AT&T's proposed WCS spectrum sale

Sprint believes it has caught to have AT&T in a ‘gotcha!’ moment. While AT&T is using the threat of a spectrum crunch as justification to buy T-Mobile, Ma Bell is trying to sell off mobile broadband airwaves it already owns. In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, Sprint basically calls AT&T a hypocrite, citing AT&T’s intended sale of its 2.3 GHz spectrum as another reason for the FCC should deny AT&T and T-Mobiles’ -billion deal. While Sprint has levied plenty of dead-on criticisms against AT&T-T-Mobile deal in the past, this time the operator has overshot the mark.

Here’s an excerpt for Sprint’s letter, signed by Sprint attorney Charles Logan:

“AT&T, in fact, has more licensed spectrum than any other CMRS provider in the country. Other wireless carriers, such as Verizon, manage to serve more customers with less spectrum resources than AT&T by using their existing spectrum licenses, deploying new technologies, and investing in infrastructure. To the extent AT&T can be said to be constrained at all, therefore, any ostensible limitations are the result of years of underinvestment by AT&T in its network and AT&T’s failure to put its existing spectrum to more efficient use – or, in the case of AT&T’s WCS spectrum, to any use at all.”

Heady stuff, but it ignores the fact that the 2.3 GHz Wireless Communication Services (WCS) spectrum bands are a mess. Ever since the licenses were auctioned off in 1997, every major operator owning WCS has tried to find some use for that spectrum, but they all came up with squat. Power restrictions in the band make it useless for any kind of mobile voice and broadband service. And attempts by AT&T and BellSouth (which AT&T acquired) to use it for fixed wireless DSL-replacement technologies fell flat after numerous trials.

The specific C-block and D-block licenses AT&T is trying to sell in partnership with NextWave are even more problematic. They straddle opposite ends of the Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service (SDARS) band used by Sirius XM Radio, requiring any network to have a guard band to prevent interference with Sirius’ radio signals. That means the already small allotment of capacity in each block, 5 MHz, is cut in half.

At worst, AT&T is guilty of putting lipstick on this WCS pig — rouge and fake eyelashes as well — in attempt to find a buyer for the licenses. AT&T pointed out just how worthless these licenses are in its public policy blog after Public Knowledge made similar criticisms of hypocrisy. Yet, the little fact sheet AT&T and NextWave put together to market the spectrum paints WCS in much gentler light. In those materials, AT&T claims that the licenses can be used for all kind of nifty applications: smart grids, supplementary downlink for mobile networks, fixed wireless broadband access, backhaul and one-way broadcast services.

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Data is driving revolutionary changes in computing and the Internet, including new opportunities for generating revenue and more efficient use of current business processes and infrastructure. Data is now the most important and valuable component of modern applications and websites, and downtime or poor performance has a major cost to a business’ bottom line, impacting customers, reputation and revenue.

Achieving increased service capacity with high service availability and low response time is mission critical for many key classes of businesses, including eCommerce, social media, gaming, finance, telecommunications, and enterprise. The business opportunities are substantial, but the demands they place on the datacenter are daunting.

Data centers can fuse together advances in database architecture and commodity server and storage technology to achieve high availability (HA) with excellent performance, scalability and cost.

For the web and application tiers, IT managers of data centers and clouds already use virtualized machine instances hosted on high density commodity servers and storage with load balancing and simple timeouts to achieve HA, better perfromance and scalability in a cost-effective manner. But achieving these goals with databases in scaled production environments presents severe challenges.

For the data access tier, the fundamental HA database approach to maintain service availability is to create and maintain a replica of the database that can be switched when the master database is down due to failure or for routine maintenance.

Traditional loosely-coupled HA database architectures are based on asynchronous replication, and they result in data inconsistency, lost data, long fail-over time (often manual), and very poor performance scalability.

Tightly-coupled database architectures utilizing  parallel synchronous replication exploiting commodity multi-core servers can achieve 99.999% availability with full data integrity; unlimited scaling with exceptional performance and high data consistency; and greatly simplified administration including instantaneous, automatic fail-over and on-line scaling and upgrades. These databases can yield major improvements in data center QOS and TCO for scaled production services.

To achieve these availability benefits with high performance, the database software implementing transaction execution and synchronous replication must be optimized for high-thread parallelism and granular concurrency control. Multi-core thread parallelism is used to concurrently communicate, replicate, and apply master update transactions on all replicas with extremely high throughput and low latency. This high degree of parallelism and concurrency control also enables effective exploitation of flash memory,  providing linear vertical scaling with the cores in modern commodity servers, thereby enabling capital expense reduction (based on consolidation) and operating expense reduction (based on reduced power and space requirements). Unlimited scaling is achieved through transparent partitioning.  Geographic scaling and disaster recovery with HA and high data integrity is achieved by using parallel aycnhronous replication that is coupled to the base synchronous cluster, eliminating WAN data loss and providing WAN automated failover.

With this approach, data centers can fuse together the benefits of architectural improvements in HA software architecture with commodity high density computing to achieve very high service availability with excellent performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.  And they can achieve this without sacrificing existing application/data SQL compatibility.

Dr. John Busch is the founder, Chairman, and CTO of Schooner, which provides OLTP database software compatible with MySQL.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mandiberg.

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Adobe has acknowledged that there’s a war going on for developers, and it believes it has some increasingly popular weapons to win the hearts of mobile developers in Adobe Air and Flash. On the eve of the Mobile World Congress, the company shared some statistics about Air and Flash, hoping to get developers to see the value in its cross-platform tools.

Adobe said Adobe AIR applications are now able to run on more than 84 million smartphones and tablets running Android and iOS — and by the end of 2011, it expects more than 200 million smartphones and tablets will support Adobe AIR applications. Developers have built thousands of Air apps including 1,500 apps for Android Market in the first two months since Air apps became available there in October. It’s unclear how many times the apps have been downloaded but Adobe said Air has been downloaded 1 million times on Android (consumers need to download Air in order to run Air apps).

Adobe said more than 20 million of the smartphones shipped in 2010 had Flash Player 10.1 installed, with more than 6 million downloads of browser plug-in in the Android Market. This year, the company expects more than 132 million smartphones to have Flash Player installed, including 40 percent of all smartphones shipped in the first half of the year, while more than 50 tablets will ship or be able to download Flash Player. RIM’s Tablet OS and HP’s webOS platform will join Android in supporting Flash when they launch. Adobe is showcasing its newly released Flash 10.2 at the Mobile World Congress and will be highlighting Stage Video, its technology for improving video performance through hardware acceleration. Stage Video, which is supported on Android 3.0 and BlackBerry Tablet OS, offers more efficient use of the processor and memory and should improve battery life, one of the big knocks on Flash.

Anup Murarka, director of product marketing, said the demands of developers to support more platforms is growing, highlighting the need for tools that can help developers leverage their work. With an army of tablets running Android and credible iPad challengers in the BlackBerry Playbook and HP TouchPad, which will largely support Adobe runtimes, Adobe thinks it’s in a good place to benefit from the tablet boom. The company has been harping on its cross-platform tools but it now believes it’s getting enough reach and performance to really be compelling for mobile developers.

Adobe still faces a challenge in trying to evangelize its tools. While the company feels like it can help developers make apps that stand toe-to-toe with native apps, it has to overcome the perception that Air and Flash apps don’t perform as well as native apps and make as good of use of the hardware. Adobe will probably never match the performance of native apps but with new platforms emerging and the market for apps expected to hit  billion this year, it makes sense for Adobe to continue to play up its cross-platform potential and hope eager developers short on time and cash respond.

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For a digital printer that will meet all of your needs, look no further than the Okidata B6500N Printer. This superb piece of monochrome equipment is fast and reliable. Since it is capable of being upgraded, you will be able to use it for many years. They definitely manufactured this one with the intent of making sure you can get all of your work done. The Okidata B6500N printer toner is exactly what you’ll need to go with it.

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By Evan Ackerman

Bicycle helmets are a useless inconvenience every single moment of their existence except for that one super important one when they protect you from death (or such less punishment). Part of the problem is their shape, which (while a predefined inevitability) is not an efficient use of space. The Tatoo helmet (that comes from the french ‘tatou’ which means armadillo) is made out of flexible (and recyclable!) interconnected polypropylene that unsnaps from itself and packs flat for storage.

The problem here is that the convenience of having a bendy helmet kinda means that the helmet is, uh, bendy. As in not rigid. And last time I checked, rigidity was a rather important part of the whole “protecting your brain from impacts” thing. Good thing it looks like it’s still a concept at this stage.

[ Abitare ] VIA [ Fast Company ]

Sharp Japan today announced [press release in English] the development of a new method that makes it possible to control the alignment of liquid crystal molecules in LCD screens with high precision. In practical terms, this means the new UV²A technology could lead to TVs that save energy and display pictures with higher contrast ratios.

The main idea is to use a special material that reacts to UV radiation. The liquid crystal molecules align in accordance with the direction of the radiation so that the screen can display dark blacks. Sharp says the the contrast ratio is enhanced by 60% to 5,000:1, compared with conventional LCD screens. The response time is even doubled, according to the company. The new technology also leads to a more efficient use of the backlight, which means you can save up to 20% energy when you watch TV.

Sharp says production of LCDs making use of the new system will begin in a Japanese plant as early as next month.