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Monday, October 29, 2001: Niki Taylor Update

Niki Taylor makes an amazing comeback. The story was here:

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/stories/

feature.cfm?instanceid=16579 (external link)

Interestingly, the photograph they use for the story wasn't taken at the event they describe. The photograph in fact is nearly three years old.

Thursday, June 28, 2001

I'm happy to report that Niki Taylor is now out of the hospital. Let's hope the wireless industry moves more cautiously to install their overly complicated, overly featured mobile devices into vehicles, for the sole reason of selling us more things. At the C.T.I.A. convention I attended last September I heard nothing about public safety, just speech after speech on how to market through wireless. Some of them are talking about safety now, although they are comparing the distraction a phone causes to the problems people have while eating, drinking, and smoking in a car. I think that's the wrong approach. The wireless community should look at what they do and how they do it and then work on what they control. Driving is the responsibility of the individual, but the design of a car plays a part in ones' driving. And if talking while mobile is permitted, the wireless industry needs to look at what role in driving that they play.

Tuesday, June 26, 2001

We got an unexpected rain storm in West Sacramento yesterday. It promptly caused power outages and the cable television system to break down. Speaking of breaking down, I am amazed with the difference between the voice and data networks the telephone company maintains. Here in SBC land, an outage to the voice network of several hours, whether wireless or wireline would be completely unacceptable, yet a data network they maintain goes down frequently without explanation or apology.

The public switched telephone network has always measured outages in minutes or seconds per year, yet with SBC's DSL network, well, the system goes off line for hours at a time.Why don't they have backup procedures installed for this service? Like redundant servers and routers? I understand other telcos across the country have similar problems. It's odd that as we march into the new century, with better and better technologies, that the quality of the telco networks is decreasing, not increasing.

I'm not sure what this will mean in the future, as services and businesses become more and more dependent on the internet and data com. Will we have to provide a backup system ourselves? So that if Pac Bell goes off line I connect to a cable modem, satellite, or other wireless service to keep my business on the net? This hasn't been needed in the past but I can see where it might be needed in the future. How odd.

June 22, 2001

Good news!, Niki Taylor is out of intensive care. The victim of a cell phone distracted driver, I am hoping she returns to her life and children soon. I've added a short page on buying cell phones and service plans (internal link). It has my thoughts and a link to Amazon.com, which offers a good way to buy wireless. On-line! I've not had a happy experience buying cellular over the counter for years, this is probably a better way for people like me. It's sad that such a good technology is sold in so poor a fashion.

June 21, 2001

It may reach 106 degrees today in the Great Central Valley of California. That's 41 degrees Celsius! This temperature is perhaps appropriate as today is the start of summer in the northern hemisphere. I've left a water hose running slightly in my yard, for the birds and squirrels to drink from. Have you seen Mars lately? It's now as close as it gets to earth. Take a look tonight, it is a wonderful sight, glowing brighter and redder (is that a word?) than I have ever seen it. Yesterday I posted the pages I describe just below. Oh, if you want to pretend that it is cooler, you can check out pictures from my hike along Horsetail Falls (internal link). I wish today that I was in the mountains.

June 20, 2001

I've just posted small sketches of different transmission and switching schemes (internal link). See if they make any sense. :-)

June 19, 2001

It might seem easy to compare the growth of the original, wired telephone network to the growth of wireless networks but that isn't the case. Cellular was possible only because a wired telephone network was already in place. Cellular would never have grown the way it did if no connection to the PSTN did not exist, all you would have is a business radio system or citizens' band radio, point to point communications, mobile to mobile customers, all operating within a small geographical area. Useful, but how could it grow beyond a certain point? So to compare the last 17 years of growth in commercial cellular to something else you might contrast it with other services offered during that time, like caller ID, call forwarding, three way calling, and so on. How many people signed up for those services compared to the installed telephone base? Then, how many people signed up for wireless during that time?

The problem is that these services are so dissimilar, and of such varying utility, that comparisons might not teach you anything. It might be more instructive to reach back to the Citizens' Band radio craze of the mid 1970's, to see how many radios were sold within just a few short years, that is, comparing the growth of personal communications back then and now. C.B. radios were wildly popular although they didn't connect to the telephone system unless someone manually patched a call. I've read Bell Labs literature stating that one in ten American vehicles had a two way radio during these years, why wireless folks were surprised by the growth in cellular I do not know. One reason of course was cost, with C.B. radios available at less than a hundred dollars, while cellular radios were well over a thousand. Too many things to research!

June 18, 2001

I'm reading up on the main packet switching technologies, ATM, frame relay, X.25, and TCP/IP, as well as the major transmission techniques, T-Carrier and SONET. I hope to have a page on each topic, with a paragraph or two of my writing as a summary, and then links to relevant .pdf files or URLs. I'm also rethinking my views on mobile telephone R&D during World War II. Rather than being put on hold, only civilian uses weren't addressed, but the mobile radio art itself was much advanced, with F.M. made practical and tank and handheld radios pointing out lines of development for later consumer equipment. Anyone researching mobile telephone history, therefore, needs to look closely at military radio work during World War II. The things I think about over a weekend! :-)

Hey, you people need to get back to work. Here's a chart showing the ten top domains for last Friday. On Thursday NASA had 58 individuals looking for information. No, I have no idea what they were looking for, my tracking software can't tell what pages individual visitors by domain are looking at. You can view this site's statistics by clicking here.

June 16, 2001

Saw yet another article on how wireless promoters have over promised cellular and that people continue to be mad over the most basic problem, dropped calls. You cannot build out a cellular network, possibly at any price, so much that it will not drop calls. Years ago I read the obvious in The Ericsson Review: developers and wireless carriers needed to allow for dropped calls since broken connections are inevitable in a wireless world. So if you were downloading a file from the office and your call was dropped, well, once back in range the call would connect again and the file would resume downloading at the point it stopped. Let's hope the wireless community spends more money on continuity since they can't guarantee connectivity.

June 13, 2001

I'm continuing to add pages and links, despite having to flee during the day while the roof on my house gets redone. Check out the links above, you'll notice files on Bluetooth, 3G, and paging. While I haven't written much on those subjects, I have come up with a way to get you more information on them. Will revise more pages this evening. I recently changed the IS-136 page (internal link) to reflect that AT&T will be moving from that technology to another TDMA based system, GSM, in the mid to long term. Also added a link to a big .pdf file all about IS-136 in case you want to read up.

June 12, 2001

I'm far too deep into debt to have done this but I pulled my credit card out again yesterday. Eighty dollars disappeared quickly as I bought three volumes in the United States Army in World War II series. Prepared by the Office of The Chief of Military History, Department of the Army in 1954, and reprinted in 1971, it is the officially sanctioned history of action in World War II. My volumes detail the Signal Corps' accomplishments and the reasons behind the communications choices they made. Want to understand the rise of F.M. during the Second World War? Or are you looking for a combination of communications and adventure? (Aren't we all?) Then you have to read this series. I had seen one of these volumes at a U.C. Davis library before, but did not think I'd have a chance to buy the group. Then I just had to walk into a used bookstore yesterday. Oh, well. You may be able to find these volumes through the net. My choice for used books is http://www.abe.com (external link). ABE is a service that puts the inventory of hundreds of independent bookstores on-line for you to search. A great resource.

June 11, 2001

The next few days won't be productive for me. My house is getting re-roofed and I will need to move out during the day. I could probably live with the noise of hammers and saws but my cat can't, and I will have to take him to another house, a quiet place, to spend the time.

June 9, 2001

Slugging away at revising many pages. I'm adding .pdf files from other authors as need be, as well as providing links to Amazon.com if those writers have works in print.

June 8, 2001

Modulation is the way we shape a radio wave. Transmission is the way we send information over that shaped radio wave. Huh? Just musing as I revise the digital wireless basics and the cellular telephone basics series. Can't believe how many corrections and additions are necessary. I'm also putting in links to .pdf files of book chapters and pages that may help you understand the subjects I'm discussing better. This may all sound dry but it is standard web site work. My goal is to have helpful .pdf files on each page of my major series; much nicer than links to other web sites which too soon disappear and leave you with a "file not found error" when you click on them. I hate those 404s! Oh, when do you think the cellular radio idea first appeared in print? I say 1945. Check out my reasons at this page and feel free to tell me if you think I'm not correct.

June 7, 2001

Working around the edges on a number of pages, adding a paragraph here, revising a sentence there. Nothing dramatic to report. Adding book recommendations to some pages, where the book relates to the material in the web page and where there is a sample chapter available. So that if you are confused by modulation, you might see a book choice that deals with it and then find a .pdf file from that book which you can then download. In the future I'd like to recommend only books which give us a look at their content.

June 6, 2001

Still in the middle of making some pages. I'll probably have some done today. Need a simple introduction to cellular? Download this chapter in .pdf from Professor Noll's Introduction to Telephone Systems. And for a fascinating look at communicating with lasers, on a budget, click here.

June 5, 2001

I'm in the middle of making some more pages. I won't have anything to report on until I finish with them, probably tomorrow. I have updated the I-Mode page, along with putting up a page on the Toshiba chip set that will enable the I-Mode's video capabilities. Thanks for checking back.

June 2, 2001

It's a beautiful Saturday morning in the great central valley of California. There is a large woodpecker working in my neighborhood and it is a delight to hear him. Ordinarily I would go on a hike today but I am having some minor foot problems and will probably not go. The day is too beautiful to waste, however, so I am probably going to take a drive. Toying around with the format for this page and working on the cellular basics series. Oh, did you know that in Explorer you can "subscribe" to a page and thus get notified by e-mail when that page is updated? So if there is a favorite page or two at this website you can get told of the changes automatically. Here's the URL to learn how to do it. A pretty slick feature, The link was here:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q171/2/27.ASP

June 1, 2001

Was busily working on many projects yesterday when I got distracted with the new Young and Modern. Ignoring their usual mix of articles on cute surfer boys, fashion, and teenage angst, this issue went majorly telecom, with even your editor making a contribution. Make sure to pick it up on your newstand now, or click here to read all the cover details. Am working on the cellular basics article today, waiting on e-mail from potential sponsors, the majority of my polite questions never answered. Anyone care to tell me why I deserve this treatment? Just wondering . . .

May 28, 2001

Hope you all had a great weekend. On some pages at this site I've written incorrectly that GSM can use CDMA as a transmission technique. GSM, though, was built from the beginning to use TDMA, time division multiple access, and not another method. Please let me know if you find this mistake in any of my writing, I will be grateful. One reason for my mistake is that I haven't written anything on GSM, another is the term personal communication service.

PCS or personal communication service is an FCC term for the 1900Mhz band and a marketing phrase that causes much confusion. Some carriers like Pacific Bell operate the TDMA based GSM at 1900 Mhz. They call their service not GSM but PCS. Sprint uses a different technology, IS-95, to also provide cellular radio at 1900 Mhz. It's a CDMA based operating system. So, although different services within the PCS band may use one technique or the other, depending on what transmission technique they were designed to use, no system may use both. Confusing enough? I'll say. If you are really interested in GSM and PCS, download Professor Levine's file in .pdf, it's a great introduction to cellular radio.

May 23, 2001

Dave Mock has revised and updated the Wireless Investing documents he sells, check out his page at privateline.com. Also, Dave and I have decided to make free the .pdf file of my Telephone History Series. No more laborious printing off the web. Download the 1.7 meg file by going here. A kind reader has sent me many good comments regarding GSM/PCS, I will need to revise several sentences in my digital wireless basics series. I wish I had time to do an entire article on GSM but that's one project that must wait, download Levine's .pdf file on the subject instead. The main point? True GSM is entirely TDMA based, while American PCS systems are of two different kinds, higher frequency GSM and IS-95. Only the IS-95 system is CDMA based. True GSM, that import from European, is by definition a time based system and cannot be otherwise. Again, it will be a while before I can get the several pages needing revision redone.

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