The Globe’s tech guru Hiawatha Bray takes the new 4G network from Sprint/Clearwire out for a spin today (read it here, with a video). His lede summarizes it well:
At last, 4G has come to Boston, and I feel like a man who’s gotten a shirt for Christmas. I’m grateful, of course, but I was [...]

Sprint, via its Clearwire subsidiary, is launching the first 4G wireless network in Boston next month, says the Globe. (Read it here) It claims downloads of 3 to 6 megabits/second, somewhere around two to four times faster than 3G. Except that 3G, as we learned in a post last week, is a moving target that [...]

As we all wait for 4G (whatever that is) to arrive in Northern New England, let’s peruse a fine piece of reporting about how the definition of 3G has changed over, and over, and over again, with examples dating back to 2002. Read it here, and chuckle/cringe.
The key points are these:
This is all a red [...]

As I noted back in March (in this bit of prose poetry), the arrival of 4G over the next year or two means we’ll be seeing a lot of confusing mobile-phone techno-speak and also some cool features. AP has a similar piece today, spurred by the imminent arrival of Sprint’s first 4G phone.
This topic is [...]

My Telegraph column today is a tour of a nearby cell tower. I’ve always wanted to see what’s inside the control rooms next to those behemoths - truth be told, it’s not too exciting, but you can’t tell until you look, can you? The story is here.

Slate has a great piece with a great headline (”I tried to sauté my brain at the base of a cell phone tower. It didn’t work.”) about anti-wireless folks who whip up fears about electronic signals and what they might be doing to our systems. It takes a few shooting-fish-in-a-barrel potshots at “electro-sensitive” hypochondriacs, but [...]

As I and many other people have noted before, 4G (as in fourth-generation mobile broadband) is a branding concept rather than a technological term - heck, there isn’t even agreement about what 3G means. Still, the idea of IP-based mobile systems with 4 to 10 megabyte upload/download and short latency is intriguing.
Verizon Wireless being the [...]

A collaboration of public and private organizations is seeking $66 million to help build a “middle-mile” fiber optic network around the state, to increase broadband expansions.
The proposal was made to the National Telecommunications & Information Administration’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (NTIA BTOP) to fund  broadband expansion in New Hampshire. From the UNH [...]

The Maine Senate and House have killed a proposal to put warning stickers on cells phones warning that they may contribute to brain cancer - an assertion that has little or no evidence to support it.  Here’s the AP story; here’s some background.)

I’ve got an overview piece in the Sunday Telegraph about how 4G is coming (read it here).
The Twitter-sized version is: Nobody really knows what 4G is because nobody agrees what 3G is, but Verizon, AT&T and Clearwire (Sprint) are spending tens of millions to bring it here anyway - in hopes that you’ll eventually get [...]

I’m writing an article for the Sunday Telegraph about 4G plans for New Hampshire by Verizon, AT&T and Clearwire (Sprint). This has required a lot of learning, since I don’t understand this stuff too well. (I will get at least three emails Sunday from telecom techs pointing out errors/omissions)

As part of research I went to the International Telecommunications Union site and found the above chart, which (a) demonstrates the unbelievable alphabet soup of acronyms used in technologies (EVDO! HSDPA! TD-SCDMA-LCH-TDD!), but also has to be the ugliest tech-related chart I have ever seen. It’s too garish for MySpace!

So of course I had to share …

Getting broadband to non-urban areas remains a problem, for financial more than technical reasons. This article on the telecom industry site Light Reading demonstrates how complicated it can be:
A public/private partnership, Maine Fiber Co., won a $25.4 million (stimulus) grant to build what is called the Three-Ring Binder, an middle-mile fiber optic network that will [...]

The ever-wonderful Improbable Research blog has a post (here it is) pointing to one of the weirdest bits of research I’ve seen in a long time: It claims that use of cell phones over long periods of time correlates with “human parotid gland secretion” - i.e., salivating. It claims that in 50 subjects, there was [...]

Verizon Wireless is set to roll out its mobile data service called LTE, or long-term evolution (what a stupid name) service, starting in Boston and Seattle.  From the CNet story:
Verizon Wireless is in the final testing phase, or “Phase 4,” of its LTE technology. Within 60 days he said he expects testing to be completed [...]

I encountered this interesting discussion on DSLreports (read it here) which talked about Verizon using its upcoming 4G network called LTE - it starts tests launches this year, in Boston among other cities - to return to Northern New England and scarf up more customers from FairPoint. The writer thinks Verizon ripped everybody off with [...]