Of course VOIP will become successful. Most people aren't concerned about voice quality, 911 availability, and backup power requirements when choosing a phone or calling plan. People will be happy with mediocre connections as long as they can communicate. J.R. Snyder (internal link) points out early telephone users put up with worse: calls going out when it rained, party lines (internal link) where only one person out of perhaps 12 could make a call at a time, and noise so bad that you could barely hear. But do we have to go backwards? Isn't technology advancing? It is. To more efficiently make and process calls that sound bad, that can't be located, and die when the power dies. :-) Telecom doesn't always move forward in the direction we want. I'll give a negative example from the past and then mention a positive development for the future.

Cellular callers often sound like Donald Duck in a tin can because carriers went digital to increase their network capacity. They'd run out of spectrum and needed to carry more calls using the same frequencies. Digital by itself does not decrease bandwidth, actually it increases it (internal link), but you gain channel capacity when you tightly compress and multiplex those calls. Now you have three calls on every frequency and, well, quack, quack, quack. Since digital signals don't go as far as analog and aren't as robust, coverage suffered as well. More dropped calls, more clipped conversations. But high capacity cellular systems could not exist today unless they were digital. The old analog networks couldn't meet demand and there isn't any way they could have paid for themselves with those comparatively few callers. There's the rub. We advance, we go backwards. Speaking of advance, have you heard of Skype?

Skype.com (external link) offers VOIP without a switch. It cuts out this formerly necessary component, needed almost since telephony began, by using peer to peer networking. PCs talking to other PCs, using PCs to connect. Very clever. They claim better audio quality than landline telephones. How? Since they base their network on DSL anchored PCs they'd have 128kbs paths to put voice on. Landline telephone circuits by comparison are allocated 64kbs. As long as the call is PC to PC it should sound good. But as soon as the call hits the Public Switched Telephone Network then quality will start to fall apart. Still, that's beyond their control, they have a good idea, and a method using a higher standard than, "Well, what can we get away with?"

Tomorrow: more VOIP rambling and the regulatory issues that threaten it.

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Many wireless phone problems now come to wired telephones, thanks to voice over internet protocol or VOIP. Digital cellular telephones provide more features than analog models but deliver poorer audio quality and suffer more dropped calls. VOIP features seem endless, would you like a real time transcript of your call appearing on a web page?, but its packet switching means echoes, delays, and poor quality sound. Locating any cell phone caller's position in an emergency is difficult, same now with VOIP landline telephones. A cell site might go dead after a few hours from a blackout, making your mobile useless. Same thing with your internet phone unless you provide backup power to your computer and cable modem. What does this all mean?

We now treat our communication systems as works in progress, adjusting and fine tuning them as we go, instead of presenting them to customers as mature technologies. I'm not criticizing this approach necessarily, it may now be the only way to advance the art, but we are approaching a safety and quality limit. Imagine this din and confusion: A pre-paid cellular call using highly compressed voice placed to an internet phone that is also a cordless. Or witness the future now, call a mobile user in Beirut with a cheap pre-paid phone card. You can hardly communicate. Is this the audio and connectivity quality we want? Is it safe? Despite technology steadily advancing will voice end up sounding like bad CB radio? And reliability as certain? More tomorrow, but for background, in you're interested, read my dated but still serviceable article on circuit and packet switching. (internal link).

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The days of the wireless crank aren't over. There's a company called Gaiacomm International that is positively whacky. It's New Age thinking for radio. At least their material is pHun to read. But investors beware:

"Our goal is to have data rates up to 100 Tbps, tera-bits-per-sec. New design techniques, however, are needed to make this happen at our desired target of one-tenth the cost of 3G. The move to GWC is complicated by attempts to standardize on a single 3G protocol. Without a single standard on which to build, designers face significant additional challenges. We will define a new 4G protocol thus removing any challenge or debate."

100 terabytes a second, eh? And they will define a standard by themselves for everyone else? Right.

"GWC is intended to provide high speed; high capacity, low cost per bit, IP based services, fiberoptic wireless connection and a truly global wireless communications system operating in frequency ranges that surpass all other telecommunication companies on planet earth."

Nice claim. Prove it.

"[Our technology] will allow enlightened minds to devote themselves into other areas of intellectual and technical enquiry. By encouraging a transparent exchange of information, peace and goodwill will undoubtedly be fostered."

I feel better already. But wait! There's more!:

"We could install our imaging technology at any port where cargo shipments from terrorists could be a problem, combine it with fail-safe detection software and within 90 seconds, scan over ten thousand parcels in an area the size of a football field and identify every weapon of mass destruction, terrorist device and pathogen known to the software."

And this bit of ego and insanity sums it up:

"Gaiacomm International Corporation has developed and refined a communications system that is virtually wireless on all fronts. By using the natural frequencies generated by the Earth and other bodies, Gaiacomm determined that it is scientifically possible globally to transmit a signal of any strength to all parts of the planet up to and including inner space and outer space. In all respects, this means that a form of sub-space communications has been discovered using the governing dynamics existing in the electromagnetic spectrum that radiates globally and interstellar in all forms, including the sought after 'Dark Matter' radiation."

Sheesh. Although Tesla made some outrageous claims he was a brilliant engineer with solid achievements, especially in power generation. You can't entirely ignore someone like that. Same way with Arraycomm.com. You wouldn't spend time considering their original inflated capacity claims except that Martin Cooper is on their team. So, you have to look at their technology. But Gaiacomm? Well, at least they're entertaining.

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Q. How can I get a wireless company to place a tower on my property? I'd like to get the monthly rent payments.

A. I'm sorry but there's little you can do. Carriers perform engineering studies to show them where best to place their cell sites. They rarely consult a list of available properties, rather, they find an area their computers and people tell them to go, then they seek a nearby landowner. Getting a lease is like winning a lottery. I don't mean to sound negative but I don't want your hopes raised or your money spent on chasing a wild dream. If you have been contacted by a carrier, want to sell your existing cell site lease, or just want to read more about the process, click below:

http://www.privateline.com/Cellbasics/leasinginfo.htm (internal link)

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AT&T's recent decision to end soliciting residential long distance service makes me think of the great difference between the largest employer of the Old Economy and that of the New.

In 1976 the Bell System employed over one million people, a figure only recently surpassed by WalMart. AT&T's work force was well paid, union, mostly skilled, and full time. Some fabrication, mostly service. WalMart's entry level employees are by comparison poorly paid, part time, all service, and non-union. WalMart's full time people do enjoy profit sharing, so greater money might be had than in the old Bell System. But that money is theoretical and far away, and definitely less certain than AT&T's well funded retirement program. On the positive side, advancement at WalMart seems comparable to AT&T's career track, you might manage a store in just a few years, and living in the same area also seems possible. Lifetime employees with the Bell System were frequently moved around the country to experience different work. Econmic class distinction is also different. Twenty five years ago everyone knew someone who worked for The Phone Company. I don't know anyone now that knows someone who works for WalMart.

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Responding to yesterday's notes, a man who used to acquire properties for the wireless industry reflects on his former career. He must remain anonymous:

"We as an industry have taken way too many liberties with communities and landowners, siting towers where ever we saw fit with absolutely no regard for the most suitable location, instead finding the cheapest or the easiest to get property that allowed us to reach our paypoint. We then bullied our way through zoning hearings or found an area where the residents could or would not object (often because they were uneducated or poor). We brought lawyers into hearings in small towns that could not afford to litigate and, without saying so, threatened to bankrupt their city coffers with lawsuits until they gave in.

"Carriers would hire anyone to do site acquisition and then fight back with lies and engineering malarkey to justify a particular site. I once had a rep from General Dynamics stand next to me at a hearing and say that they could not move a proposed tower 30 feet because of the specific RF engineering requirements needed. When asked the same question by the board about my client, I punted, probably continuing the nonsense. I said my company did not have the same problem but that I could not speak for the engineers of another firm."

"One of the practices I fully disagreed with from a site ac perspective was that of liberally replacing the site sketch in the lease with a completely different site design at a later date. Then relying upon lease language that allowed such a liberal change to beat the landowner complaints down. I no longer do much work for the carriers."

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Q. Dear Mark van der Hoek (internal link):

A wireless company wants to build a tower near me and I am opposed. They say they need this cell site to comply with their FCC coverage requirements. Is this true?

A. Whether this particular site is needed is a complex question, and cannot be answered by second guessing. Without a complete knowledge of the rest of their network build plan, it's simply impossible to judge the necessity of a particular location.

Cellular and PCS companies are not evil maniacs who delight in ruining neigborhoods by putting up as many towers as possible. On the contrary, they are businesses interested in making a profit. Every tower typically represents a half million dollar investment and they do not want to put up any more than they absolutely have to.

Left to themselves, cellular companies will build the most efficient network they can, covering the largest population with as few sites as possible consistent with good quality. But as they get pushed here and there by NIMBY (not in my back yard) problems, the ideal design cannot be realized, and they wind up building more sites overall.

One other thing they don't like to do - build stealth towers. They can be very expensive. I don't know if a stealth application would be feasible here, but it's worth looking into. A flagpole type tower can be used (external link) if they are proposing anything under an 80' tower. Most people find these designs more agreeable. Higher than that, though, and stealth designs are not usually workable. There are a few 100' flagpoles around, but soil conditions and other problems can be very tricky to deal with.

As to an FCC coverage requirement, this is difficult to say. If they are PCS in that area (meaning they operate in the 1900 MHz band), they are covered under CFR47, Part 24.2XX The specific section is CFR46 Part 22.203 Depending on the license, this specifies one of two coverage requirements.

1. For 30 MHz licensees: "must serve with a signal level sufficient to provide adequate service to at least one-third of the population in their licensed area within five years of being licensed and two-thirds of the population in their licensed area within 10 years of being licensed."

2. For 10 MHz licensees: "must serve with a signal level sufficient to provide adequate service to at east one-quarter of the population in their licensed area within five years of being licensed, or make a showing of substantial service in their licensed area within five years of being licensed."

Failure to meet these requirements results in forfeiture of the license, so it's not trivial! It's highly unlikely that they are operating on a cellular (850MHz band) license, as these were built out long ago. Those regulations are found in CFR47 Part 22.9XX.

I hope that helps!

Regards,

Mark van der Hoek

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A patent for playing with a cat using a laser pointer. Vital details below.

Click to enlarge

Here's just some of this very silly patent:

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Method of exercising a cat

Abstract

A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Technical Field

The present invention relates to recreational and amusement devices for domestic animals and, more particularly, to a method for exercising and entertaining cats.

2. Discussion of the Prior Art

Cats are not characteristically disposed toward voluntary aerobic exercise. It becomes the burden of the cat owner to create situations of sufficient interest to the feline to induce even short-lived and modest exertion for the health and well-being of the pet. Cats are, however, fascinated by light and enthralled by unpredictable jumpy movements, as for instance, by the bobbing end of a piece of hand-held string or yarn, or a ball rolling and bouncing across a floor. Intense sunlight reflected from a mirror or focused through a prism, if the room is sufficiently dark, will, when moved irregularly, cause even the more sedentary of cats to scamper after the lighted image in an amusing and therapeutic game of "cat and mouse." The disruption of having to darken a room to stage a cat workout and the uncertainty of collecting a convenient sunbeam in a lens or mirror render these approaches to establishing a regular life-enhancing cat exercise routine inconvenient at best.

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Look up the rest of this patent at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (external link).

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Q. Why is America so far behind the world with things like SMS and full color screens?

A. Our marketing people aren't as hip and we've had technology and regulatory problems.

I think short message service is part of conventional cellular, IS-136 (internal link), just as it is with GSM (internal link). But text messaging's popularity started on its own overseas, with no carrier seeing its potential or working to develop it. The wireless industry instead put its time into developing WAP (internal link), only to have that ignored and customers instead choosing a service they really liked: SMS. The same thing happened in wireline. The telcos favored ISDN, took over fifteen years to bring it out, then watched it get overtaken by DSL (internal link) in less than two years. They couldn't get out ISDN at all, now they can't deploy DSL fast enough. At least overseas operators recognized the SMS trend when it started, American marketing did not. We now watch what the Japanese and Europeans do with services, then follow.

If not with services, America still leads with technology. CDMA is The Future and our wireless companies developing transmission schemes are first class. But aside from marketing, why do we lag with services and handsets?

America has been behind the world ever since it went digital. The FCC required conventional cellular to handle even the oldest analog mobile, so IS-136 had to incorporate new features while working with legacy models. IS-136 had to be a digital or analog system when needed. That made it tough to compete with GSM which was all digital from the start, with no old phones to accommodate. We were still working on improving the Studebaker, trying to put a new tail pipe on it, while the Europeans were working on a flying car.

In America, while GSM was gaining subscribers around the globe, the FCC did not allocate frequency space for GSM/PCS for years later than it should have taken. GSM can also change service more quickly because it is a smart card system. The SIM or subscriber information module (internal link) stores customer info on an easily changed card . . . Arrrgh! I could write about this stuff for hours. I will stop now, perhaps more tomorrow.

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Q. We are an operator services department. How do we get updated inward codes for assistance through other carriers? We have some codes but most are outdated and do not work. We tried to buy a list from AT&T but they won't sell. Is this the only way?

Smarty Jones replies . . .

A. I can't provide you with the Inward codes themselves but can offer a probable explanation of the difficulty you're having. I hope it's not too discouraging or long winded. First, AT&T considers the other carriers as competitors, they no longer consider themselves a corporate citizen in the public interest, and that's probably why they will not sell you inward routing codes. In today's environment I suppose that can be understood. [Continues here (internal link)]

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France Telecom and designer Elisabeth de Senneville are working on clothing with electronic displays enabled by wireless technology. The prototype screen removes and runs four hours on a charge. Although some public good may come from this I suspect advertisers will promote it. Perhaps one could lower their cellular bill by wearing a Pepsi Logo on their shirt. Or perhaps ads would change depending on where the subscriber went. Since gambling and porn drive most new development on the net I await to see what those industries do with this new toy. Click on the images below.

From the press release:

"The screen is connected to a mobile phone via a Bluetooth link, so drawings and animations can be sent by MMS to another user with the same equipment. Thanks to a dedicated embedded software application, the mobile can be used as a remote control to activate the screen's functionalities: adjust the brightness, select the image or text to be displayed, enter text, draw simple animated visuals, download animations from the Internet, etc. A more sophisticated animation editor has been produced to allow professionals to market their own animations, which will be online and downloadable via the Internet from a mobile phone."

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Coast to coast telephone service began in 1915. (internal link) Professor Michael Noll, writing in Signals: The Science of Telecommunications, [1990, Scientific American Library] says a three minute call cost $22.20. That's $411.47 in 2004 dollars. That adjusted figure comes from this easy to use Cost-of-Living Calculator: http://www.aier.org/cgi-aier/colcalculator.cgi (external link)

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The ugliest cell site of the month. Click to enlarge. Geoff Fors' friend Ray sent him this image from Jordan above the Dead Sea. Israel is in the distance. Geoff says, I think this site uses a microwave MUX to transfer traffic to the actual switch, as far as I know. There is a highway below the site and the site serves that highway corridor, which is a route to Iraq and Saudi. Israel can be seen across the water. No plants, weeds, or anything green. The armed guard lives inside and cooks his food on a propane stove right next to the battery rack (!). At the time the photo taken, the temperature was about 120 degrees. (45+C) It's probably one of the few air conditioned living spaces in Jordan.

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Geoff Fors (internal link) checks in with quick comments on television and movies showing old-style car telephones: Click on this link for more information on pre-cellular phones. (internal link)

Tom: I wonder how many movies and TV shows feature vintage mobile phones.

"Sabrina" with Humphrey Bogart -- Prop/totally fake lowband MTS phone, in fact two of them side by side in his limo with an antenna which looked like it belonged on a tank in Iraq.

Mannix -- had a white MJ series head in his Mercury (?) convertible operated in the MTS mode. Seemed to be accurate in portrayal.

Cannon -- Had an RCC or Radio Common Carrier, (not Bell) head in his Lincoln, seem to recall his using MTS format when making calls.

Hawaii 5-0 -- Wo Fat, Chinese agent, used a Motorola MJ phone on board a yacht while holding a kidnapped child for ransom. McGarrett traced him through the ship to shore operator, curious because the MJ is a Bell car phone.

Earthquake (movie) -- Charlton Heston's K-5 Blazer has a lowband antenna and a GE Progress Line DTO series MTS head mounted on the dash. Early scenes show the head and Heston making calls. TV versions are edited and the scene has been cut out (drat...)

Superman serial (B&W 1953 era version) -- Perry White has a MTS phone in his car. A real one, not a prop, labeled "Mobile Radio Telephone, West Coast Electronics." I have one in my collection, minus the head and cables.

Banacek -- Had a fake mobile phone in his Packard and also the limo. Limo prop was usually a Trimline princess style. Later limo phones were black MJ heads and accurate.

Jerry Lewis movie (title forgotten, about a little girl and her chauffer (Jerry) --The Rolls Silver Cloud limo has a VHF highband MTS phone with rear seat extension head above the rear seat, appears to be the rare ITT KH- series MTS phone.

Live and Let Die -- James Bond--starting scene has CIA driver taking Bond into NYC in a Chevrolet sedan which has a Motorola "MTS" pre-MJ head, which the driver uses to answer a call, as I remember. Driver is shot enroute and the car wrecked, but the head no doubt escaped unscathed.

Twilight Zone -- (1966)--Blackmailer driving a 1966 Chrysler Imperial sedan uses a black MJ control head to receive calls from victim.

Ironside -- Had an MJ head in his second generation van. His first generation truck seems to be parked in various Monterey locations with a load of parking tickets plastered to it and a chicken coop built into the rear.

That leaves a bunch of other movies whose titles I can't recall, including some Doris day films with just handsets showing, other films with briefcase phones, and so on and so on . . .

Geoff

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