Tag Archives: WiFi

Free Nights and Weekends Makes a Comeback

Remember when you could make free mobile calls after 9:30 PM weeknights, and all weekend? For awhile the mobile carriers competed on the time when “off-peak” started, from 10 PM to 8:30 PM. A whole hour and a half! These days we have unlimited domestic calling all the time.

So, now we have varying degrees of data plans, such as AT&T Wireless 3 GB, 9 GB, or unlimited per month, but there are caps where after 22 GB data transfer speeds are slowed down.  22 gigs seem like a lot until you have kids using Snapchat and TikTok.

When you think about it, data peak is when you may not be in a hot spot. At night, you’re at home using your own WiFi, or at an establishment with their complimentary WiFi. Weekends and weekdays are a bit scattered. Your work may have WiFi, but weekdays “on peak” are mostly commuting times, the “rush hour(s)”,

Can wireless carriers bring back on and off-peak for data?  The simplest approach:  “turn off the meter” during off-peak data periods.  Maybe on-peak the consumer can elect 5G, when available, and off-peak at 4G LTE? Our Smartphones can identify low consuming bandwidth opportunities, e.g. when the phone is locked, text messages without graphics and email are semi-passive states. Maybe users are able to prioritize their apps data usage? What about those “chatty” apps that you rarely use? Smartphone settings may show you those apps bandwidth consumption as opportunities to prioritize them lower than your priority apps.

Skeptic, and think there are no Peak or Off-Peak periods with data?  Check the business analytics.  I’m sure wireless carriers have a depth of understanding for their own business intelligence (BI).

Alzheimer’s Inflicted: Technology to Help Remember Habitual Activities  

Anyone ever walk into a room and forget why on Earth you were there?  Were you about to get a cup of coffee, or get your car keys?  Wonderful!  It’s frustrating on my level of distraction, now magnify that to the Nth degree, Alzheimer’s.  Apply a rules and Induction engine, and poof!  A step further away from a managed care facility.

Teaching the AI Induction and rules engine may require the help of your 10 year old grandson.  Relatively easy,  you might need your grandson to sleep over for a day or two.

It’s all about variations of the same theme, tag a location, a room in an apartment, also action tag, such as getting a cup of coffee from the kitchen.  The repetitive nature of the activities with a location tag draws conclusions based on historical behavior.  The more variations of action and coinciding location tags, will begin to become ‘smarter’ about your habitual activities.  In addition, the calculations create a bell curve, a way to prioritize the most probable Location/Action tags used for the suggested behavior.    The ‘outliers’ on the bell curve will have the lowest probability of occurrence.

In addition, RFID tags installed in your apartment will increase the effectiveness of the ‘advice’ engine by adding more granular location tags.

Microchip_rfid_rice
Microchip RFID compared to the size of a grain of rice.
Beyond this ‘black box’ small, lightweight computer (smartphone) integrate a Bluetooth, NFC, WiFi antenna, a mobile application and you’re set.  A small, high quality Bluetooth microphone to interact with the app.  There’s also potential for exploring beyond the home.

Kidding, you don’t need that Grandson to help.  Speak into the mic, “Train” go into the room and say your activity, coffee.  This app will correlate your location, and action.  Everyone loves to be included in the Internet of Things, so app features like alerts for deviation from the location ‘map’ are possible.

In earnest, I am mostly certain that this type of solution exists.  Barriers to adoption could be computer/ smartphone generational gap.  Otherwise, someone is already producing the solution, and I just wasted a bus ride home.

Additionally, this software may be integrated with Apple’s Siri, Google Now,  Yahoo Index, Microsoft Cortana,  an extension of the Personal Assistant.

Increasing RAM on an Android OS to Limitless Computing Capacity

As I was implying in other posts, it is possible, with a potential infinite capacity to expand the computing power of a Google Android device exponentially without potential limitations.  As I explored why all the devices produced by Android seemed to grow in CPU, but not in RAM it seemed to be implied that the Android model was progressing toward a cloud model, the computations on the device would occur using an Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon, EC2, and now Google is expanding into that arena. 

The other spectrum, Apple’s iPhone, has a business model, where it was clear that storage was their cloud model, no indications of cloud computations.  In fact, initially, there was no road map for cloud computing, philosophically, as the initial pricing model was indicating, although that might have had to change to compete, but wouldn’t admit it.

There have been several posts which specify how one would be able to hack the Android Operating System, and add RAM using the extendable, on board microSD.  The initial strategy to partition on board memory, such as leveraging the Secure Digital memory is the first step to increase your devices computing capacity.  The secondary evolving step is to use cloud elastic computing, especially in HotSpots, or home WiFi, when accessible, to utilize and expand your devices capacity to run applications at a high performing capacity.

There are opportunities to increase HotSpots through public access points, which will be hard, maybe impossible, for retail to compete with the free expansion of public accessible HotSpots.  Municipalities may decide to allow tax payers of a particular community to enter in a code, and as a result of residency of a local community, have access to the municipalities’ HotSpots.  It justifies the expansion, expenditure, and increase in revenues and local taxes for the municipalities.   Municipalities may even allow the local taxpayer to have a certain number of guest accounts.  Additional accounts may be charged a discounted fee for transient visitors to the towns, such as local shoppers that patronage local shops.  The question is, would expansion of municipality public access WiFi  offset the retail WiFi income potential for shops?  It seems that many shops are offering Free WiFi, or partnering with external national or regional providers of WiFi.  Municipality WiFi may use these 3rd party vendors to build up their infrastructure, and offer this plan.

The ability to scale up your device for both performance and storage is the sweet spot, which may entice retail shoppers to shop in a community, bring in additional revenues to a municipality.  In addition, local municipalities may offer tax breaks to registered WiFi secure HotSpots, which enable local shoppers to go through a municipality portal, and utilize the WiFi access.  The common proxy portal will enable users to register a code, or pay for the local access, just as hotels today perform the same service.  Revenue for the municipality would come both from the WiFi access, and retail revenue, i.e. taxes.

The important part of cloud computing, regardless of storage or real-time computations, must be able to encrypt the storage so the storage company doesn’t have the encryption access to the contents, but also the processing of information (CPU/RAM) in real time, or, Just In Time (JIT) encryption in the cloud.  People need to be able to trust the containment and the processing of their information within the cloud, and this is one way to be able to do so.  If each device has a mechanism, just like the one already in place by Google, and other firms,  they define and pass a Client ID,  and Client Secret to exercise there API for applications.  The one challenge to this is providing the company, which contains your information, the keys to your kingdom, a trusted party.

An alternate approach might be to allow an independent authority to control the keys, just like the original structure of the internet, where a single source controls the maintenance and control of domain (e.g. name.com) allocation.  The authority which manages domain names under a hierarchy is headed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). They manage the top of the tree by administrating the data in the root nameservers.   Many time governments administrate the authority, others delegate the authority, so please read, the Domain Name Registration article.

Memory wall

The “memory wall” is the growing disparity of speed between CPU and memory outside the CPU chip. An important reason for this disparity is the limited communication bandwidth beyond chip boundaries. From 1986 to 2000, CPU speed improved at an annual rate of 55% while memory speed only improved at 10%. Given these trends, it was expected that memory latency would become an overwhelming bottleneck in computer performance.[5]

Currently, CPU speed improvements have slowed significantly partly due to major physical barriers and partly because current CPU designs have already hit the memory wall in some sense. Intel summarized these causes in their Platform 2015 documentation (PDF)

“First of all, as chip geometries shrink and clock frequencies rise, the transistor leakage current increases, leading to excess power consumption and heat… Secondly, the advantages of higher clock speeds are in part negated by memory latency, since memory access times have not been able to keep pace with increasing clock frequencies. Third, for certain applications, traditional serial architectures are becoming less efficient as processors get faster (due to the so-calledVon Neumann bottleneck), further undercutting any gains that frequency increases might otherwise buy. In addition, partly due to limitations in the means of producing inductance within solid state devices, resistance-capacitance (RC) delays in signal transmission are growing as feature sizes shrink, imposing an additional bottleneck that frequency increases don’t address.”

 

Hotspot Companies Sell Smartphones and Data Plans, use Affiliate Networking to fill Gaps

I’m using my Samsung S3, which I throughly enjoy, but I am eyeing the new Nokia Lumina 920 with Windows 8, and not to mention my old fling with the iPhone 5, and I see an article that AT&T is now the largest hotspot provider.  I’m also eyeing the prices of these phones without a contract, and don’t want to take out a 4th mortgage.  Alternatives?  Why aren’t the Wireless Carriers, and even cable companies that offer currently free hotspots add or change their business models, where we can sign up for two year agreements for data only plans, and sell subsidized smartphones and WiFi only usage?  Even cable companies that give away their hotspot coverage, start charging $20, $30 a month depending on GB usage plans and even $40 per month for unlimited.  Are the cable and wireless companies worried about coverage?  Treat it like toll charges and chargeback to the provider.  The consumer gets relatively seamless transition with an app that handles the switch between WiFi spots.  Even more wild, have any business or residence with a wireless router that wants to sign up to have the ability to sign up to be an ‘affiliate WiFi provider’, and they too can get a toll chargeback, given they are approved, e.g. running upgraded software on their router for handling transitions between WiFi hotspots and security.  The consumer can receive a credit on their monthly cable or wireless statement for their shared bandwidth chargeback usage.  Its like when people charge for their surplus of their energy from their solar panels.  It’s ok to charge a cancellation fee of $400 or prorated based on months of usage if the smartphone user exits the contract early.Get those cool devices in the hands of consumers, and you’re now able to pay for the WiFi infrastructure you’re built up, and your giving incentives to consumers with WiFI routers.   I like this technology because the Cable, and Cell Phone companies can even lease this to the consumer, and the consumer can get a charge back from usage.

The technology is primarily available, the business model is required to implement:

Note from Wikipedia: Femtocell

In telecommunications, a femtocell is a small, low-power cellular base station, typically designed for use in a home or small business. A broader term which is more widespread in the industry is small cell, with femtocell as a subset. It connects to the service provider’s network via broadband (such as DSLor cable); current designs typically support two to four active mobile phones in a residential setting, and eight to 16 active mobile phones in enterprise settings. A femtocell allows service providers to extend service coverage indoors or at the cell edge, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable. Although much attention is focused on WCDMA, the concept is applicable to all standards, including GSMCDMA2000TD-SCDMAWiMAXand LTE solutions.

Near Field Communications & WiFi Lure B&M Window Shoppers

I read articles today about free Brick and Mortar in store WiFi to utilize tech to enhance in store experiences. Another article I read about Nike embedding tech to enhance their products echos manufacturers might want to continue to pursue embedding chips, such as Near Field Communications (NFC) in conjunction with in store WiFi to offer both programmable manufacturer rebates as well as in store sale offers turning window shoppers into sales.  WiFi  would not just entice the prospective shopper, but also provides manufacturers with the ability to update rebate offers as seasons and styles are shifted to help move stock.  A win for the consumer, manufacturer, and retailer.