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.
At the State Capitol in Austin recently, Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples honored 119 Texans whose families have farmed and ranched the same lands in the Lone Star State for more than 100 years.
These rural entrepreneurs are representative of the hundreds of thousands of Texans in rural communities all across our state, families and businesses that truly represent an integral part of our Texas economy.
Yet, think how much the world has changed in 100 years for these families and their farm and ranching businesses. Cultivating a crop and moving cattle to market today relies far more heavily on technology than they just a decade ago. The need is ever increasing for greater connectivity across rural America.
And, while most Texans enjoy adequate access to the Internet, the sheer size of our state makes access to broadband a struggle still for many rural communities. The Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan set out the admirable and important goal of bringing high speed Internet to every home, ranch and small business in America.
It’s good timing, too, given recent studies that point to rural communities increasing preference and reliance on wireless devices to communicate, educate, access health care and do business.
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Packed “Texans on the Go” Capitol Luncheon Featured National Tech Experts on Future of Technology and Keeping Texas on the Cutting Edge
On March 4th, the Texas Consumer Association, The Business Success Center, TechNet, and Texans for Economic Progress hosted “Texans on the Go,” a communications technology luncheon in Austin. The conference featured nationally renowned experts, who discussed the dramatic growth and constant innovations in the telecommunications and wireless industries. READ MORE +
By Simon Dumenco
The New York Times
Imagine getting a bit lost in, say, Manchester, England, pointing your cellphone at a nondescript building and learning instantly that you’ve chanced across a legendary pub that opens 30 minutes from now — and, by the way, a nearby rare-vinyl shop is offering a 20 percent discount, today only. Oh, and just down the block is a bistro that is never mentioned in guidebooks but is beloved by locals.
Welcome to the new, hyper-connected, technology-based travel paradigm. It’s the era of the smartphone as ubiquitous tool of navigation, when what matters is not just the here but the now. With smart phones increasingly ubiquitous, a new era of hyper-connected travel is at hand—literally—as so-called location-awareness continues to explode as a cultural/tech meme. Google Maps and Google Street View blanket more and more of the planet. Facebook and Twitter allow users to ‘‘geotag’‘ their updates with specific geographic coordinates, while Foursquare turns ‘‘checking in’‘ into a form of entertainment. Users of the photo-sharing site Flickr geotag more than four million photos per month. And augmented reality (AR) technology, which allows travelers to navigate their way to nearby attractions by aiming a smartphone in any direction, weaves together all those geodata points into a miniaturized virtual world coated with zesty little information bubbles.
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By Cecilia Kang
The Washington Post
Americans are holding onto their old cellphones much longer because of the bleak economy, while penalties and other fees attached to new purchases turn off would-be buyers, according to a survey by J.D. Power and Associates.
In a report released Thursday, the marketing information firm found that in 2010, basic cellphone and smartphone users said they had kept their wireless cellphones for about 20.5 months. That’s 17 percent longer than the previous year and the longest since J.D. Power began its survey in 1999.
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By Amanda Lenhart
Pew Internet & American Life Project
Texting by American adults has increased substantially over the past year, but still does not approach the magnitude of text messages exchanged by adolescents. Some 72% of adult cell phone users send and receive text messages now, up from 65% in September 2009. Fully 87% of teen cell users text. Teens text 50 messages a day on average, five times more than the typical 10 text messages sent and received by adults per day.
Still, for most adults, voice calling is their primary use of the phone. They make and receive about 5 calls per day on average.
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Download full report (pdf)
LONDON — The uptake of Wi-Fi within healthcare has grown at more than 60% over the past 12 months in both wireless local area network and Wi-Fi RTLS (Real-Time Locations Systems) deployments, and high double-digit growth is expected to continue for at least the medium term.
Other wireless technologies being adopted and deployed in healthcare including cellular M2M and wearable wireless sensors have also seen significant growth over the past 12 months.
Wireless communications continue to be adopted in healthcare applications ranging from Wi-Fi networks to wearable sensors that wirelessly transmit a patient’s condition to monitoring applications.
“Wi-Fi adoption has helped overcome initial concerns about complexity and reliability of wireless within healthcare,” says ABI Research principal analyst Jonathan Collins. “The growing number of wireless technologies and wireless applications being developed, piloted and deployed within healthcare further underline the level of interest in using wireless to improve the flexibility and efficiency of healthcare services around the world.”
The technologies tracked by ABI Research’s Wireless Healthcare Research Service include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Low-Energy Bluetooth, ZigBee, 802.15.4 and proprietary low power RF offerings across applications such as WLAN, personal monitoring, disease management, assisted living and telepresence.
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