Boston Unplugged: Mapping a Wireless Future

Reviews a variety of models that would allow Boston to provide free or low-cost high-speed Internet access citywide. Outlines the benefits and mechanics of citywide WiFi, and lists factors to consider in designing, developing, and deploying a system

Superfast broadband: the future is in your hands

The National Broadband Network (NBN) will deliver a comprehensive upgrade to Australia’s national broadband infrastructure. This will be of profound importance to Australia’s long-term productivity agenda. This paper, commissioned by Vodafone Australia, assesses new opportunities for the NBN. In particular, we examine how the growth of mobile services has transformed the telecommunications industry and how NBN has the potential to dramatically improve mobile telecommunications. It makes the case that the NBN, far from becoming redundant due to the explosion in mobile internet access, is in fact crucial to delivering better mobile services to both regional and urban areas without any significant increases in cost. It argues that the recent development of small mobile base stations (able to be placed on lampposts for example), connected to the NBN, can significantly increase and improve mobile coverage in both urban and regional Australia. This has the potential to radically reshape Australia’s economic and social future

Remote fieldwork: using portable wireless networks and backhaul links to participate remotely in fieldwork

Fieldwork is an important means of contextualising knowledge and developing subject-specific and generic transferable skills. However, field locations are not always accessible. To address this problem we present a remote fieldwork approach that makes use of a portable wireless network and other mobile technologies to support fieldwork at a distance. As well as improving access to fieldwork, this approach can also be used to provide communication tools to fieldworkers, enabling them to share their findings and talk to their colleagues while in the field. This paper presents the portable communications toolkit we have developed and reports on three recent trials

What's Going on in Community Media

What's Going On in Community Media shines a spotlight on media practices that increase citizen participation in media production, governance, and policy. The report summarizes the findings of a nationwide scan of effective and emerging community media practices conducted by the Benton Foundation in collaboration with the Community Media and Technology Program of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The scan includes an analysis of trends and emerging practices; comparative research; an online survey of community media practitioners; one-on-one interviews with practitioners, funders and policy makers; and the information gleaned from a series of roundtable discussions with community media practitioners in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Portland, Oregon

Are classroom internet use and academic performance higher after government broadband subsidies to primary schools?

This paper combines data from a government programme providing broadband access to primary schools in Ireland with survey microdata on schools’, teachers’ and pupils use of the internet to examine the links between public subsidies, classroom use of the internet and educational performance. Provision of broadband service under a government scheme was associated with more than a doubling of teachers’ use of the internet in class after about a two year lag. Better computing facilities in schools were also associated with higher internet use, but advertised download speed was not statistically significant. A second set of models show that use of the internet in class was associated with significantly higher average mathematics scores on standardised tests. There was also a less robust positive association with reading scores. A set of confounding factors is included, with results broadly in line with previous literature

Technologie en innovatie in Vlaanderen: Prioriteiten.

Vlaanderen;

The Mobile Generation: Global Transformations at the Cellular Level

Every year we see a new dimension of the ongoing Digital Revolution, which is enabling an abundance of information to move faster, cheaper, in more intelligible forms, in more directions, and across borders of every kind. The exciting new dimension on which the Aspen Institute focused its 2006 Roundtable on Information Technology was mobility, which is making the Digital Revolution ubiquitous. As of this writing, there are over two billion wireless subscribers worldwide and that number is growing rapidly. People are constantly innovating in the use of mobile technologies to allow them to be more interconnected. Almost a half century ago, Ralph Lee Smith conjured up "The Wired Nation," foretelling a world of interactive communication to and from the home that seems commonplace in developed countries today. Now we have a "Wireless World" of communications potentially connecting two billion people to each other with interactive personal communications devices. Widespead adoption of wireless handsets, the increasing use of wireless internet, and the new, on-the-go content that characterizes the new generation of users are changing behaviors in social, political and economic spheres. The devices are easy to use, pervasive and personal. The affordable cell phone has the potential to break down the barriers of poverty and accessibility previously posed by other communications devices. An entire generation that is dependant on ubiquitous mobile technologies is changing the way it works, plays and thinks. Businesses, governments, educational institutions, religious and other organizations in turn are adapting to reach out to this mobile generation via wireless technologies -- from SMS-enabled vending machines in Finland to tech-savvy priests in India willing to conduct prayers transmitted via cell phones. Cellular devices are providing developing economies with opportunities unlike any others previously available. By opening the lines of communication, previously disenfranchised groups can have access to information relating to markets, economic opportunities, jobs, and weather to name just a few. When poor village farmers from Bangladesh can auction their crops on a craigslist-type service over the mobile phone, or government officials gain instantaneous information on contagious diseases via text message, the miracles of mobile connectivity move us from luxury to necessity. And we are only in the early stages of what the mobile electronic communications will mean for mankind. We are now "The Mobile Generation." Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology. To explore the implications of these phenomena, the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program convened 27 leaders from business, academia, government and the non-profit sector to engage in three days of dialogue on related topics. Some are experts in information and communications technologies, others are leaders in the broader society affected by these innovations. Together, they examined the profound changes ahead as a result of the convergence of wireless technologies and the Internet. In the following report of the Roundtable meeting held August 1-4, 2006, J. D. Lasica, author of Darknet and co-founder of Ourmedia.org, deftly sets up, contextualizes, and captures the dialogue on the impact of the new mobility on economic models for businesses and governments, social services, economic development, and personal identity

WiMAX in the Classroom: Designing a Cellular Networking Hands-on Lab

Wireless networking has recently gained tremendous attention in research and education. Since the concepts taught in wireless courses are difficult to acquire only through lectures, hands-on lab experience is indispensable. While Wi-Fi based networking labs have been introduced before, to the best of our knowledge, labs that use a cellular technology have not been designed yet. Therefore, we present a WiMAX hands-on lab designed for a graduate course in wireless and mobile networking. The lab is based on the mobile WiMAX hardware and software developed and deployed within the GENI WiMAX project. We provide a brief overview of the course and of the main concepts taught in the WiMAX lecture. Then, we describe in detail our WiMAX network and the structure of the lab experiment. The effectiveness in achieving the learning objectives is evaluated via the lab reports submitted by the students. Finally, we review some of the lessons we learned during design and implementation of this lab. These can provide important insights to designers of similar labs