Connectivity, Communications & Cloud News - Page 23

Ericsson and Philips have announced that they are teaming up on a new project that brings green LED lighting to streetlights and helps mobile providers to expand mobile broadband within a city. Ericsson calls the system Zero Site and the idea is to help cities reduce clutter while offering expanded access to broadband around the city.

Philips is providing the green LED streetlights for the plan and the poles used have space inside to support Ericsson cellular networking hardware. Philips says that the city can help offset the costs of installing green LED streetlights by selling or renting the space for networking gear to a wireless provider.

The streetlights will help the city reduce electricity usage significantly with a large rollout. Philips says that the lights can provide a power savings of 50 to 70%. Power savings of up to 80% is possible with smart controls according to Philips.

According to OpenSignal's State of LTE report for Q1 2014, Australia leads the pack in terms of the fastest LTE/4G speeds in the world. Australia's leading ISP, Telstra, is helping to drive that back home for the country.

The OpenSignal report looks at countries all across the globe, analyzing their 4G networks to see who has the best coverage, speeds and carriers. 17 countries in total were compared, with Italy coming in second place, and in second-to-last, the United States. The average download speed experienced in Australia was 24.5Mbps, while the US trailed behind with just 6.5Mbps.

If we compare the speeds with the last report taken, the US was sitting at 9.6Mbps, and is now reaching an average download speed of 6.5Mbps. Australia on the other hand, has increased from 17.3Mbps to 24.5Mbps.

Garmin is famous in the GPS world for making products ranging from navigation apps for smartphones to PND devices for cars and watches for athletes and outdoors types. Garmin has announced a new GPS watch that is aimed at athletes that like multiple sports. The new watch is called the fenix 2.

Garmin bills the watch as the ultimate multisport adventure watch and it has features for running, climbing, riding, hiking, skiing, and swimming. The watch is water resistant and can survive the outdoors. It features an altimeter, barometer, and a 3-axis compass.

It also provides GPS navigation for people when they are off the beaten path. It will store breadcrumbs to make sure you can find your way back when needed. The GPS functionality supports up to 10,000 track points and 1000 waypoints. Those GPS details can be shared with other Garmin devices via Bluetooth.

Steve Perlman, has something that could truly solve some of the problems we have with mobile data congestion, dead zones and more, with his new 'pCell' device.

Current cellular networks use a tower to transmit a radio signal, forming a large cell that provides wireless signal to all mobile devices within that area. This umbrella of signal will feed out whatever you need in terms of data or calls. Cell tower capacity is then shared through mobile devices, taking turns to avoid interfering with each other, and once more people enter the area, speeds can drop.

Companies simply can't just add more antennas in order to prepare for the increased demand, as their signals would be disrupted if they're placed too close together. This is where Artemis Networks' pCell technology comes into play, as it enhances the signal itself, with multiple waves combining to form stronger waves.

Its been a few months since I first reported on Microsoft being forced to rename SkyDrive, and just a few weeks ago we learned that the service would be transitioning to the moniker "OneDrive." The initial announcement said that it would take several weeks for the new branding to be fully implemented, and today Microsoft's cloud storage service is now officially named OneDrive.

Visiting Skydrive.com redirects you to the OneDrive site as does OneDrive.com, but the official URL is OneDrive.live.com, something that may be confusing to some non-technical customers. Microsoft has only changed the service's name and all functionality appears to have remained the same. New users who sign up receive 7GB of free storage space and an additional 500MB for each additional user they invite to the service. Additionally, users who opt into auto backing up images from their smartphone receive an additional 3GB of free storage space.

"Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to get all of your favorite stuff in one place - one place that is accessible via all of the devices you use every day, at home and at work. Because let's face it, until now, cloud storage services have been pretty hard to use, and the vast majority of us still have our stuff spread out everywhere," said Microsoft's Chris Jones. "In fact, according to a recent poll, at least 77 percent of people who are familiar with the cloud still have content stored on a device that is not backed up elsewhere. We want to change that."

A software glitch has forced Toyota to recall 1.9 million vehicles sold worldwide from 2010 to 2014, trying to fix an error that causes the car to stall. The recall hits 1 million cars in Japan, 700,000 in the United States and the remaining 200,000 from Europe and other select markets.

Specifically, Toyota will have car dealerships install updated software to fix a bug that leads to heat buildup in the car's circuit transistors, which obviously caused damage. Engine warning lights would trigger an alert, but the vehicle would also occasionally stall while driven.

No reports have been submitted to Toyota regarding accidents or injuries from the unexpected error.

Cloud computing is predicted to reach $121.1 billion by 2015, according to a report from MarketsandMarkets, though other analysts guess the market will have a difficult time in 2014. Embracing the cloud gives users the chance to utilize a scalable and cost-effective way to access and share information from any Web-connected device.

For companies trying to sell cloud services to the consumer or B2B markets, it's quickly coming down to service quality. Any company trying to drive innovation in the cloud market must pay attention to good product support, customer support, and clear lines of communication with users.

Companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon tend to get a lot of headlines for their respective cloud efforts, though software providers like Red Hat and CA are expected to have a difficult time growing this year.

Manufacturers have finally figured out how to attract consumers to connected high-definition TVs (HDTVs), using third-party Web-based apps to draw in users. Smart TVs will capture the "majority of television shipments" this year, and more U.S. consumers will have smart TVs than connected TVs by 2015, according to Business Insider.

Original Web TVs initially seemed appealing, but were wrongly predicted TV viewers would want to use the TV to browse the Internet in a traditional manner. Some companies embrace open platforms, such as LG, Roku and Google Chromecast supporting open source, while Apple, Samsung and other companies rely on closed infrastructures.

Apple TV and Roku set-top boxes lead the market for streaming devices, though Google Chromecast also sold a large number of units. Apple TV racked up 8 million units shipped during all of 2013, while Roku shipped 4.5 million units.

Less than one year after the public launch of its Chromecast HDTV dongle, Google has finally opened up the software development kit for developers trying to get in on the fun. The Cast SDK was previously available, but was in a restricted form as Google worked with exclusive partners to give them earlier access to create Chromecast apps.

"With the Chromecast, we're resetting consumer applications," noted Rishi Chandra, Google Chromecast director of product management.

App developers now have the ability to integrate Chromecast apps with Google Android, Apple iOS, or Web-based apps - and Google developers believe the potential for Cast-enabled apps is huge - joining Netflix, YouTube, Chrome, and a small number of apps Google immediately included support for from launch.

AT&T has recently filed for a patent that would institute a credits-based system. The new system is designed to allow AT&T to lower the bandwidth allotment for file-sharers, but the implications of the patent go much further than that. The new patent could have a chilling effect on content distribution networks, including Steam, Origin, and Netflix.

The patent, titled "Prevention Of Bandwidth Abuse Of A Communications System", would theoretically allow AT&T to create Internet plans that would only allow access to certain sites or protocols. The patent has a brief description:

The user is provided an initial number of credits. As the user consumes the credits, the data being downloaded is checked to determine if it is permissible or non-permissible. Non-permissible data includes file-sharing files and movie downloads if user subscription does not permit such activity. If the data is permissible, the user is provided another allotment of credits equal to the initial allotment. If the data is non-permissible, the user is provided an allotment of credits less than the initial allotment