Harbinger Will Compete With AT&T, Verizon And Sprint In Wireless Data Services, But Who Are They?
The wireless industry changes every few years. Evolving from analog to digital to smart phones to wireless data. We see Apple iPhone and Google Android capturing the headlines and now the next big unknown, Harbinger.
Who? The only company I know by that name is a privately owned hedge fund in New York City called Harbinger Capitol Partners owned by Philip Falcone. It’s the same company. You may ask, aren’t they in the investment business? What do they know about the satellite or wireless industry?
That’s the question many are asking. We have watched the industry change and transform itself over the last decade or two. Except all the innovation has come from solidly wireless companies and networks.
Even the new competitor Clearwire was started by Sprint. Now suddenly we have a new world opening up. Non-wireless companies like Apple and Google are capturing the headlines and at the top of the industry growth curve. These are not wireless companies, but suddenly they are on everyone’s mind.
Now we have a new comer to the party. Harbinger is not a wireless company. It is not even a technology company. They make nothing. They sell nothing. They are a hedge fund. A very successful company, but nothing to do with wireless the wireless industry and has no customers.
Even Apple and Google have millions of customers that they can then market their new wireless phones to and they do it very successfully.
However Harbinger has no customers who use other services who they can convince to try their new wireless data service. So this seems to make little sense.
With that said, who knows, maybe they can be successful. After all Clearwire also started from scratch, but it has many heavy hitter companies helping them with customers like Comcast, Time Warner and others.
Phil Falcone just hired Sanjiv Ahuja, the former chief of France Telecom SA mobile unit Orange to head up this new company.
This is all speculation because they are a private company and have not discussed yet what their plans are, but it sounds like they plan to create a high-speed wireless data network in the United States. They are acquiring SkyTerra, a MSS company which means Mobile Satellite Communications Services. This allows communications with satellite instead of cell towers.
Are their plans to be a satellite provider, or mix that with building a wireless data network? There are more questions than answers so far.
That is the question many are pondering today. How serious is this company about getting into the wireless data business? How do they intend to compete with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile? Are they going to do something new like Clearwire?
Are they planning on breaking out of the investment business and being a real wireless competitor? Will we start seeing television commercials at dinnertime on this new service? If they do how well will they compete starting from scratch? Will they have a good quality service, priced competitively, will they market and advertise it well. Will they attract customers who like the service and stay? Will they build a real company?
Or is this just the first step in a larger investment plan? Create something of value then sell it to another company for a large profit?
So the bottom line question is, will they be a competitor or not? We don’t know yet.
This is not a public company. Rather this is a private firm. Therefore we don’t have to know anything they don’t want us to know. They are keeping this close to the vest for now.
So all we can do is speculate. There has been some speculation, but not a lot so far. However they seem to be making the moves that say they will become a competitive force. They hired a known CEO. They are acquiring a company. These are steps in the right direction. However we don’t know, and won’t know anything until they are ready to talk more. So all we can do right now is stay tuned.
Jeff KAGAN is an Industry analyst, Author and Consultant. Over 25 years he has followed the industry and has worked with many wireless and telecom, cable TV and IPTV, Internet, software and computer companies. Visit him on the web at www.jeffkagan.com to learn more. Click here for more columns.
The History of Wireless Networking
The history of wireless networks and of wireless networking goes hand in hand. Without the discovery of technology such as the radio, wireless technology would not exist at all today. The history of wireless networking goes as far back as the 1800′s with that advent of radio waves. The advent of more technology grew throughout the years and expanded to what we communicated with today.
In 1888, a Hamburg, Germany born physicist named Heinrich Rudolf Herz produced his first radio wave ever. By 1894 this radio wave production became a way of communication. Telegraph wires were used to receive the radio waves in signal form. Herz opened the way for radio, television, and radar with his discovery of electromagnetic waves. An Italian inventor named Marchese Guglielmo Marconi then expanded the radius of radio wave sending to two miles, becoming the “father of the radio.” By 1899, this form of telecommunication could travel pretty far for its time. Marconi could send a signal 9 miles across the Bristol Channel. He eventually expanded the radius to 31 miles across the English Channel to France. By 1901 the communication area became immense. Marconi could send signals across the entire Atlantic Ocean.
World War II became a big stepping stone for the radio wave. The United States was the first party to use radio waves for data transmission during the war. This use of radio waves could have quite possibly won the war for the Americans. The use of radio wave data communication lead to a lot of speculation to whether the radio signals could be expanded into something bigger than it currently was. In 1971, a group of researchers under the lead of Norman Abramson, at the University of Hawaii, created the first “packet-switched” radio communications network entitled “Alohanet.” Alohanet was the first wireless local area network, otherwise known as a WLAN. The first WLAN was not much, but it was a large discovery. The Alohanet WLAN was comprised of seven computers that communicated to each other. In 1972, Alohanet connected with the WLAN system Arpanet on the mainland. This length of connect was ground breaking in telecommunications between computers.
The first types of WLAN technology used an interface in which became over crowded for communication. Small appliances and industrial machinery caused interference so the technology had to be updated. The second type of WLAN technology to be released ended up being four times faster than its predecessor at 2Mbps per second. We use the third format of WLAN today, though our current WLAN system runs at the same speed as the second system released.
In 1990, the 802.11 Working Group was established to work towards a WLAN standard for all computers to communicate from. In 1997, IEEE 802.11 was accepted as the standard data communication format for wireless local area networks. The technology continues to grow today. Governments and large corporations are constantly looking out for the latest and fastest standard to work from.
The expansion of wireless networking will likely continue for decades to come.
WES is a special event that is hosted for anyone associated with BlackBerry technology and wireless training. Everyone from technology executives, developers, IT professionals, developers, and software vendors can benefit from BlackBerry training.
What Are Wifi Finders?
With the increased WiFi technology progresses comes and increased wifi coverage in all the countries of the world. There are so many wireless devices that can be connected with each other that this technology is practically offering us a whole new networking perspective, that includes absolute mobility of connection. You could be practically walking the street holding a small laptop and still get constant internet access, with the help of various hot spots that are aiming to offer total coverage, especially in big metropolis.
But if you want to find for example a bench to sit on in a city park and then turn on your laptop and verify the mail you will first need to know if there are any available wireless networks in the area that allow client access freely. This can be done by finding some coverage areas from home, before leaving or by keeping the laptop or mobile device turned on all the time and scanning. Still, neither of the possibilities sounds promising. This is where the Wifi finders or Wifi detectors come in handy.
The wifi finders are small devices that work independently are their only purpose is to find and identify wireless network in the vicinity. They are used to detect wireless networks from the 802.11 protocols, and the detection is done instantly without needing to turn on the computer or the laptop. These devices usually present some type of light signals made of small led lights, that indicate the signals strength in the area. In open spaces, the wifi finders will detect wireless networks that operate no more than 60 meters away, which is a perfect opportunity of detecting networks you will actually be able to connect to if you turned on the laptop.
Using a wifi finder is as simple as it gets. All you need to do is press a button to activate it, and from here on the devices does its job. In case you are worried about other wireless signals that might be confounded with a wireless networks, know that the detectors do not present a signal when they encounter radio frequencies or frequencies that are used by mobile phone or cordless phones and microwave ovens.
A wifi finder is usually something as small as a lighter, that can be worn as a trendy keychain accessory. Because they need portability and because they work without a computer connection, these devices use batteries to function. For a person that like to spent a lot of time relaxing outside but still remains dependent to a laptop that need internet access for various reasons (work, emails, chat), a small device that can detect wireless networks in the near area is an absolute must have.
Mark Dunne is a writer providing advice on Wireless USB Set if you have time drop by his site for some tips and information.
Wireless Basic Notions Understanding Wireless Concepts
Because the wireless technology has evolved so fast there are many notions, protocols, definitions and terms that appear each day and most of them have meaning that are not deductive and are not understood correctly by the general public.
Open system is referring to a type of security that is include in wireless routers. It means that the client is identifying himself in the wireless network using his hardware address of the network card. For the infrastructure mode, the access point can have a list of hardware addresses configured, so that he knows what addresses to allow to connect. For the ad-hoc mode any hardware address is accepted in the wireless network.
Shared Key – means that an access point will verify of you know the secret network key when you want to connect to the network. The key has to be made public to all the clients of the access point and to the access point itself.
IEEE 802.1x – This wireless standard has been created for the wired Ethernet networks and them was adapted for utilizing it on wireless network using the extensible autentification protocol and other specific methods of connecting to the network.
Preshared Key – this is a method that is used for small and home networks in the infrastructure mode for encryptions like WPA and WPA2. The keys are configured in the access point and then in each client.
The connection 802.11b is like a half-duplex, because it can only send or receive data at a certain moment in time. This is the reason why the speed of traffic is usually half the connection speed. For a good quality signal and when WEP is not active, the speed is somewhere around 3.5-4.5Mbps and with WEP activated around 2.5-3.5 Mbps. This speed decreases if the signal decreases.
The wireless connection assures networks on limited distances, being influences by interferences with equipments that use the 2.4 GHz frequency (like cordless phones, microwaves). Perturbing the wireless signal will lead to errors, and some packets might need retransmitting, and the transfer speed will decrease.
A new wireless standard that is not accepted yet is called 802.11n, but it still is draft stage. This is a dual band standard and it can use both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies, with a speed of maximum 248Mbps. This is the new generation of wireless networks at high speeds that can run on the network applications with a big broadband like video streaming and multimedia games. They also have a bigger range. This standard is based on the technology of MIMO, which means multiple inputs, multiple outputs.
Mark Dunne is a writer providing advice on Wireless USB if you have time drop by his site for some tips and information.
Strange Wireless Uses ZigBee Wireless
Various methods of measuring based on wireless technologies have been used for a long time in industry, in applications where communication over long distances is a must and where the costs for installing wires is much higher than the one of transmitting data over radio frequencies. Drill stems, gas infrastructures, pumping stations, agriculture projects, these are just a few of the examples where a wireless radio communication is successfully used. The thing that makes this method even more interesting today is the convergence of technologies pf powerful microprocessors with reduced consumption, with the technologies of huge radio devices that also have a reduces power consumption.
Minimizing these types of components makes it possible to build today a wireless network which can work on batteries for years, even if it is not under strict surveillance. The wireless sensor network is a measuring instrument that is virtually manages, which means it is handled with the help of a computer.
ZigBee represents the definition of a technical specification utilized in digital radio protocols of communications, of small power, based of the wireless IEE 802.15.4 standard for personal wireless networks. The ZigBee 1.0 version has been accepted and standardized on the 14th of December 2004.
Operating on the radio frequencies of 868 Mhz in Europe, 915 Mhz in USA and 2.4Ghz in most countries, a ZigBee radio circuit that has been produces in a very small series in the USA used to cost around 1 dollar and the price of a small controller for this network is smaller than 3 dollars. Using a technology that is much simpler and much cheaper than the one in regular wireless networks, with software dimensions that are between 2% and 10% out of the ones used for a typical Bluetooth hotspot, the ZigBee networks are designed for applications with low consumptions of power (changing batteries can be done in some cases once every two years) and that do not need high transfer rates.
A zigbee wireless network can be used in a wide amount of domains, from industrial controls, to networks with integrated sensors, Getting medical data and in anti-fire and anti-theft systems or even in automatic devices that permit the existence of intelligent buildings and homes.
In the end, it is clear that these networks have been around for a while and we are probably making used of the wireless technology in many other ways, more than we dream of. Its not only the mobile phones, laptops and entertainment devices the ones that need wireless to function.
There are so many other more vital thing that are using the wireless technology that we cant even imagine, and the fact that the wireless network used by those devices are even more evolved and a lot more secure than the ones we use in our everyday browsing makes us wonder how come we have never though about their existence.
Mark Dunne is a writer providing advice on Xbox 360 Wireless Reciver if you have time drop by his site for some tips and information.