New Florence. New Renaissance.

The NYCWiN Mesh Network

Lots of creative applications on NY City's new grid

State Tech Magazine

"NYCWiN will allow agencies to share high-bandwidth data, including wireless streaming video, at incident scenes for first responders. DoITT is currently working to ensure that wireless video feeds from NYCWiN can be shared with video networks operated by other city agencies. The New York Department of Transportation operates nearly 100 still and video cameras from its Traffic Management Center in Long Island City, Queens; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority focuses another 20 still and video cameras on the city’s major bridges and tunnels; and the New York Police Department operates several thousand cameras. The NYPD announced in July that it was seeking $90 million to deploy an additional 3,000 cameras in lower Manhattan."

and NY Times

"The Department of Environmental Protection wants to use the technology to eliminate the need for meter-readers to go door-to-door to monitor water usage. The city has installed 800 wireless water meters in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens that send readings every six hours over the network to a central computer."

"Dismantling of the Last Mile Barrier"

"GigaBeam, a technology company in Herndon, Va., has come up with an alternative: millimeter-wave technology, which transmits data over wireless connections at one gigabit per second — 1,000 times as fast as a D.S.L. connection."

Read more at New York Times

45Mbps at less than $ 30 a month!

WebPass offers 1 to 1000 Megabits per second (Mbps) Dedicated Internet Access for business customers or 45 Mbps residential broadband service. If you sign up for a year it is $ 350. Webpass only offers service at properties that are capable of supporting Ethernet. This data cable allows Webpass to operate completely independently of the local phone and television companies. Only in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles to start with.

Long-Distance Wi-Fi

"The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform (RCP), will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel. And the data rates are high enough--up to about 6.5 megabits per second--that the connection could be used for video conferencing and telemedicine, he says."

MIT Technology Review

The Joys of "Speedcabling"

"Contestants are faced with a tangled mass of six ethernet cables of various lengths. Their task is simply to separate them in the fastest time.

To get them to replicate the conditions of the wires found snaking and choking their way around hard drive units, monitors and printers in offices worldwide, Schkolne first started by tangling them in a figure eight. Then he threw the bundles in a clothes dryer - no longer attached to any computer unit, naturally."

BBC News

Bandwidth on Demand

"Called the dynamic circuit network, its immediate applications are academic, but its underlying technologies could one day filter into the commercial Internet, and it could be used, for example, to carry high-definition video to consumers."

MIT Technology Review

Google's Oregon Data Center

Harper's Magazine (Harper's?) runs a blueprint of the new data center Google is building along with some commentary. If you can ignore the snarkiness of the comments, you can see the dimensions of the investment, and the energy needs to run the center.

Cisco's Massive New Switch

"Cisco announced the development of the Nexus 7000, a network switch that's capable of routing 15 terabits of data per second--the equivalent of moving the entire contents of Wikipedia in a hundredth of a second, or downloading every movie available on Netflix in about 40 seconds...

...Cisco's 3-1/2-foot-tall box, like any network switch, is a device designed to control and direct the flow of data between connected computers. But its massive bandwidth capacity--which Cisco says is 20 times that of any switch currently available..."

Forbes

Mesh Network to help with the Hajj

I spent a couple of years in Saudi Arabia in the 80s and every time you flew into Jeddah airport you could see the huge Hajj open format terminal designed just to handle the millions of pilgrims who came for a couple of weeks each year.

So, it is good to see technology in the way of a mesh network at least help with some of the logistics, and  provide the pilgrims web access. The dates of the Hajj rotate with the Hejira calendar and in some years they could be in the middle of the brutal desert summer. A bit of online access can only be a welcome distraction.

Extending DSL and copper

"..the new technology could deliver between 100 and 250 megabits per second - compared to current Australian DSL which ranges from one megabit to 20 megabits per second."

Networking News