The European Union has cleared Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong-based telecommunications firm, to move forward with its planned $1 billion purchase of Telefónica’s Irish mobile-communications operation. The EU’s approval was contingent on Hutchison Whampoa selling 30 percent of the newly-formed company’s networking capacity to two mobile virtual-network operators, which are companies that use other firms’ networking infrastructures to offer services. Hutchison Whampoa must also continue to participate in a network-sharing agreement with Irish telecommunications provider Eircom. Hutchison Whampoa, which already operates in six European countries, is expanding its holdings in the region. Regulators have been closely monitoring the European telecommunications market in recent months given ongoing consumer concern about consolidation causing rate increases. The EU’s approval of the Hutchison Whampoa deal could clear the way for Telefónica to enter the German market based on its divestiture of this unit. (Reuters)(Businessweek)
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Monday, November 4, 2013
New Smartpen Works with Mobile Devices
Mobile-computing vendor Livescribe has released a smartpen that can work on small devices such as tablets and smartphones. The Livescribe 3 smartpen uses a mobile machine’s microphone to record directly on the device. It also has a capacitive stylus, which can be used to write on the smartphone or tablet, opposite the ink pen tip. The smartpen has a mobile app that can record and playback audio, organize data, and add photos to notes, which users could share via e-mail or save to applications such as Evernote and Dropbox. (Venture Beat)(Engadget)(Livescribe)
Sunday, January 27, 2013
A boost to your mobile signal
We live in a 24/7, always-on, mobile and wireless world. Wherever we go we are connected -- to each other, to the web, to all our favourite apps, to whatever data we need, exactly when we need it.
Or so we like to think. The reality is quite different. There are corners of our homes where the web won't work. There are black spots in towns and huge holes in the wireless network in more remote areas. Coverage is far from complete.
To compound the problem, even when they have a good signal, smartphones often struggle to download the data they need because the mobile networks are saturated. The airwaves are at full capacity.
Europe has always been at the forefront of innovation in telecommunications and a pioneer of the next generation of mobile technologies. So watch out for 'femtocells' -- small mobile telephony cells that improve both connectivity and coverage at a local level.
Better signals
The principle is quite simple. Instead of mobile operators having to invest millions in powerful long-range base stations to extend coverage over a wide area, they can move mobile connections to more localised small cells. A residential femtocell, for example, would improve coverage for just one house, or perhaps a block of flats. A commercial small cell might boost mobile connectivity for a whole office while a mobile femtocell could provide passengers on public transport with a strong and static signal (sparing their battery and eradicating sudden drops in signal).
Femtocells are far more than mobile booster stations; they can also help to divert data traffic off the mobile airwaves. This offloading creates more network capacity. Wired into the fixed line broadband network, a femtocell can reroute data and voice traffic down wires, freeing up the precious airwaves for even more traffic.
Fast forward
Significant research is still required to turn these practical ideas into reality. There are so many dots to join up. How do you prevent femtocell signals from interfering with signals to and from main base stations? How do you decide whether to route connections through fixed lines? What protocols should you use in the layers of the 'communications stack'?
The FP7 'Broadband-evolved Femto networks' ( Befemto) project unites several industry giants in mobile telecommunications equipment, mobile operators, small companies with key technologies and several technology R&D organisations to solve these issues and demonstrate prototype femtocells at work.
'Europe recognises that mobile connectivity is a powerful social and economic driver,' explains Dr Thierry Lestable, the project's coordinator. 'EU support for the development of cheap technologies to enhance and boost innovative services is really important for growth, not just growth for telecoms manufacturers and providers, but for the entire economy. Most businesses rely now on mobility and permanent connectivity.'
'By adding femtocells and small cells into the mobile network mix we make it possible for mobile operators to improve their spectrum efficiencies through heterogeneous networks (HetNets) and seamless integration of the fixed line telecoms network,' Dr Lestable continues. 'But this rerouting has to be optimised and intelligent. We have been developing and testing self-managed femtocell connections which are programmed to pick their wireless protocols and frequencies and route traffic depending on a whole host of contextual data.'
Befemto has developed advanced cooperation, self-organising, healing and switching algorithms. The built-in intelligence allows femtocells to optimise their use of radio frequencies (depending on traffic densities, for example) and fixed broadband networks. They can also communicate with macro-basestations without any interference or effect on macro signal quality or capacity.
'These new algorithms allow femtocell networks to work together to provide top quality coverage for users and support seamless, low-power and low-cost relief enhancement to the mobile service,' Dr Lestable remarks. 'We are focusing on the newly launched LTE or 4G networks because customers are paying a premium for these and will expect a true broadband experience: fast, reliable and unlimited access to everything everywhere. Femtocells, and small cells will allow operators to meet these expectations and lower their operational costs at the same time.'
Active all areas
The project partners have applied for an impressive 12 patents for the technologies developed within the project. These patents range from novel network monitoring software to mobile traffic optimisation algorithms. The project has also improved radio-frequency front-end technology to improve signal quality and reduce interference between femtocells and other wireless devices.
On the international stage Befemto has played an important role in proposing and supporting industry standards for femtocell protocols and the mechanisms for migrating data traffic between mobile, WiFi and fixed line architectures. The project partners have made a total of 27 direct contributions to 3GPP, the international standards organisation for mobile technology.
The partners have also run five international workshops worldwide and two training schools to share the project's findings and build a common understanding of these technologies within the community. The partners have published more than 70 international papers.
The Befemto technologies and system architectures have been tested in five pilot demonstrations. Trial results show that femtocells significantly reduce load on mobile networks while boosting signal strength and quality at a local level. The work of the project will support mobile operators to reach two major technical targets: high spectral efficiency (8 bits/s/Hz per cell) -- meaning more and better use of scarce airwaves -- and a maximum mean transmit power of 10 mW -- for lower levels of interference.
'Most importantly, our trials also prove to mobile network operators that the small cell model is a good one,' says Dr Lestable. 'We've looked at several different business models for their deployment; no matter which one you follow, femto- and small cells will save mobile operators money and help them to create value -- a sure way to get them to market.'
It looks like that dream of 24/7 fast connectivity could be just around the corner -- a corner that no longer gets in the way of your calls.
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Monday, August 27, 2012
Better security for web and mobile applications
Called RockSalt, the clever bit of code can verify that native computer programming languages comply with a particular security policy.
Presented at the ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) in Beijing, in June, RockSalt was created by Greg Morrisett, Allen B. Cutting Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), two of his undergraduate students Edward Gan '13 and Joseph Tassarotti '13, former postdoctoral fellow Jean-Baptiste Tristan (now at Oracle), and Gang Tan of Lehigh University.
"When a user opens an external application, such as Gmail or Angry Birds, web browsers such as Google Chrome typically run the program's code in an intermediate and safer language such as JavaScript," says Morrisett. "In many cases it would be preferable to run native machine code directly."
The use of native code, especially in an online environment, however, opens up the door to hackers who can exploit vulnerabilities and readily gain access to other parts of a computer or device. An initial solution to this problem was offered over a decade ago by computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed software fault isolation (SFI).
SFI forces native code to "behave" by rewriting machine code to limit itself to functions that fall within particular parameters. This "sandbox process" sets up a contained environment for running native code. A separate "checker" program can then ensure that the executable code adheres to regulations before running the program.
While considered a major breakthrough, the solution was limited to devices using RISC chips, a processor more common in research than in consumer computing. In 2006, Morrisett developed a way to implement SFI on the more popular CISC-based chips, like the Intel x86 processor. The technique was adopted widely. Google modified the routine for Google Chrome, eventually developing it into Google Native Client (or "NaCl").
When bugs and vulnerabilities were found in the checker for NaCl, Google sent out a call to arms. Morrissett once again took on the challenge, turning the problem into an opportunity for his students. The result was RockSalt, an improvement over NaCl, built using Coq, a proof development system.
"We built a simple but incredibly powerful system for proving a hypothesis -- so powerful that it's likely to be overlooked. We want to prove that if the checker says 'yes,' the code will indeed respect the sandbox security policy," says Joseph Tassarotti '13, who built and tested a model of the execution of x86 instructions. "We wanted to get a guarantee that there are no bugs in the checker, so we set out to construct a rigorous, machine-checked proof that the checker is correct."
"Our proofs about the correctness of our own tool say that if you run the tool on a program, and it says it's safe to run, then according to the model, this program can only do certain things," Tassarotti adds. "Our proof, however, was only as good as this model. If the model was wrong, then the tool could potentially have an error."
In other words, he explains, think of an analogy in physics. While you might mathematically prove that according to Newton's laws, a moving object will follow a certain trajectory, the proof is only meaningful to the degree that Newton's laws accurately model the world.
"Since the x86 architecture is very complicated, it was essential to test the model by running programs on a real chip, then simulating them with the model, and seeing whether the results matched. I specified the meanings of many of these instructions and developed the testing infrastructure to check for errors in the model," Tassarotti says.
Even more impressively, RockSalt comprises a mere 80 lines of code, as compared to the 600 lines of the original Google native code checker. The new checker is also faster, and, to date, no vulnerabilities have been uncovered. The tool offers tremendous advantages to programmers and users alike, allowing programmers to code in any language, compile it to native executable code, and secure it without going through intermediate languages such as JavaScript, and even to cross back and forth between Java and native code. This allows coders to choose the benefits of multiple languages, such as using one to ensure portability while using others to enhance performance.
"The biggest benefit may be that users can have more peace of mind that a piece of software works as they want it to," says Morrisett. "For users, the impact of such a tool is slightly more tangible; it allows users to safely run, for example, games, in a web browser without the painfully slow speeds that translated code traditionally provides."
Previous efforts to develop a robust, error-free checker have resulted in some success, but RockSalt has the potential to be scaled to software widely used by the general public. The researchers expect that their tool might end up being adopted and integrated into future versions of common web browsers. Morrisett and his team also have plans to adapt the tool for use in a broader variety of processors.
Reflecting on how the class project has been transformative, Tassarotti says, "I plan to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, and I hope to work on projects like this that can improve the correctness of software. As computers are so prevalent now in fields like avionics and medical devices, I believe that this type of research is essential to ensure safety."
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