail, actually, fail badly. I somewhat doubt his conclusions.

The main argument to support his analysis is that since network operators have to like the phone, then Apple has to do a good job convincing them. Remember the ROKR? It was rather a failure due to the fact it could only be loaded with iTunes music over cable, and thus mobile operators were left out of attractive data chargers levied when buying music directly from the phone. There was even speculation that Apple allowed it to launch on purpose, to protect their audio player market.
Where Bill goes wrong in my opinion is that the handset market is heavily controlled in the US, but not in Europe – go to any shop in the latter and you will have a very large variety of handsets to buy unsubsidized. Why? Because a lot of people value the ability to switch operators as they see fit, without having to enter into contracts involving their soul. In the US, there isn’t a culture of operator hopping, but rather of staying with one just to get a phone $50 or $100 cheaper.

One thing I have never understood is why people get themselves tied into a two year contract for a $50 saving. If they worked out how much they could save by moving operators taking advantage of special offers, they may think twice.

There is a very large number of paths Apple could follow, first, they have a nice distribution network with excellent shops placed in key areas, second, they have a large and loyal crowd of followers, who would probably not mind paying an unsubsidized device, and third, there are already a number of MVNOs and fixed-line operators that are willing to take a bite from the large networks. As for the subsidy, I wonder…are iPods subsidized by anyone? Apple costumers are used to pay for quality, and in my view, the iPhone will be no different.

Merry Christmas, now read our legal disclaimer

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The name of the company has been blurred to protect the innocent, and my email too, to prevent OCR-capable spam bots – this is what landed in my inbox today. Fancy that! A Christmas greeting with a legal disclaimer. So, let’s see what the implications are:

  • The fact that it is Christmas may be confidential or privileged information, belonging to the sender of the email. Santa, you are through with your monopoly! No more running around with deer and presents! Or we will sue you!
  • Had I received the message in error, I would be forbidden from showing anyone the greeting card, or saying “Merry Christmas!” to friends, colleagues and family. I guess I could not buy Christmas presents for my kids, as I cannot make use of the information that it’s that time of the year, either.
  •  The company doesn’t give a crap about Christmas, as the greeting is the opinion of the sender. At least they have someone nice working there.

In any case, thanks for scanning the greeting with F-Secure to make sure there were no Christmas bugs attached.

The problem with WiFi at hotels

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The New York Times ran a story two days ago, also picked up by Glenn Fleishman over at WiFi Net News, about how hard it is sometimes to get connected at hotels over their WiFi networks. Some travelers even report a failure rate of 50%, in comparison with 5% in wired connections. Support is usually directed to a hotline run by the hotspot operator, which results in a rather frustrating experience.

I have also seen it all, hotels with only WiFi in the lobby and wired connections in the rooms (Hotel Fox, in Copenhagen), others with very spotty coverage that reached only certain rooms, getting connected to another hotel’s WiFi across the street, then realizing it was free and only asked for a room number and surname, while your own hotel charged you a fortune, and so on.

My best experience was during DEFCON 14 in Las Vegas, where we stayed in the MGM Grand hotel. These guys went over the top, and installed an AP in every single room!. It was bolted underneath the table, inside a metal case, and the deprecated Ethernet cable was connected to it. A quick scan revealed that I could only see about 4 or 5 networks from my room, and only two with a half-decent signal, which makes me believe they turned down the power of the APs so as to avoid interference problems.

Wouldn’t it be great if with falling hardware costs, other hotels would do the same thing? To avoid interference between rooms, apart from channel variations, one could either turn each room into miniature Faraday cages, or turn down the power of the AP to a minimum.

Divine to offer pay-per-minute WiFi

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Techworld.com reports that UK WiFi aggregator Divine Wireless will be offering a new service, which covers some 15.000 hotspots run by BT Openzone, amongst others, charged in minutes rather than hours or days. Thus, a user would pay 8 pence per minute, or 4.80 GBP per hour. This is still very expensive, but the fact that you only pay for the minutes you use will make it very attractive to occasional users, to quickly check email, for example. Will people go for it? Maybe, but only if you really can get connected while waiting for the bus to come, as they claim in their typical scenario.

Morse code is dead…not!

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Various sources have picked up on the FCC’s announcement that it is removing the requirement of five-words-per-minute Morse code that was required to get an amateur radio license. Boing Boing and Engadget (uggh!) for example talk about the ‘dead’ language, arcane, old and tired. Digital communications, the SMS and the web are here to stay, and replace Morse, right? Maybe not so fast.

When disasters such as Katrina strike, modern digital communication networks fail – and this is a fact. Generators can only give juice to power-hungry cell networks for so many hours, and that is if the generators are working (and have not been stolen!). Usually, in these scenarios, initial status reports, help requests, and coordination attempts come from none other than the amateur radio community, and in many cases, it comes in…morse. When your expensive Motorola phone stops working, a radio ham will build a QRP (low power) transmitter with nothing else but a few capacitors, resistors, and coils, power it off whatever battery he can find (or even a solar cell), and start sending out dashes and dots. The reason for Morse code? It stands out above the noise, and thus makes faint signals much easier to interpret.

Remember the famous SOS, Save Our Souls, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot, …—…, which was sent out by the Titanic before its final trip to the bottom of the ocean. If you have a radio ham friend, give him a hug, and ask him to please keep proficient in morse, if only for when the bad times come.

Personally, I think it is right to remove it as a requirement for obtaining a license, knowing Morse will be something to be proud of. A couple of stories related to Morse – in the movie “Enemy of the state”, starred by Will Smith and Gene Hackman, the ultra-high-tech surveillance satellite used by the NSA to track a prey is actually seen sending out the letters ‘CQ’ in Morse…these stand for ‘attention airwaves, I have something to say’. Nice touch from a good friend, Steve Uhrig, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago (more on this in a post coming soon) and who was the technical advisor in the movie.

The second story is in the movie “Space Camp”, where I can only remember Lea Thompson, and is about a space shuttle that is launched into orbit with a bunch of kids from Space Camp on board. For some strange reason, the long-range radios hadn’t been installed (uh?), and so one of the kids actually starts sending out Morse to mission control, by flicking a switch on the shuttle that toggles a lamp on some telemetry panel down in Houston.