Connectivity, Communications & Cloud News - Page 26

We'll put this in the bin of 'how the hell did that happen', but a 67-year-old woman has driven for 900 miles over a two-day period thanks to a GPS error, as well as her total lack of attention. The kicker? Her destination was just 90 miles away.

Sabine Moreau had planned to pick up her friend at a train station in Brussels, with her first step of the trip leaving her home town of Hainaut, Erquelinnes, Belgium. The train station was 93 miles north of her home town, so the GPS gets flicked on and directs her... south, instead of north. She listened to the GPS and started her turn-by-turn navigation trip down to Zagreb, Croatia.

What should've been a couple of hours in the car turned into a multi-day trip including gas stops, sleeping on the side of the road for a couple of hours and even a minor car accident. This all happened while she was none the wiser, where she has said:

Marvell, a fabless semiconductor company, makes a plethora of wireless chipsets and other integrated electronics. Today, they are touting that they have the industry's first 802.11ac 4x4 wireless solution. Marvell says that it is "built to improve the throughput of enterprise and retail access points (APs) and the robustness of wireless video distribution."

"I believe that with Marvell's new breakthrough 802.11ac 4x4 Wi-Fi solution, we are positioned to change the landscape for enterprise-class network infrastructure and carrier grade video applications, further empowering the entire spectrum of always-on devices. The new era of the digital lifestyle requires superior wireless connectivity which serves as a critical pillar for delivering live content across all screen sizes and 'Smart Furnishings' for connected consumers," said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell. "I am very proud to see our dedicated team of engineers continue to build ground-breaking wireless technologies that support the latest industry standards, significantly improving network capacity, performance and reliability for Wi-Fi devices accessing the cloud infrastructure. Working with the industry's largest and most innovative global carriers and OEMs over the last decade, Marvell has established a successful track record of delivering world class wireless solutions for enterprise, consumer and mobile applications."

The new chipset, the 88W8864 SoC comes with the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac, which is the fastest wireless so far. It provides throughput up to 1.3Gbps. Beamforming is also supported by the 88W8864, which allows a stronger link to be formed by directing the beam in the direction of the device. The highlights are as follows:

Google's cloud computing services have seen a price drop ahead of Amazon's first big event that takes place this week in Las Vegas. The new prices are roughly 20 percent lower and Google has gone ahead and offered a new service to compliment the price drop. The new feature is like Amazon's Glacier service in that it provides large amounts of storage for cheaper prices. These cheaper prices come at the cost of slower access.

Google's new Durable Reduced Availability Storage is an ideal option for data archiving and backup. If you have data that you're required to keep and don't need to access it very often, if at all, this new cloud storage option by Google could be just the thing for you. The archiving pricing, as seen in the chart above, is $.015 to $0.02 cheaper than the new pricing for the standard cloud storage offering by Google.

Google has also introduced a new feature called Object Versioning, which does exactly what it sounds like it does. It allows users of Google's cloud storage to keep a list of updates so that files can be reverted to earlier states or be resurrected after an accidental deletion. This is an experimental feature, which means that updates to it make not be backwards-compatible and that the feature may be removed in its entirety.

Most of our readers will know about the service Dropbox, which provides 2GB of free cloud storage, with ways to earn more and options to pay for more. The service was started roughly five years ago after the creator forgot his USB stick at home. Since then, Dropbox has grown by leaps and bounds and has had to fight off competition from larger tech companies, such as Microsoft and Google.

Today, the Dropbox blog announced that they have 100 million users, "100 million [different] reasons" for needing cloud storage, but a general place to join together. The blog post goes on to share some stories of people who use the service and how they use it to advance whatever worthy cause they are championing.

For instance, Coach Stringfellow:

There's a team of scientists in Bangor, Wales, who are working with current fiber optic technology hoping to boost its speeds. The team believe they've found a breakthrough that could see broadband speeds excel by a magnitude of 2,000 times what is on offer today.

Fiber optic technology currently takes digital data, 1s and 0s, and converts them to light pulses. They then have the ability to travel very, very fast, but as data is continuously flowing through the cables and required to be sent over vast distances, signal degradation becomes a huge problem. At the moment there are a few ways of working around this, adding more fiber optic strands to the cable, implementing signal strength boosters and installing extra encoding and decoding lasers at each end.

Those three options are all very expensive and require massive investments in order to do so. The Bangor, Wales-based researchers want to keep the potential costs down by manipulating current technology. The one being worked on now is used by wireless networks and those in the digital broadcasting field. This technology is called Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex, or OOFDM.

Fans of the Windows Live Messenger will be sad to hear that the service will be retired in Q1 2013. Existing users of Messenger will be shepherded towards Skype, which will give the communications platform a large boost in user base. Skype has roughly 280 million monthly active users, so an additional 100 million will be a large increase.

Windows Live Messenger is on the down swing of product life. Last year, it was reported that Messenger had over 300 million monthly active users, not Microsoft is planning 100 million to be shifted, which is a massive drop from its peak. This shift will boost Skype's user base by roughly 36 percent, that is if everyone agrees to switch.

Some will likely be disappointed in the fact they are being forced to switch to Skype. However, there are some good, non-trivial reasons to use Skype over Messenger. Quite frankly, the service is quite a bit better. Check out the list that Microsoft compiled to encourage users to switch:

Google have been playing with artificial intelligence (AI) for quite a while now, with previous reports and stories of it being able to detect cats in YouTube videos. But now the team is months ahead in their project, where they've been experimenting with different methods and giving it more power.

Google's learning software is all based on simulating groups of connected brain cells, that all communicate and influence each other - which is normally refered to a 'neural network'. When this network is connected to data, the relationships between differing neurons can change. Once this change begins, the network develops new abilities - where it is able to react in different ways to the incoming data, and its new ability is having learnt something.

Learning something for a neural network is the exciting part of it all - and various companies have been playing with this technology for quite a while with the Terminator and Matrix series' famous for making these networks more well-known. Where Google are changing things up is that the Mountain View-based company's engineers have found different ways to put more number-crunching power behind them, creating neural networks that can learn, all without human assistance.

Over the weekend, it seems Apple was feeling a little generous - they extended their additional storage offer until September 30, 2013. Originally, this offer was made to customers making the transition from MobileMe to iCloud.

At the time, they'd offer the normal 5GB that comes with iCloud to ease this move, and it was set to expire on September 30, 2012. But, Apple have been sending out e-mails to their customers informing them that this would be extended until September 30, 2013.

Nothing is required to take advantage of this, so if you were still wondering whether you should make the move or not, you now have another twelve months to scratch that noggin' of yours. Thanks Lee for sending this in!

Users who live in rural parts of the United States will soon be able to get on the internet quite a bit quicker. DISH, one of the large US satellite TV providers, has launched a new internet service under the dishNET brand. Incredibly, the new service provides internet speeds of about double the average residential connection.

"Many unserved and underserved markets are years away from a telco or cable broadband build out, but dishNET is available today," said Brian McIntyre, vice president of Broadband at DISH. "These services will have powerful, positive impacts for kids, educators, businesses, farmers and families -- no matter how far out of town they may choose to live."

As of October 1, users will be able to obtain a 5Mbps down/1Mbps up data connection for $39.99 a month with two year contract. That price does not include equipment fees. Unfortunately, there is a 10GB data cap on that line. Stepping up to $49.99/month yields a 10/1Mbps connection with a 20GB data cap.

Telstra's 4G network sports some incredible speeds, but it's currently limited to in and around the capital cities of Australia. Of course, they aren't just sitting on their hands, with the telco announcing a huge expansion plan that will take place over the next 10 months which will see Telstra's 4G network cover 66% of the population of Australia by mid-2013. Telstra have provided a state-by-state breakdown:

Telstra have also announced that they have turned on 4G coverage for Bondi in Sydney, as well as in the North Sydney rail tunnels. The telco has also stated they are working on getting coverage in "every tunnel in every city in Australia". Telstra are bringing over 1,000 new base stations for their 4G expansion, and they've also said that they won't need to acquire new spectrum from the Digital Dividend auctions to support this new coverage, but they have said they're going to try and get more spectrum at government auction.