Stakes High For Sprint Nextel in Wireless Gamble

In August, Sprint executives told analysts at a company "summit" that they plan to start service in 2008 and expect to generate as much as $5 billion annually in WiMax-related revenue by 2011.

Paul Jacobs, chief executive of Qualcomm and an engineer by training, said in an interview last week that WiMax needs significant upgrades to become a "world-class technology." Qualcomm offers a competing mobile technology.

He argued that WiMax, originally a fixed-wireless technology, does not handle mobility or real-time streaming well and noted that it cannot transit regular phone calls. "There's so much hype and misinformation about its capabilities," he said.

Executives at Sprint, Intel and Motorola disagree. They have said the primary obstacles in the development of WiMax have been overcome. And the fact that it wasn't designed for voice is a big plus, they say.

"WiMax was built from the ground up for data speed and isn't encumbered by technology compromises for backward compatibility [and did not begin its] life as a voice network that had data grafted on," Sprint spokesman John Polivka said.

In choosing WiMax, Sprint passed over the technology Qualcomm believes is better suited for quickly delivering video and other services over mobile networks. Qualcomm has championed MediaFlo, which uses broadcast airwaves as a fast, reliable and cost-effective solution. Verizon already offers mobile-video service to customers over the MediaFlo network, and AT&T has also signed on.

What's more, Qualcomm has patented the wireless technology known as CDMA that Sprint, Verizon and other carriers already use to carry voice traffic and enable subscribers to access the Internet, albeit at relatively slow speeds. If WiMax proves to be a good alternative for future networks, Qualcomm could lose out.

That's' why Qualcomm is exploring WiMax's potential, too. And, just to be on the safe side, AT&T and Verizon Wireless also are looking at WiMax. They have not as yet been won over, though, and continue to experiment with less costly alternatives.

"They're both being very careful about spending billions of dollars on unproven technology," Rethemeier said.

Another monthly bill?

Perhaps a larger question is how much demand exists for superfast mobile Internet connections. Certainly business customers would show an interest, and some consumers might as well.

Yet most Americans already have high-speed access in their homes through a cable or phone company. And a growing number already pay for voice calling and data services such as email on their mobile devices. Do a large number also want to pay another monthly fee so they can watch movies or sports on their wireless phones?

MTS Picks Ericsson, Nokia Siemens As 3G Suppliers

MOSCOW -(Dow Jones)- Russia's Mobile TeleSystemms (MTS), the country's largest mobile operator by users, said Thursday it has chosen Nokia Siemens Networks and Sweden's Ericsson to build its third-generation, or 3G, network.

Ericisson and Nokia Siemens Networks will be the only two companies building MTS' 3G network, a spokeswoman for the Russian operator said.

MTS declined to give any financial details for the deal.

MTS is one of three operators that this spring won licenses to operate 3G networks in Russia and is the first of the three to sign a contract for the supply of 3G equipment.

Unusual Accident Involving a Motorola Phone and a Mercedes Car

An unusual accident has been reported in Russia involving a Mercedes car and a Motorola mobile phone. It is illegal to drive a car while using a mobile phone without a hands-free kit, and the photos below do seem to show some justification for the ban.

More photos at EnglishRussia website

Latin American CDMA Decline Continues As Vivo GSM Service Takes off

n Q1 2007 the number of CDMA customers in Caribbean & Latin America (CALA) declined for the first time. Data for the second quarter shows that this was result was not a statistical aberration, but rather a consequence of the fact that almost all of the region's CDMA champions - including, most significantly, Vivo - have now chosen to adopt GSM technology.

After a 2.5% decline in the CDMA base in the first quarter, the total fell another 3.7% in the second quarter to reach 61.2m. In absolute terms, there were 2.4m disconnections on a net basis, of which slightly more than half were accounted for by Vivo. The CDMA disconnection rate at CALA's largest CDMA operator is accelerating, amounting as it did to 0.58m in August 2007 alone, after a similar figure in July. The adoption of GSM at Vivo saw more than 3m new connections made in Q2 2007, helping net additions to a new record of 23.84m in the quarter, almost 40% more than the total number of net additions at the continental level.

iDEN was the only other technology in use in the region to see growth in the period, with another 0.25m connections made. The AMPS/TDMA base declined by almost 20% between March and June, with 4.6m disconnections as customers switch in droves to GSM services.

At the end of Q2 2007, more than 75% of mobile customers in CALA used technologies from the GSM family, up from 62% a year earlier and 45% a year before that, as the total base exceeded a quarter of a billion. The Q2 2007 figure includes W-CDMA customers for the first time as the region's first 3GSM networks launched in Argentina and Mexico during the quarter. The contribution of the CDMA customer base to the overall total declined 5pp from 23% to 18% over the year to 30th June 2007, although the part of the base using EV-DO technology increased its contribution from 3.21% to 3.33% during the quarter as customer numbers rose by almost a million in the three month period. Meanwhile, the rapidly declining AMPS/TDMA group went from constituting 14% to just 5.6%.

At current rates, it is likely that the CALA customer base will be around 90% GSM by the end of the second quarter 2008.

Technique puts more data into airwaves - cellular telephone technology - Brief Article

As telecommunications designers add electronic mail and Internet access to cellular phones, they find it's like connecting a fire hose to a straw.

Each phone user's tiny slice of the airwaves is too narrow to handle the full deluge of available data.

Now, scientists at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., have found a way to boost the data-carrying capacity of each radio frequency as much as six-fold. They outline their scheme in the Jan. 18 NATURE.

Besides feeding more data into each cell-phone link, the development could expand telecommunications in other ways, says Lucent's Michael R. Andrews. For instance, wireless companies might pack more customers onto each radio channel.

To test the new approach, Andrews, Partha P. Mitra, and Robert deCarvalho recorded three independent electric signals encoding the red, green, and blue hues in a Joan Miro painting. Ordinarily, each signal would require a separate frequency But in their new scheme, the researchers transmitted those signals across a cafeteria at Bell Labs simultaneously on one frequency A receiver adapted for the new technique reproduced the Miro image from those signals.

Alfred O. Hero III of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor comments that the "intriguing and interesting" result stokes an already hot technology known as smart antennas. It provides a compact way to further increase capacity, he adds.

Smart-antenna pioneers have recently discovered that using 10 or so antennas at each transmission and receiving station can greatly increase the number of independent channels per radio frequency (SN: 7/15/00, p. 38). But the scheme works only in environments with many objects, such as buildings, that scatter radio waves. That way, each signal ends up taking several independent paths.

Although the signals arrive in a scrambled condition, sophisticated software untangles them by accounting for the effects of the different paths. So far, the technique has been unsuitable for handheld devices because it requires spacings between the multiple antennas that are wider than the devices themselves.

Andrews' team has now recognized that the scattering of radio waves not only multiplies the number of pathways they can take from transmitter to receiver. It also adds an extra information-carrying dimension to those waves.

Scientists have known since the 19th century that electromagnetic waves consist of electric and magnetic fields oriented, or polarized, along distinct directions in space. Therefore, polarization is a feature of every transmitted signal. Andrews says, however, that textbook explanations of electromagnetic waves preclude polarization along the same direction a wave travels, leaving only the up-down and left-right dimensions.

Not so, he and his Lucent colleagues have now found. When waves are scattered along multiple pathways, fields do polarize along the direction of travel. So, there are three polarization dimensions. The addition of the third permits the polarization of the electric and magnetic fields to vary independently. That means six separate polarization signals can be transmitted simultaneously on the same frequency.

What's more, exploiting these six newly recognized channels of a radio signal requires only one antenna, albeit a bristly one, at each end of the link. That simplicity may make the discovery applicable to handheld cell phones.

Protect VoIP and other Internet multimedia applications with these key management mechanisms

Key management is a fundamental part of protecting Internet multimedia applications such as VoIP, video on demand, conferencing, and others, but key management protocols are difficult to design. In this chapter download from Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures, study two methods, MIKEY and STRP Security Descriptions, that are currently implemented by vendors to support security requirements to provide authentication, confidentiality, and integrity of media streams. In addition, explore ZRTP, which is currently an IETF "draft" but is likely to become a viable solution for peer-to-peer confidentiality.

Key management is a fundamental part of protecting Internet multimedia applications such as VoIP, video on demand, conferencing, and others, but key management protocols are difficult to design. In this chapter download from Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures, study two methods, MIKEY and STRP Security Descriptions, that are currently implemented by vendors to support security requirements to provide authentication, confidentiality, and integrity of media streams. In addition, explore ZRTP, which is currently an IETF "draft" but is likely to become a viable solution for peer-to-peer confidentiality.

Title: Securing VoIP Networks: Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Countermeasures
Author: Peter Thermos, Ari Takanen
Publisher: Addison Wesley Professional
Chapter 7: Key Management Mechanisms
ISBN: 0-321-43734-9; Copyright 2008, Addison Wesley Professional. All rights reserved.
Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from Addison Wesley Professional

(Is this item miscategorized? Does it need more tags? Let us know.)

Format: PDF | Size: 1,076KB | Date: Sep 2007 | Version: 1.0 | System Requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or later | License: copyright | Downloads: 68

Learn how to handle legacy phone technologies when you move to VoIP

Get a look at how you can seemlessly and cost-effectively migrate voice technologies and applications such as fax, voice mail, interactive voice response, surveillance systems, and others to VoIP.

This chapter from the O'Reilly book Switching to VoIP opens by explaining, "When first designed, landline phone service was intended to carry sound signals, and its uses as a carrier of data were years away from realization. It's ironic that the technology that predated the telephone was itself a data transport technology: the telegraph. This device carried encoded messages from terminal to terminal across the 19th-century equivalent of a peer-to-peer network.

A lifetime later, in the 1960s, sound-encoding devices emerged, and, very soon, computers were able to send data, represented as sound, across the telephone network. Those devices were modems, and later fax machines—the descendants of the telegraph. Modems, fax machines, voice mail systems, emergency 911 service, and a slew of other messaging tools evolved around the international telephone network.

Today voice and data networks converge and VoIP begins to replace Bell's brainchild.IP telephony has the same fundamental goal as legacy telephony: facilitate human interaction at a distance. But, since IP telephony goes about this goal differently, not all of the specialized devices that evolved around the old system work with the new one. Fax machines, modems, and voice mail systems aren't necessarily compatible with VoIP, because they grew into a mold that was shaped by the old network.

In this chapter, we'll cover some of the great legacy technologies we've come to rely on and discuss ways of migrating their functionality to the converged network."

Multi-Tech Shipping Cellular Routers for Industrial Control and Management

Includes Wi-Fi Models

MINNEAPOLIS, SEPTEMBER 11, 2007 — Multi-Tech® Systems, Inc., a leading data communications technology company, based in suburban Minneapolis, is announcing new products that enable secure management and control of remote devices using EDGE or CDMA cellular communications. The new RF825 series cellular-based industrial routers are part of the Multi-Tech RouteFinder® Internet Security Appliance family. They are industrial security devices for companies that need secure M2M communication over cellular networks. Using the new RF825 routers M2M applications can control and manage multiple devices over a single cellular connection with the added security of using Virtual Private Network (VPN) communications.

"We've married our wireless modems with our routers to address customers' needs for secure communications in M2M environments," states Dan Nelson Vice-President of Sales, North America for Multi-Tech Systems, Inc. "The RF825 series RouteFinder allows multiple remote devices to be managed over a single VPN secured cellular connection. The devices can be Ethernet wired or connected via an optional integrated Wi-Fi® access point."

The new RouteFinder RF825 Internet Security Appliances feature 15 IPSec or PPTP VPN tunnels, EDGE or CDMA integral modems, strong 3DES and AES encryption, optional 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, built-in 4-port 10/100M bps switch, stateful Packet Inspection firewall, built-in dynamic DNS client, protection against Denial of Service (Dos) attacks and Internet access control tools providing client and site filtering.

Multi-Tech Systems is an ISO 9001:2000 certified global manufacturer of telephony, Internet and device networking products connecting voice and data over IP networks. Multi-Tech Systems has 75 U.S. patents and numerous international patents. Contact Multi-Tech in the U.S. at 800/328-9717 or +763/785-3500, via fax at +763/785-9874, EMEA at T: +(44) 118 959 7774 (UK) or T: +(33) 1 49 19 22 06 (France), or via fax at F: +(44) 118 959 7775 (UK) or F: +(33) 1 49 19 21 00 (France) or at http://www.multitech.com.

Multi-Tech and Multi-Tech product names referred to in this news release are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Multi-Tech Systems, Inc. Other company names and their products mentioned in this news release may be the trademarks of their respective companies.

Multi-Tech Shows IT Gateways at GITEX in Dubai

Featuring VoIP and Fax Internet plus Cellular to PBX Gateways

MINNEAPOLIS, SEPTEMBER 8, 2007 — Multi-Tech® Systems, Inc., a leading data communications technology company, based in suburban Minneapolis, will be showcasing its full line of business communications solutions at this year’s GITEX Business Solutions exhibition in Dubai, UAE (September 8^th to 12^th). Featured products will include the MultiVOIP^® VoIP gateway, FaxFinder^® networked fax server, CallFinder^® cellular-to-PBX gateway and RouteFinder® SOHO Internet Security Appliance ideal for small branch offices. Multi-Tech Systems will be exhibiting its products at the International Convention & Exhibition Center Data Processing Sys Stand Z-Q10.

"GITEX technology week is all about building interest in the Middle-East technical business sector," states Dilip Mistry, Managing Director Multi-Tech Systems EMEA. "To meet that mission, Multi-Tech is showing four of our most popular small business telecommunications solutions. Multi-Tech has been in the business of providing business communications solutions from its very beginning over 35 years ago. At this year’s GITEX exhibition we will be showing gateways that leverage a single IP network to support voice and data providing cost savings and increased productivity, network fax servers that send and receive documents to desktops for added security and efficiency, cellular gateways that route incoming and outgoing fixed-line calls through lower-cost wireless networks and Internet security appliances that help protect business communications. We invite you to visit Multi-Tech at this event to find out how our solutions can better serve your upcoming SME business needs."

CallFinder GSM and CDMA cellular gateways connect to a PBX trunk line, PBX extension line, or a single PSTN line, and route incoming and outgoing calls through a GSM or CDMA wireless network. Equipped with FXS and FXO interfaces, the gateways offer a wide range of potential applications.

The FaxFinder fax server is a turnkey solution that connects to an analog port(s) of a PBX capable of DID-to-DTMF conversion. It converts faxes to PDF or TIFF files allowing you, wherever you are, to receive faxes as e-mails and send faxes from any application that can print.

Multi-Tech VoIP gateways and servers come in different types: The MultiVOIP gateway can connect dissimilar and/or proprietary telephone equipment while extending PBX features and functionality over a WAN, the MultiVOIP SS SIP survivable gateway and server connects up to 20 branch office employees/phones integrated into a centralized SIP server network, and the MultiVOIP AV survivable H.323 gateway for Avaya Communication Manager environments is ideal for small branch offices (1-15 phones/employees) as the alternate gatekeeper for IP phones.

The RouteFinder SOHO Security Appliances are ideal for small branch offices that need secure access to the corporate LAN while providing the convenience of off-premise connectivity utilizing cellular wireless communications. In addition to providing secure cellular connections, models also offer Wi-Fi connectivity, one or two WAN Ethernet ports for DSL or cable broadband Internet access, secure client-to-LAN and LAN-to-LAN connectivity, and Internet firewall services. The cellular models are available with EDGE or CDMA technologies.

Multi-Tech Systems is an ISO 9001:2000 certified global manufacturer of telephony, Internet and device networking products connecting voice and data over IP networks. Multi-Tech Systems has 75 U.S. patents and numerous international patents. Contact Multi-Tech in the U.S. at 800/328-9717 or +763/785-3500, via fax at +763/785-9874, EMEA at T: +(44) 118 959 7774 (UK) or T: +(33) 1 64 61 09 81 (France), or via fax at F: +(44) 118 959 7775 (UK) or F: +(33) 1 64 61 09 71 (France) or at http://www.multitech.com.