Telecommunications

Discarded and left-for-dead, old TV broadcast channels (called “white spaces”) that have been freed up by the transition to digital TV in the U.S. are being given new life and used to wirelessly deliver high-speed Internet connectivity to business, education and community users. Under an experimental license granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Spectrum Bridge designed and deployed a wireless TV white spaces network to distribute broadband Internet connectivity in Claudville, Virginia. To ensure the local residents make the most of this new high-speed connectivity, Dell, Microsoft and the TDF Foundation have contributed software and hardware to the local school and the town’s new computer center.  Read More

A new technology that applies the same principles used by ADSL to improve the capacity of data transfer over copper and wireless broadband could potentially increase the data capacity of optical fiber cables tenfold. It’s creators say the technology, known as optical Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (oOFDM), offers an inexpensive way drastically boost the capacity of increasingly strained broadband networks and improve download times around the world.  Read More

The European Commission has announced the official start of operations of the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), a satellite based augmentation system (SBAS) that improves the accuracy of the current US Global Positioning System (GPS) and Russian GLONASS system signals from about ten meters to two meters. Like the U.S. GPS, the EGNOS Open Service is accessible free of charge to any user equipped with a GPS/SBAS compatible receiver within the EGNOS coverage area, which includes most European states and has the built-in capability to be extended to other regions, such as North Africa and EU neighboring countries. Most receivers sold today in Europe meet that requirement.  Read More

Motorola is demonstrating a TD-LTE mobile networking solution on behalf of China Mobile at ITU Telecom World in Geneva that delivers high-definition video, GPS navigation, video conferencing and high-speed Internet browsing to a moving vehicle. In addition to the world’s first live 2.6GHz TD-LTE (Time Division Duplex Long-Term Evolution ) drive demonstration, the technology will be showcased at the China Mobile booth with a downlink speed up to 112 megabits per second (Mbps).  Read More

Michael Bennett-Levy's extraordinary collection of early technologies went under the hammer at Bonhams in London on Wednesday with 90% of the 758 lots on offer sold for a total of £683,384. A tidy sum no doubt, but having had the opportunity to examine the treasure trove closely, and the benefit of speaking at length to Bennett-Levy about the significance of key items, we can't help but conclude that many pieces were a steal for shrewd investors. The largest privately held collection of early televisions in the world - including 26 pre-war sets - made up a large slice of the auction and in the first of a series of interviews, Michael Bennett-Levy talks to Gizmag about outstanding items in his collection, starting with the much sought after Teleavia type P111, a rare 1958 console-stand television by Citroën DS designer Flaminio Bertroni that was not only a hallmark in style, but also one of the earliest examples of high-definition TV.  Read More

At the risk of sounding antiquated, it doesn’t seem so long ago that a face-to-face business meeting involved one or both parties having to jump on an airplane. Teleconferencing helped a little but video conferencing certainly changed the way we do business - although the expense often meant that it was used sparingly. HP has just introduced new videoconferencing software that it claims is not only high-definition and offers live-real-time collaboration, it is also affordable and has no subscription fees.  Read More

Full HD video conferencing has been available for some time - provided you can afford to spend over $20,000 on a product like Cisco's TelePresence 500. Until now that is. FaceVsion's FXexpress Pro is an ExpressCard-based hardware accelerator with an HDMI input, capable of encoding and decoding 1080p H.264 video at 30 frames per second in real-time for 1080p video conferencing - and it's available for under $200. Gizmag's Tim Hanlon talked to Facevsion at IFA 2009 - click through for the video.  Read More

When eBay bought Skype from Joltid in 2005, the whopping US$2.6 billion price tag didn't include the Global Index peer-to-peer software that the world's biggest Internet Telephony system is based on. And now, Joltid is trying to cancel Skype's license on the Global Index technology in a move that threatens to shut Skype down once and for all. Is it just a canny commercial chess move to force eBay to sell Skype back to Joltid at a huge discount - or is it the end of Skype as we know it?  Read More

Devastating wildfires are burning around the Mediterranean this summer and down south, Australia is still recovering from its worst wildfire season in history in which more than 150 lives and 1800 homes were lost on ‘Black Saturday’. Telecommunications are paramount to helping save lives and direct fire-fighting efforts in wildfires but unfortunately, infrastructure such as mobile and fixed line phones and Internet services are often early casualties in fire ravaged areas. The country’s major telco, Telstra, has launched a portable solution to this issue with the unveiling of a AUD$200,000 Mobile Exchange on Wheels (MEOW) which can be quickly deployed to provide temporary fixed-line communications including broadband.  Read More