So if you ever dreamed to see what 210 billion emails, 3 million Flickr images, 43 million gigabytes (on phones) sent on an average day really means, have a look at the image below.

Literally mindblowing…

Online Education

Nicolas was kind enough to invite me to share my experiences with mobile VoIP, specifically with Sipdroid on the Android platform. I’ll start by providing a quick summary of the technology, and how applications are now utilizing it.

Simply speaking, VoIP – short for Voice-over-IP – is a general term for technologies which route phone calls over the internet, rather than regular telephony networks. The result is very cheap telephony, or in the case of pure internet-to-internet communications, free telephony.

The best example for this technology is the extremely popular Skype software: internet-to-internet is free, but whenever the regular phone network is involved (for example when calling a mobile handset via SkypeOut), a miniscule fee is charged.

Skype uses a propietary protocol for communication. What most people don’t know is that VoIP communications was standardized ages ago as SIP, a technology which currently is extensively used in corporate environments, but not (yet) that popular in the private sector.

To use SIP, you need either a VoIP-enabled phone (all the desktop phones at my workplace are plugged into the LAN!), or a software client, commonly called a “softphone”. This gets you the free internet-to-internet calls. For internet-to-regular-telephone calls, you will additionally need a service provider. There are hundreds of providers to choose from (most of them a lot cheaper than Skype), however for beginners I recommend sipgate.

[singlepic id=91 w=320 h=240 float=left]Luckily enough for Android users, there is a great SIP client for the Android platform: Sipdroid (http://sipdroid.org/). Sipdroid tightly integrates into your phone. When Sipdroid is active, all outgoing calls are automatically routed through your SIP provider. You don’t pay or use any phone minutes because your end of the call is going through the internet. You just pay your SIP provider’s minutes, which are dirt-cheap. Best of all: by using a WLAN hotspot, you can use SIP from any place in the world, for the same cost! There is no need for roaming, because all calls are going through your internet connection.

I merely touched some if SIP’s features here. There are tons of others (one or more phone numbers for incoming calls, online voice boxes, etc.). I can only recommend that you check out one of the “beginner” VoIP providers and see what you are mission out on

On a side note: I realize the above may be a too laborious or time-consuming solution for some. There is another SIP client for Android callue truphone. Truphone offers everything in a bundle (SiP provider, software, etc) – just register an account, and that’s it. The issue I have with truphone is that you are locked into their service, i.e. you can’t switch between providers.

[singlepic id=92 w=540 h=480 float=center]

Nicolas, thanks for the opportunity!

What are the differences between them? How much do they cost? And what can you do with that connection? Kevin Hall at Device.com talked to reps from all three services, putting together all the information in a handy table.

Hit the jump for the info, and the answer to the biggest question about airline Wi-Fi: Can it do VoIP?

The answer is here

***

Source: dvice.com

I though just realized today, while checking my online mobile phone bills of the last three month, that I actually managed not to overrun my monthly fee! And that’s the first time since 2006!

So where’s the trick?

I was at least expecting to have to pay my mobile operator a comfortable fee for extra calls given from abroad, as I was “sailing the seven seas” since the end of April. But I was not claimed any extra money to feed my provider with. Good news (for me)!

I then realized that, as a dyed in the whool digital native, I had not so badly prepared (digitally talking at least) my trip throughout the Atlantic ocean… as one of my first concerns was to be able to stay in touch with my family and friends at sea and while landing @ our ports of call.

When we were ridding the waves, thousand of nautics aways from any piece of ground, the only widely available communication resource for the crew was the email. One very same email adress shared by 30 people. In that case, you’d better warn your friends, and particularly those amateurs of weird stuff you can find on the Internet, about this peculiar thing! Else, you could end up doing the least entertaining chores available on board…

Since we were most of the time kept busy with hundred of things to do, the big challenge was to be as efficient and savvy as possible with the free time we were granted, while updating as much as possible our friends and family on how the odyssey was evolving. Twittermail has probably saved me from being else tied to writting dozens of emails per day to relatives, or to facing a bunch of disappointed friends kept appart from the wonderful adventure I was living.

One status update sent to my Twittermail adress was enough to keep updated my Twitter followers and Facebook contacts at once, on how things were going down here. You can see some samples of what I posted while at sea here under What happened on my twitter this week.

Land in sight!

During my 3 month sailing trip my cellphone has switched between something like 20 different mobile phone providers’ networks. Which one was the most convenient? I have no idea, as, luckily, I never had to use any of them.

Today most cities, at least in the West, are real webs of wifi networks. Internet access can be found almost anywhere and for free or for an outrageous low fee. So why should I pay for cellphone communications, when I have at the reach of hand, the possibility to call for free using softwares like Skype on my PC and Nimbuzz on my Symbian phone?

After three month of intensively using both applications I can testify that in our today’s world it is “soooo 1990″ to communicate on a cellular network and pay for it!We now have to take a maximum profit of what is made available to us FOR FREE, which is no luxury today in our economy, and get ready for the next big leap in our habits to communicate (WiMax).

Let’s just hope that mobile phone providers will accept to face that truth one day soon and become reasonable when it comes to charging their loyal customer a fee, which is still unfortunately today,  disgraceful.

***

Today, more and more “socially responsible” companies are launching new environmental programs – not all of them are only meant to act as some nice PR or advertising for those companies -  to try to make things change. They aren’t revolutionnary, as every one of them is more like a stone which helps build the big wall which at the end will give the big picture. But at least, they help.

Nokia has launched beginning of December, a great green travel resource that is up in beta mode called Green Explorer.  It features travel news, eco-centered information about destinations, tips from fellow green travelers, easy carbon offsets, mobile device access, and loads more.

According to Jaymi Heimbuch on treehugger, this resource “is geared specifically for people who want to travel in an eco-friendly fashion and provide their own travel tips, and the site has quite a few features that can make it a top resource when it comes out of beta”

And for those of us who are dyed in the wool environment lovers who can’t stand the idea of leaving a Big-Foot environmental print every time they fly, Nokia has developped the world’s first CO₂ emission offsetting tool to your mobile: we:offset. It’s already available in 46 languages.

I think this is how in-flight ISPs Aircell, Row 44 or OnAir should have called their piece of hardware they supplied airlines with. But I doubt that their engineers were whistling Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” while working on their solution… or is it because it’s still light-years away from being something decently called “broadband Internet”? who knows…

Anyway…

Most of us know that airlines have been touting the possibility of in-flight Internet access for, oh, seemingly forever now.

But chances are that even the most well-traveled fliers haven’t had the opportunity to update their Facebook pages or surf YouTube at 30,000 feet, at least on a U.S. carrier. Despite industry promises over the years, Wi-Fi broadband service is available on relatively few flights. Blame technological hurdles, financial turmoil and a general reluctance by airlines to invest in upgrading fleets.

The U.S. airline industry, though, now appears serious about moving forward with Wi-Fi in the sky.

A half-dozen carriers – including airline heavyweights American, United and Southwest – are testing or implementing Internet service on select flights. Other airlines hope to roll out the technology on a broader basis later this year.

Ars Technica posted yesterday a very detailed article on the current state of in-flight Internet. If you’re interested in knowing more about « Internet access at 35,000 feet », I strongly recommend you to read this interesting review which explains how the technology works, which airlines offer Internet service, and what’s coming up.

I’ve so far not have had a chance to fly on any of those airlines which have in-flight Internet service, to try myself how good the access is. But I’ve experienced earlier today on my Paris-Brussels train trip, an other meaning of « high speed Internet » which does not amount here in Kbit/s but in Km/h (or mph)…

From theory…

Three years ago, Thalys, made the news when the company announced that it was launching an innovative service for its customers traveling between Paris and Brussels: on-board true broadband access . The idea behind it was to provide passengers traveling across national borders at 300 km/h with a continuous Internet connection on board trains.

…to reality…

Today the service is fully operational between Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Cologne and allows travelers to stay connected during their journey, which is sometimes critical when you still need to access your office’s server to rework the presentation you’ll give your clients in a couple of hours (yeah, to some extends we’ve all done that at least once).

Thalys’ wifi service allows VPN access to professional applications, sending and receiving emails from your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird), web browsing, VoIP as well as free information services (news, Thalys timetable, online ticket reservation, etc.).

Free information? Indeed, as the email and web access services will cost you a small fee (€6,5 for a 60 minutes access or €13 for an unlimited access for the whole journey – note that if you’re traveling between Paris and Brussels, a 60 minutes access is well enough) if you’re not traveling in 1^st class. In Comfort 1, travelers enjoy from a free access to all ThalysNet services.

…there is still a gap to fill

In terms of quality of service, some users and others agree to say that the service is “painfully slow”, hardly delivering more than 33k output (which is bad dial-up speed)…

So what is my feeling about this? Well, reading the news and checking Thalys’ time table on their onboard server (http://portal.thalysnet.com/) was really fast and smooth on my netbook, but for the email and web access I chose to rely on my FonJoiku Spot’s application for Symbian devices which gives me fast access to the web. And I confirm that 3G works really well at 200km/h!

So, I think that we still have some work ahead of us to set what we’ll proudly call on day “on-board/in-flight broadband Internet”

I just can’t wait to be the next Chuck Yeager who twitters at (almost) the speed of sound!

]]> http://www.52ndwest.com/bora-bora/environmentgreen/%e2%80%9cthey-wanna-make-a-supersonic-man-out-of-me%e2%80%9d-surfing-the-web-at-the-speed-of-sound-well-almost/feed/ 2 http://www.52ndwest.com/gizmos/technology/turn-you-mobile-phone-into-a-wifi-hotspot-for-your-laptop/ http://www.52ndwest.com/gizmos/technology/turn-you-mobile-phone-into-a-wifi-hotspot-for-your-laptop/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:15:23 +0000 Nicolas http://montcalm.wordpress.com/?p=99 Who has never looked with envy at those people surfing the web on their laptop, from the gate of an airport or while travelling on board of a train?

Who has never been discouraged to purchase a 30mns Internet credit for €15 from the only local provider available at an airport lounge or at a hotel?

As for my part, I’ve experienced both situations during one of the 140 Paris-Vienna flights I took for the past two years (17,5 tonnes of CO₂ … I know… I’m so ashamed). But I’ve never been so desperate to subscribe to an additional mobile contract for 12 or 24 month and get one of those “cool” broadband Internet access USB dongles you connect to your PC or Mac and which puts the world at your finger tips while on the move…

The main reason? Those mobile broadband packages cost (between €29 and €39/month). And since I already had a very convenient mobile contract with my mobile phone provider which features, among others, unlimited download allowance*, it was not worth having to pay for exactly the same thing (500MB) under a different shaped device (a USB dongle).

To that point, I just needed to figure out a way to properly “spend” those 500MB I was given every month. Most symbian devices, such as Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and Motorola, come with a software full of nice features to install on your laptop. One of those features (supposedly) allows you to connect your laptop to your mobile through a cable or a Bluetooth connection. But in most cases the result does not meet with the expectation of surfing the web at a high speed (in the best case you managed to properly configure your phone…). Surfing the web, in that case, is slow and painful.

JoikuSpot Light is a free symbian software that turns any mobile phone with a wifi connection, to a 3G WLAN HotSpot. You can thus connect your laptop or any other WLAN device to the web from anywhere using your mobile phone and enjoy 3G speed surfing!

In terms of download and upload speed, you can manage to pick at a very decent average of 850 kbps in downloads (I eventually managed to reach 1259 kbps!) and 85 kbps in uploads (peeked at 98 kbps during my speed tests on speedtest.net), which is not bad at all considering the fact that a regular home broadband Internet takes you at 2572 kbps (download) and 391 kbps (upload). So with JoikuSpot you’ll be able to listen to streaming music on Spotify, Deezer or Jiwa and enjoy from the best of youtube and dailymotion while on the move!

I’ve attached below some screen captures of the speed tests done with my laptop connected to my mobile ISP (BOUYGUES TELECOM) through the JoikuSpot mobile application and of the same test done with my laptop connected to my home Internet connection (Neuf Cegetel).

Once you’ll have this free software installed on your mobile, you won’t think twice when you’ll have to spend the week-end visiting your parents-in-law who live in a remote Internet-free location in the country… you’ll still be able, to some extend, to hide in the bathroom and make your pain public on twitter or facebook…

*which is actually not: phone service providers say “unlimited” for a 500MB download allowance… literally “unlimited”, as an adjective, means that something is not restricted or limited or seems to have no boundaries; infinite. Maybe this will be unlimited for M. Jones who only uses the Push email feature of his phone or his happy to surf the web for hours and burn his eyes on his tiny phone screen… but not for me. One more thing: Many “broadband-hungry” applications, such as “Internet Radio” will only be able to run on a wifi hotspot (mobile providers just want to make sure that you won’t be able to use more than 30MB, at most, of your 500MB).

In his study “Predicts 2009: Enterprise Infrastructures Look to Provide ‘Anywhere’ Access” Gartner analysts predict that by 2010, 90% of global wireless operators will cease to offer unlimited mobile data plans. This is mainly linked to the fact that networks are already hitting high capacity with increased customer demand, which affects the network availability and speed that users get on 3G. Data services on PCs and phones are already slowing down, and carriers cannot regularly provide the speeds that they advertise. Also, through 2010, 20% of 3G operators will be capacity-constrained, which will limit wireless network capability.