Season Scope.

This looks like an interesting desktop app… If only they had it for Linux

Well, we jumped off the deep end today and dropped our landline connection. We got the Ooma Telo a few weeks ago, tried it out and thought it worked and sounded OK.  Then we requested to port our current phone number to Ooma. I figure that the Ooma will pay for itself in less than a year if we dropped Qwest.   Today I went out to the box on the side of the house and disconnected from the phone network. I plugged Ooma into the house wiring and now all the phones in the house are running through Ooma.

After a lifetime wired into the network, it will be interesting to see what happens. We are on a MMDS broadband wireless connection to the internet  so the only physical connection to the grid is the electricity. Ooma will redirect calls to our cell phone if the network connection is down so I am expecting a some redundant connectivity. Of course, if a power loss drops our MMDS tower, it may drop the cell phone tower as well, and then where would we be?  And all the electricity in the phone lines will be laughing at us.

If you don’t hear anything more from me on this then everything is going so smoothly I have forgotten all about it.

Curiosity Cam, Ustream.TV: Aquarius news briefing: Join us on http://ustream.tv/NASAJPL2 for a live news briefing on NASA’s first mission to measure ocean ….

Very interesting. Of course they want you to pay for anything good…

Pipl – People Search.

Someone asked me this weekend about 4G Wireless; Wikipedia has a good basic description. (Plus I also watched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet this weekend (OK, it is Shakespeare’s Hamlet – as interpreted by Branagh) Excellent DVD)

ITU Requirements

This article uses 4G to refer to IMT-Advanced (International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced), as defined by ITU-R. An IMT-Advanced cellular system must fulfill the following requirements:

• All-IP communications.
• Peak data rates of up to approximately 100 Mbit/s for high mobility such as mobile access and up to approximately 1 Gbit/s for low mobility such as nomadic/local wireless access, according to the ITU requirements.
• Scalable channel bandwidth, between 5 and 20 MHz, optionally up to 40 MHz.^[6][6][7]
• Peak link spectral efficiency of 15 bit/s/Hz in the downlink, and 6.75 bit/s/Hz in the uplink (meaning that 1 Gbit/s in the downlink should be possible over less than 67 MHz bandwidth)
• System spectral efficiency of up to 3 bit/s/Hz/cell in the downlink and 2.25 bit/s/Hz/cell for indoor usage^[6]

Confusion has often been caused by some mobile carriers who have launched products advertised as 4G but which are actually current so-called 3.9G technologies, and therefore do not follow the ITU-R defined principles for 4G standards.