If you have teenagers or grandchildren who are glued to their phones around the clock, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the amount of wireless data traffic from Web browsing, streaming videos, tweeting, texting and checking Facebook is skyrocketing.
What you may not know is that all of those wireless texts, tweets and posts travel on invisible radio waves known as “spectrum.”
This spectrum or wireless capacity is a finite resource, meaning we can use it all up.
In fact, the Federal Communications Commission says we are less than a year from running out of wireless capacity.
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By Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association
February 22, 2012, 2:54 p.m. EST
It seems that Congress is always fighting partisan battles, but when they agree to do something significant without partisan rancor, it is not big news. Take last week.
A little-noticed silver lining in last week’s extension of the payroll tax cut opened the door to build a 21st Century wireless broadband network. As part of the compromise to pay for unemployment benefits, Congress included language authorizing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to hold voluntary incentive spectrum auctions.
If you’re unsure what this means for our wireless network, first a little background. Our mobile devices – tablets, smartphones, e-readers, etc. – connect to the Internet on wireless spectrum allocated by the federal government. A large portion of available wireless spectrum is now allocated to broadcast stations that transmit “over-the-air” television to those TV sets with rabbit ears. Decades ago, the government gave broadcasters, for free, a huge amount of spectrum to reach 100 percent of American households with television and radio programming. They were the only ones using this spectrum, but times have changed dramatically since cell phones were introduced and the overwhelming majority of Americans switched to pay-TV service. With the decline of broadcast TV – fewer than 10 percent of households rely on “rabbit ears” or other antennae –broadcast TV spectrum today is vastly underused.
Read the Full Forbes Article Here
WASHINGTON, Jan. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A new economic study released today by NDN finds that the adoption and use of successive generations of cell phones supported by the transition from 2G to 3G wireless networks led to the creation of 1,585,000 new jobs in the U.S. between April 2007 and June 2011. The study also estimates that a rapid transition from 3G to 4G mobile broadband networks could create more than 231,000 additional jobs within a year.
The study, “The Employment Effects of Advances in Internet and Wireless Infrastructure: Evaluating the Transitions from 2G to 3G and from 3G to 4G,” was co-authored by economists Robert J. Shapiro, chairman of the Globalization Initiative at NDN and former U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs, and Kevin A. Hassett, senior fellow and director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. In the paper, the authors quantify the large economic benefits – from employment to innovation – associated with the deployment of and investment in more advanced wireless infrastructure and associated mobile devices, tracking the impact of the transitions from 2G to 3G and from 3G to 4G network technologies.
Before we ring in the New Year, the Mobile Future team took a look back at some of the year’s exciting developments and ground-breaking wireless innovations. Our new video, the Mobile Year in Review 2011, and accompanying paper highlight many of the key consumer and mobile tech trends and explore what’s driving the dynamic mobile sector.
Watch the video here.
by Cecilia Kang, Washington Post (Post Tech)
There are now more wireless devices being used in the United States than there are people, and Americans have doubled the amount of Internet data traffic they generate on smartphones, according to the trade group CTIA.
The number of mobile devices rose 9 percent in the first six months of 2011, to 327.6 million — more than the 315 million people living in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Wireless network data traffic rose 111 percent, to 341.2 billion megabytes, during the same period.
How is this possible? Many adults have more than one wireless device, which include smartphones, tablets, and wireless cards.
Analysts have also pointed to the shorter lifecycle of electronics in U.S. homes, a trend prompted mostly by the availability of high-speed wireless access and more affordable devices. Read full article on Washington Post +
(WASHINGTON, DC) — Today, Mobile Future and Roger Entner of Recon Analytics, released a new report, What’s It Worth To You? Comparing Wireless Pricing in 14 Countries. The analysis finds that Americans consume more than five times the wireless services at more affordable rates than those in key countries around the world.
“Never has it been cheaper and more affordable for Americans to take full advantage of all that mobile connectivity has to offer,” Entner said. “Putting both voice and data spending together, Americans pay more than $4 less per month on mobile communications than they did three years ago, all while enjoying faster speeds and increased utility through more applications and tools. That is a remarkable value given the exponential growth in recent years in U.S. mobile Internet use.”
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Jacksonville Daily Progress
September 13, 2011
Lauren LaFleur
JACKSONVILLE — As more and more people rely on social media outlets and technology for daily life, Jacksonville’s local colleges are keeping up with the times through advances in their use of technology.
Both Jacksonville College and Lon Morris College have adopted the use of Google applications, or Google apps, for their students.
Google apps is a collection of software and storage on the Internet where users and create, store and share documents; use email; search online resources; organize and share calendars; and more.
“This year we decided to make it an effort to reduce space on our servers, to be cost effective, mindful of the environment and to use the incredible tools to make the classroom setting more interactive,” said Linda Gray, head librarian and member of the faculty development team. “We are utilizing Google applications for storing documents online that are used campus-wide, Google sites to create interactive class and department websites and online grade book systems. We hope that this will help students better communicate with their instructors while in and outside the classroom.”
Read the full article on the Daily Prgress web site
August 26, 2011
Governor Rick Perry has named Donna Nelson of Austin chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) for a term to expire at the pleasure of the governor. The board encourages competition and customer choice in Texas, and ensures electric and telephone operations, services and rates are fair and reasonable.
Nelson is a former special assistant and advisor on energy, telecommunications and cable budget and policy issues in the Governor’s Office, and has served on the PUC since 2008. She assisted the Governor’s Competitiveness Council with the preparation of the Texas 2008 State Energy Plan, and is past director of the PUC telecommunications section and former legal advisor to the PUC chairman. She is also a former assistant attorney general of Texas, where she specialized in antitrust lawsuits. Nelson is a member of the State Bar of Texas and a past member of the Texas Council on Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders.
Nelson received a bachelor’s degree from Black Hills State College and a law degree from Texas Tech University.
In 2011, the evidence is clear: the world is moving online at a pace that exceeds even the predictions of our top Internet visionaries. As everything from schoolwork to job applications to medical reports morphs from paper to “the cloud,” digital literacy is no longer an option: it’s an essential skill for anyone hoping to maximize his or her educational, earning and quality-of-life potential. In order to achieve the level of digital literacy necessary for a productive society, public access to computers and high-speed data transmission is imperative.
To bridge the digital divide, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission is coordinating an ambitious initiative to reach new or underserved computer users in traditional and non-traditional settings. READ MORE +
