Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines
Or when you think you're gonna die
Or did you long for the next distraction?

Alanis Morissette

Good article in MIT's Technology Review by Eric Brown about mobile television (external link). Texas Instruments and Qualcomm are both producing chipsets to enable television. Qualcomm has even partnered with another company to found the so called MediaFLO network to deliver content using push technology. Video gets sent to your phone when you're not using it, then you can retrieve what you want to see later. But push and every cache based method hasn't be well received on the internet and I don't see a reason why it should be here. TIVO uses push in a way but that is a high quality product. Will mobile users sit through hours old content that is jittery, slow framed, and often disconnected? Here's the concluding paragraph to the article:

"In short, don't be fooled by the mobile hype --cell phone users may move around a lot, but at the end of the day they still veg out at home or in a hotel room watching a nice big TV (or big laptop monitor). Which brings us back to the size question. Two-inch handheld TVs have gotten dramatically better in recent years, and the digital technology from Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and others is likely to be even better. Yet, even if the resolution and frame rate improve, size matters in the TV illusion. At two inches, details are still difficult to make out, and it's a hassle to have to sit and hold your TV in your hand. Even with a 3-inch screen (about the biggest that's feasible on a phone), people will watch it when the need arises, but it's less likely they'll be hypnotized. That may be good for our souls, but not so good for the TV business."

Qualcomm is said to have purchased in 2003 the rights to spectrum currently occupied by UHF-TV channel 55 throughout the entire nation. That may let their scheme succeed.

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[Editor's note. The Bell System created the finest telephone system in the world, the envy of every nation. But it had its problems like every company and suffered from Dilbert Syndrome from time to time.]

I landed in a really odd corner of the Bell System, in one of only three places they ever ran High Frequency or HF radio. To the vast majority of people in telcos then, "radio" meant terrestrial microwave, and there was little understanding of it.

As an example, perhaps because they had AT&T for the "control office" at Miami, Southern Bell had a Collins microwave with multichannel analog carrier installed between Miami and Ft.Lauderdale. Well, it crosstalked badly and got generally screwed up regularly with people cranking knobs on it. After a couple of years of screwing around with it, and continually having customers writing nasty letters to Southern Bell HQ. the Southern Bell "engineers" at their FL state HQ in Jacksonville,which specified the thing, got someone from Collins Radio to come to Miami. What they found was that over time, as SB had added more and more hardware and carrier to the thing, they had not ordered newer "roofing filters" on the microwave to adapt to the wider modulation needed with higher loading. Getting the proper filters into it cured all the problems in a flash -- after some years of terrible performance and upset customers.

In a similar instance, SB had a number of type ON carrier systems running the 160 miles or more from Miami to Jey West. They were awful - noisy and cross-talking and unstable when the hot Florida sun heated the black PVC clad aerial cable each day. After many years of complaint, we found out that:

1.) Bell Labs never intended the system to accommodate losses for more than 50 miles of cable;

2.) It had devices called "span pads" that effectively were passive equalizers for the aerial cable, but the only span pads ever made for it had been for 22 gauge cable, and the 160 miles of cable was 19 gauge.

Oops!

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Dear Tom Farley

Thank tou for your reply and the links!! i found out who made it and when! iy was alexander graham bell 1876

thanks, Jeremey

Dear Jeremey,

I'm glad you found your answer. 1876 was an important year to the United States. The Wild West was still truly wild. In a lonely part of Montana that summer, George Custer and his men were slaughtered at the Little Big Horn. America turned 100 years old. And Budweiser beer was born. Can we give a big cheer for the year 1876?

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From Don Kimberlin (internal link)

The day I started work at AT&T in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, my personal induction was by Henry G. Pettit, one of the nicest people I ever worked for. Henry had been a US Navy radioman on board a four-stack destroyer in WWI, and eventually wound up working at AT&T's east coast overseas HF radio operations, transferring to Florida when that site opened up a couple of decades later.

He exposed to me his personal opinion that Bell did "whatever it wanted," and got the government to rubber-stamp it, then telling the public it was "The Law" that required them to operate as they did.

I have found out that Henry was right.

At any rate, he told me that the Bell even "owned a railroad" at that date in 1962.

I later found out that Henry was correct. However, his was that typical employee doctrinaire sort of knowledge of a selected portion of the facts.

In later years, I found out that Illinois Bell at Chicago, in the monopolistic fashion of the early Bell (pre-1913 antitrust settlement) era, had purchased a "merchants' railway" that ran in tunnels under the buildings of downtown Chicago, ostensibly to deliver coal and merchandise among the center city buildings.

What the Bell historians had neglected to include in the story was that the railway had been built by a competing phone company, to evade the monopoly on placing telephone cables in the streets; a monopoly established by close Illinois Bell relations with the rather openly corrupt Chicago city government officials.

To close that gap on their monopoly, Illinois Bell got Western Electric to purchase the railway, and thus deny the potential competitors from using its tunnels for telephone cables.

And so the railway was "owned by AT&T" for some decades.

The twist came a half century or more later, when Western Electric, perhaps suffering from corporate senile dementia, sold the railway, which had been inoperative for some years.

However, the people who purchased it without Ma Bell recognizing them, was the Chicago Fiber Optic Corporation, the first of the many local fiber optic companies to emerge in the fiber era.

That once again gave a Bell competitor the selfsame tunnels to use to beat Ma Bell at her own game in Chicago.

The first market Chicago Fiber Optic found was to provide broadband connectivity between the various interstate Bell competitors at Chicago -- Sprint, MCI and such -- thus making Chicago perhaps the first major inland interchange point between Bell's interstate competitors.

I find that a rather interesting example of how corporations create, then lose, their competitive stance.

Don Kimberlin (internal link)

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From J.R. Snyder Jr. (internal link)

On the telecom front, I feel as if we've stepped into a time warp. We're back to former RBOC's wanting into cable TV; how reminiscent of the late 80's and early 90's. This time there's a twist: cable TV wants to get into wireless and VOIP.

The business news people are calling it the cable vs. telco wars. It seems to me that it's more like trucking vs. rail, two different forms of transit that serve different purposes. Sometimes I don't have the stomach to keep up with the current events, I'm still more interested in the history, although there is the thought that history repeats itself and that may be a lesson here.

I suspect that telcos are more talk than action and CATV is more active. What I don't like about any of this is that it's leading towards buying a package of services, which to me is actually less choice. In other words, the consumer will be in the position of if they only want wireless and not CATV or wireline or VOIP, they won't really be able to choose among wireless providers but buying a single service from a package provider at a premium price for one product. It's the trend where marketing forces demand consumers buy products in a lump. In other words, buy it all or a single piece that's overpriced. So what's the difference between marketers forcing a monopoly by the force of marketing or the government forcing a regulated monopoly? I don't pretend to have an answer, but just a question. I also hope that made sense. Any thoughts?

What if I like my Verizon Wireless service and my Comcast CATV but the separate cost is far more expensive than a package from either Verizon or Comcast, or Cox or SBC for that matter for all the services? Or I only want broadband and wireless and not CATV and VOIP? How about forcing satellite radio in the mix on me that I may never listen to?

ok...I'll stop rambling.

J.R.

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Dear Tom Fanley,

Name is jerermy, i am nine years old.I want to know about the telephones, like what is in it and how many types? Also anything else you know about the telephone?I am doing the telephone because we get to pick a topic for CLEF.It stands for child centerd learnig educational Framework

From jeremy

P.S i am in year four

I replied to Jeremy's e-mail. There are very few resources for children on the web. I do have some links to better ones on this page. (internal link) Howstuffworks.com (external link) is a little advanced and not always accurate, but worth checking for simple technology explanations.

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Made some changes to page two of the Orwell article. (internal link) Many thanks to Philip Lees for his comments.

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Telephone tokens! This article by Christopher Batio appeared in the January 10, 1995 Numismatic Review. Good reading:

Telephone Tokens: The Forerunner of the Telephone Card

"Before there were telephone cards to collect and use, telephone tokens were a widespread medium of exchange for people wanting to talk with someone across the ocean or across the street."

"These brass nickel-sized tokens were once widely used in Europe, Japan, and South America, and are still used today in places such as Turkey, Hungary, and Israel."

Israeli phone tokens, showing a telephone dial on the front

(Article continues here --> internal link)

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Q. Did any European digital cellular radio schemes exist before GSM? (internal link)

A. They did at least in development, I do not know if any were put into commercial use. The table below (internal link, click to enlarge) lists nine different digital services evaluated for GSM:

From the Oki Technical Review. Volume 127, July 1987. "History and Future of the Cellular System and Mobile Phone" Ryoji Kobayashi, p. 10.

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Texas Instruments unveils a digital TV on a single chip made for mobiles. (external link, .pdf file -- 936K) With some creative thinking this may allow quality video to go mobile. At least from the content provider to you. How do you now get streaming video over low bandwidth cellular radio frequencies? You get it poorly, of course, since spectrum allocated for voice isn't adequate for video. But what if you used different frequencies? With this new TV tuner chip a mobile picks up digital television from a broadcaster's conventional antenna or from a satellite, using different frequencies than those used for voice. Get it? You make a call using regular cellular radio channels, but the TV gets fed on its own frequencies. Cool. Quality transmission is only one way, you can't communicate over broadcast television freqs, but let's see what happens. As I say, "One miracle at a time!"

From TI's press release"

TI puts digital TV on mobiles

Texas Instruments has announced development of the wireless industry's first digital TV on a single chip for mobile phones, code-named "Hollywood".

The chip will receive live digital TV broadcasts at 24 to 30 frames per second using new television infrastructure that is being developed for mobile phones, doing for mobiles what HDTV did for home TVs, TI explained.

"TI´s new Hollywood digital TV chip will combine the two biggest consumer electronics inventions of our time - the television and the cell phone," said Gilles Delfassy, TI senior v-p and general manager for TI's wireless terminals business unit. "One by one, the industry's most exciting consumer electronics are being integrated into wireless handsets, allowing consumers to get their news and entertainment whenever and wherever they want. With this new chip on the cell phone, users will enjoy digital, high-quality TV in real-time."

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BPL or broadband over power lines, permits net access anywhere an electrical outlet exists. Click here to read the FCC document (internal link) explaining and allowing this service. It's possible every hard corded electrical device in a house or office could be instantly networked over that building's electrical lines. With suitable software and chipsets your refrigerator could communicate with your television or your alarm system could talk to your garage door opener. Ubiquitous computing made real. Going further, with VOIP you could have a telephone outlet every place you plug in an appliance. Neat technology, if only the BPL industry can solve interference problems and develop products to work with the service. But it will happen.

New York Times illustration

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