Archive for April, 2010

My iPhone vs. My iGo

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Last week, I gave in and bought an iPhone.  I did not get it because of its must-have cachet as a technocrati status symbol.  Rather, I got it because I did not have many other smartphone options in my little town in Germany.  This is despite the fact that T-Mobile is also marketing the G1.

Nonetheless, I am kind of disappointed with my purchase.  It is a neat toy and I am impressed by what it can do.  I am, however, really annoyed by what I can’t do with it.  For one, the firewire cables and docking station I have from my second-gen iPod Classic are not compatible, even though the plugs are the same.  Congratulations, Apple, you have made your product incompatible with a piece of wire.  Further, I can’t sync it with iTunes using the iPhone’s onboard Bluetooth connection.  Clearly, the point of this is to force me to buy additional new cables so I do not have to schlep the one that came with the iPhone with me.  That kind of bundling is to be expected.

However, what really upsets me is the fact that I cannot use my Bluetooth keyboard with the iPhone.  I have a really cool iGo Stowaway folding keyboard, which my wife got me as a present a few years ago.  The keyboard is about passport-sized (about twice as thick) and unfolds to a laptop-sized keyboard.  It’s really very handy.  However, the Bluetooth onboard the iPhone does not recognize the device and there are no apps for the keyboard in the App Store.  iGo’s website simply states that it is not compatible with the iPhone.  Obviously, I cannot load the software and drivers which came with the keyboard onto the iPhone and I am terrified that if I try to load a hack, Apple will brick my phone into a 200€ paperweight.

In many ways, my old Nokia N95 was a better, certainly more flexible, smartphone.

Insight:  It is an absurd result that I cannot use a standardized peripheral with my own computing device.  I have been using Apple products since 1982 (Apple II Plus, 32kb), but now, I am not purchasing another Apple product until I can do something as simple as hook-up my own keyboard to it.  In the meantime, there was this gem, via Guy Kawasaki.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Pet Peeves | 6 Comments »

Every Ash Cloud Has a Silver Lining (for some)

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Love to fly.

We have enjoyed a perfectly sunny weekend in Northern Germany – not a cloud in the sky, not even a contrail.  Obviously, all commercial air traffic in the region has been grounded due to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano.  The only air traffic near us includes some low-flying, single-engine planes flying VFR in the Rhine river corridor, a few gliders kettling over Oberkassel, and a hot air balloon soaring over Mehlem.  Deutsche Bahn is running the ICE (the 300 kmh train) down the regional lines to add rail capacity to move people around during the crisis.

As I am sitting in my yard and looking toward the jet-plane-free sky, I am wondering what the long-term implications might be if Eyjafjallajokull continues to spew volcanic ash into the sky for the next few weeks or, worse, if it continues to erupt sporadically over the coming months and years.  It could make air travel intermittent and unpredictable in Europe.

This could be potentially damning for the airlines lines, but a boon to telecommunications infrastructure providers, video conferencing firms, and high speed rail which could see demand for their products and services take off (pun not intended).

Don’t get me wrong, I love planes and I love flying (see the picture), but I am also a big fan of both high-speed rail and telecommunications.  So, I am not rejoicing in this.  If people cannot get to where they need to go to conduct their business by air, they will have to find other means or even substitutes.  Most of Western Europe is crisscrossed with high speed rail links.  Many of these trains are capable of speeds which are nearly half that a jet aircraft.  On trips of less than 500-600 km, it is actually faster and easier to take the train because one does not have to arrive two hours before departure and deal with getting through security.  If one cannot get where he needs to go, video conferencing is the only option.  Companies like Cisco and Skype have already made ventures into high-definition, mass market video conferencing solutions.  An essential ingredient for these solutions to work is ultra-broadband access networks.

Insight:  The eruption of Eyjafjallajokull could provide the impetus for further investment in communications infrastructure and high-speed rail in Europe.  The downside of this fact for the US is that it will significantly harder to stay competitive in these crucial infrastructure areas.

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Posted in Broadband, Cool Stuff | 1 Comment »

Keeping up with the Jitsuzumis

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

The first goal of the FCC’s recent National Broadband Plan is to ensure at least 100 million US homes have access to Internet connections with download speeds of at least 100 Mbps by the end of the decade (the year 2020).  This goal strikes me as not being a terribly ambitious.  I only have a single data point to support that conclusion, which is typically referred as an anecdote.

Prof. Jitsuzumi's Class

One of these is not like the others.

During a business trip to Japan last year, I traveled to Fukuoka to visit my good friend Prof. Toshiya Jitsuzumi.  (According to Wikipedia Fukuoka is Japan’s eighth most populous city and its second youngest).  Prof. Jitsuzumi invited me to give two talks: one to Kyushu University’s Faculty of Economics and one to his undergraduate students in communications economics.  To the undergraduates, I gave a lecture about the policy and economics of Next Generation Access Networks in the European Union.  I found Prof. Jitsuzumi’s students to be bright and engaging.  In the middle of the lecture, the students had some trouble understanding one of my stats on the number of homes passed by fibre optic access networks in the EU.  At first, I thought the confusion was due to my weak Japanese language skills.  After a bit of back and forth, I discovered the source of the confusion.  Prof Jitsuzumi’s students all have fibre optic connections to their homes.  I was the only one in the room who did not have a fibre optic Internet connection to his home (NB: I live in a suburb of Bonn, Germany).  The source of the confusion was that they were questioning why one would want to count homes passed.  This is not obvious if you and all your classmates  already has a fibre optic connection.

Insight: Granted Prof. Jitsuzumi’s class is not a representative sample set, but I can’t help feeling that the FCC is trying to catch the US up in ten years to where Japan is now.  From what I have been reading on the listservs, given current pace of deployment of FiOS and DOCSIS 3.0, the market will accomplish this goal on its own.  This fact begs the question what is need for governmental intervention.  Instead, the FCC should propose a more ambitious goal (one that might have a higher risk of failure) and devise a road map necessary for achieving that goal.  Perhaps this will come out in follow on work to National Broadband Plan.

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Posted in Broadband, Optimal Regulation | 2 Comments »