Poor wireless reception is symptomatic of a much bigger issue, says regular columnist Bill Thompson

"The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, must be hoping that his neighbours don’t decide to have a larger family.

He recently spent ages setting up a high-speed wireless network (wi-fi) at home, documenting the whole tortuous process on the BBC Technology blog, but all his hard work could apparently be ruined by a single baby listener.

The intercoms that let parents listen in to every snuffle, sob and cry operate in the same frequency band as wireless networks and can generate so much interference that they make the wi-fi unusable.

The television re-broadcasters that many people use to watch satellite TV in the bedroom (without having to install a second set-top box) also use the same frequency, because it is one of the few areas of the radio spectrum that does not require a licence; they too can slow down wi-fi speeds or make it hard for a computer to make a connection with a local network.

These unwelcome findings about interference come from a detailed survey by Mass Consultants, carried out on behalf of the telecoms regulator Ofcom, as part of its investigation into how radio spectrum is currently used and should be allocated in future.

" I can see 18 networks apart from the one I’m connected to, so I can vouch for the scale of the problem"
Bill Thompson

They found that in central London, the number of overlapping networks attempting to use the same channel was a significant problem, and that in some areas nine-tenths of the available bandwidth was being used by wi-fi nodes advertising themselves or doing general housekeeping, with only one-tenth actually available for user data.

Outside major metropolitan areas the real problem was interference from other devices using the same frequency ranges.

As I write this in a café near Holborn I can see 18 networks apart from the one I’m connected to, so I can vouch for the scale of the problem in London!

Wi-fi is far from robust in normal circumstances, as anyone who has wandered around a house with a laptop looking for a spot that gets a decent signal will testify.

Back in 2006, consultants AirMagnet got some useful pre-Christmas publicity when it announced that reflections from tree baubles and tinsel could cut wireless signal strength by a quarter in a well-decorated home.

But these findings reveal both the growing popularity and importance of wireless networks for home and business net use, and the urgent need to do something about it. Imagine how nice it would be if most wireless networks were suddenly five or even 10 times faster and generally reliable.

There is, of course, a simple if somewhat radical solution to the problem of having to squeeze wi-fi, baby alarms and TV re-transmitters into the same frequency range as remote controls, children’s toys and many other devices. We could get rid of them, or at least, the ones that cause trouble.

The problems arise because the devices are analogue and use a wider band of frequencies than their digital counterparts. On top of that, the signals are far more variable than digital signals expected by a wi-fi receiver, so if we made them all digital, we could design them so as to not to interfere.

Of course this won’t happen, because owners won’t accept that the analogue devices they’ve already paid for and used for years have to be sacrificed in the name of a bright shiny digital future.

I can see their point, even if part of me just wants to sweep their old technologies away in favour of an uncluttered wireless world.

Another solution would be to move wi-fi away from the currently unregulated 2.4 gigahertz frequency band it uses, but here we face much bigger issues than the objections of parents and sports fans.

Vast tranches of the radio spectrum, from 9 kHz to 275 GHz, is taken up by radio and television, both the older analogue transmissions that are currently being switched off and the newer digital services that replace them: DAB and digital terrestrial television.
If we got rid of the analogue and the digital services and replaced the whole thing with a high-bandwidth wireless network service then we would have more than enough room for laptops and baby listeners.

Yet even if Ofcom decided this was a good idea – and it won’t – there is an international dimension to the issue as the International Telecommunication Union’s Radiocommunication Sector has the task of ensuring that the many systems in use do not interfere with each other.

Much of the ITU’s work is about balancing competing desires, but there are also real physical limits on what can be done. Some frequencies, for example, are used by remote sensing devices in satellites because they are characteristic of water or growing plants, and obviously these can’t be changed by administrative fiat.
But as with so many established practices and procedures, from copyright law to the regulation of the financial markets, digital technologies both create new opportunities and challenge or undermine current practice.

The ability to make perfect digital copies has led to the crisis in the music and film industries, and the availability of digital communications channels is causing us to question the wasteful use of spectrum by analogue devices.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we’ll see a wholesale rethink of the way spectrum is allocated, and the lack of political will means there is little chance that those pushing for deregulation of broad swathes of the spectrum will have any success. We will have to live with dodgy wi-fi for a while yet."

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Imagine joining your friends who live across the country for a pickup game of softball in a virtual park, or wandering through a virtual shopping mall from the comfort of your home and trying on outfits perfectly simulated so you know they will fit, or bringing together your worldwide organization in a private, secure virtual conference center to plan next year’s strategies without having to purchase a single plane ticket. Intel is working to bring these and other immersive, connected experiences to mainstream virtual worlds by helping in the development of open-source virtual world platforms such as OpenSim. By developing such tools, which anyone can use to create a high quality virtual environment, Intel is helping to open up access for individuals, universities, and companies that want to start building the 3-D Internet of tomorrow. Intel is working with the OpenSim community to continuously improve the performance and capabilities of this platform, and is leading by partnering with the Supercomputing’09 conference to develop the ScienceSim virtual world. See OpenSim Performance Profiling to see examples of how Intel is improving the performance of not only ScienceSim, but the OpenSim platform itself. For more info, see Intel blog “ScienceSim — what could you do with a 3D internet?”

PCs and set-top boxes left powered-on yet idle, lead to wasted energy consumption. Ideally these devices would enter low-power sleep modes but today this would degrade functionality to the point that they lose their network “presence” so they can’t run tasks they need to run. Using a network proxy to maintain a system’s network presence and wake it only when necessary is a very energy efficient approach. Intel researchers are designing a proxy architecture, and accompanying API, intended to be general and flexible so proxies can be designed for both home and office environments, and for different targets in terms of complexity versus savings tradeoff. See Intel Research Berkeley Lab projects 2009 brochure for more information.

Regular columnist Bill Thompson probes media reports that Facebook usage affects grades

"The examination period is always stressful, both for those sitting GCSEs, A levels and the International Baccalaureate and for their parents and siblings who get ‘second-hand stress’ without even a certificate to show for their efforts.

My friends and I used to revise together, hoping that it would create enough social pressure to keep us working through the evening, but being in the same room is clearly no longer required. My daughter, in the midst of IB exams, and my son, facing GCSEs next week, have email, instant messaging and of course Facebook and other social network sites to keep in touch with their school mates and share revision tips and exam guidance.

Some revising schoolchildren probably found their access to Facebook severely curtailed last month, however, after The Sun revealed that those who checked the site every day dropped a grade in their studies while heavy users were doing as little as an hour of school work a week.

The story was far from exclusive to The Sun, as a quick search of Google News reveals. It made dozens of papers and websites, including The Times, The Calgary Herald, and The Australian, which told its readers that "Facebook fixation harms student grades" and referred worried readers to a Sydney University-based group called "I want to sue Facebook if I fail university".

Social networking scare stories are becoming increasingly popular, perhaps because the internet remains strange and mysterious despite its popularity while the long term impact of the network on our society is only just becoming apparent.

Cancer risk

" The research which looked so conclusive in the pages of The Sun is actually far from definitive. "
Bill Thompson

Journalists, who probably have more to fear from the growth of social tools and conversational media than most, may also be keen to highlight the dangers of the new technologies.

So we see absurd stories like the Daily Mail’s recent claim that "using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer", stories that entertain and frighten readers in equal measure by combining carefully selected psychological research with unfounded speculation to create a tale that has no basis in fact but aligns perfectly with widespread fears about new technologies.

This could also explain the love-hate relationship with Twitter in the press, where the service is a dull and tedious celebrity circus one day, and a cool way to stay in touch the next.

Facebook’s impact on academic grades seemed to be different, however, as it was backed up by some real science. The findings were based on a survey of 219 students at Ohio State University carried out by doctoral student Aryn Karpinski and Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University and presented to a prestigious meeting of the American Education Research Association, which is as scientific as the media gets.

But of course things are never as straightforward as they seem, and the research which looked so conclusive in the pages of The Sun is actually far from definitive.

Karpinski’s presentation, "A Description of Facebook Use and Academic Performance Among Undergraduate and Graduate Students," was not an invited peer-reviewed paper but a less formal poster session at the conference. The data showing a correlation between Facebook use and academic performance had not been published, and most of the news coverage seems to have been based on reading the abstract of the session without looking at the detail.

"Very basic"

The press coverage prompted further investigation, and in an article for the online journal First Monday Josh Pasek, Eian More and Eszter Hargittai describe how they analysed data from other studies to see if Facebook did have the claimed effect on grades. They found no support for Karpinski’s findings, noting instead that "if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades."

Karpinski then defended her work, noting that "my exploratory study and subsequent poster presentation were very basic. I merely planned to do this… to get some ideas and network with more experienced researchers in this area." She also took the time to consider the methods used in the other surveys, offering a detailed and technical critique that demonstrates just how complex this area is. This is real science, and it has to be done if we are to establish a sound basis for our understanding of these new technologies. Talking about coding methods and regression analyses may not be exciting for headline writers, but it is at the heart of this current debate.

None of the newspapers and websites that were so keen to exaggerate the original claims seem interested in following the real scientific debate, with the honourable exception of Carl Bialik in the Wall Street Journal who was careful to discuss the limitations of the original research and said right from the start that the area needed more study.

The press move on to another scare story, the impression that Facebook is bad for your studies remains, and the detailed research that will help us understand the emerging network society remains unread and unremarked upon. Perhaps we will have to wait for the semantic web and intelligent search, so that anyone calling up a dodgy article about the dangers of social networking is forced to review the latest academic research before they proceed.

"

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary in Karnataka, India is world famous for its tiger habitat along with other wild species living in a protected environment. Intel is working closely with scientists from the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS) to aid in ecosystem conservation through innovative use of the Intel-powered classmate PC to collect and analyze field data on real-time basis. With its unique features, the classmate PC is an ideal device to aid in the data collection, analysis and transmission process in adverse weather conditions. Intel collaborated with Tata BP Solar to create a solar unit that could charge Intel Classmate PCs anywhere, even in the remote forest areas.