1. Noxon iRadio For iPod

£240
Stations: 10,000+
Formats: AAC, ID3, MP3, M3U, PLS, WAV, WMA
Bands: FM
Verdict : A sleek-looking radio with iPod dock, an output to add a second speaker plus a USB socket for a storage device. Stations are from the vTuner, with listings updated automatically. Local stations are at the top of the menu, and it can stream lots of formats (and thus stations) from a PC. A sophisticated machine, but for £240 it should sound better

2 out of 5 stars

2. Intempo GX-01

£120
Stations: 5,000+
Formats: AAC, MP3 Ogg, Vorbis, RealAudio, WMa
Bands: None
Verdict: A sturdy Wi-Fi radio offering surprisingly good sound from its 3W speaker. It’s a cinch to set up, with internet stations updated via the Reciva database. Sadly, the lack of a DAB or FM tuner means it’s dependent on a high-quality tuner/amplifier.

3. Denon S-52DAB

£550
Stations: 7,000+
Formats: AAC, FLAC, MP3, WAV, WMA
Bands: FM/AM, DAB
Verdict: Pricey, but with FM, DAB, CD playback and iPod connectivity, it’s a comprehensive package. The station listings are updated via vTuner, and you can create a preferred list at radiodenon.com. Meanwhile, audiophiles will welcome support for the lossless FLAC format, which enables you to stream music at the highest possible quality.

4 out of 5 stars

4. Magicbox Clarus Plus

£77
Stations: 8,000+
Formats: MP3, RealAudio, WMA
Bands: FM, DAB
Verdict: At under £80, the Clarus Plus is certainly cheap, but it’s not the most attractive of units. The stations are acquired from wifiradio-frontier.com, where you can add your own show selections, but the radio lacks some of the flexibility of other models; only three audio streaming formats are recognised and it has relatively weedy 1.5W speakers

2 out of 5 stars

5. Tangent Quattro

£180
Stations: 6,500+
Formats: AAC, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Real Audio, WAV, WMA
Bands: FM
Verdict: The Quattro offers access to a plethora of stations, which are automatically updated via Reciva. Entering an encrypted Wi-Fi network can be a hassle, but after you’ve done it once, the data is stored. The top-mounted speaker can be a problem when choosing where to place this model, but the sound quality is fine.

3 out of 5 stars.

6. Pure Evoke Flow

£150
Stations: 8,000+
Formats: AAC, MP2, MP23, RealAudio, WAV, WMA
Bands: FM, DAB
Verdict: The reliance on pure’s own thelounge.com site to manage stations, favourites and presets could be a drawback, but this is one of the easiest internet radios to set up and use, thanks to touch controls and a clear, bright screen. It sounds good, too, and you can run it off batteries as well as the mains (with an optional rechargeable battery pack costing £30)

4 out of 5 stars.

A Guide to the World’s Internet Radio Stations

Last.fm

Founded in 2002, Last.fm was acquired for £140m by CBS last year thanks to the success of its ‘audioscrobbler’ recommendation system. Register at the site and it will record details of what you listen to then recommend and play tracks it thinks you might like.

Subfm.com

Billing itself as the best of ‘online pirate soundz’, Subfm offers a mix of Dubstep, Garage, Grime and of course those all important shout outs.

FiP – radiofrance.fr/chaines/fip/endirect/index.php

Thanks to a Brighton resident rebroadcasting it for ten years (before Ofcom shut it down) FiP holds the honour of the longest running pirate station in Britain. Now available to all online, France’s eclectic, advertisement free station plays everything from world music, to film soundtracks.

J-Wave – J-wavemusic.com

Broadcasting out of Tokyo, the station that coined the term ‘J-Pop’ offers a mix of Japanese music and more western favourites like Beyonce.

KCRW.com

Public radio broadcast out of Santa Monica College in California, KCRW offers a mix of news, talk and music, and is famed for its live sets from the likes of Vampire Weekend and Goldfrapp. Their music director is Brit Nic Harcourt, credited with helping to launch the careers of Travis, Coldplay and Franz Ferdinand stateside.

ResonanceFM.com

Art radio straight out of Borough High Street in London, Resonance play a wide variety of music, as well as regular programming on everything from the latest in comics to environmentalism.

BBC.co.uk/radio

One of the big players in internet radio, the BBC offers everything online, including the fantastic listen again service to catch anything you missed and bite size podcasts, ensuring you get the most out of the license fee.

Muppet Central Radio – muppetcentral.com/radio

24/7 Muppet music, what’s not to love? Wall to wall Fozzie, Kermit and Miss Piggy provides a fun distraction, but the 100th playing of ‘Mahna mahna’ might be enough to have you hurling that new wifi radio out of the window.

Mayor Boris Johnson first said that he wanted London to become “a wi-fi city”, where the internet was available anywhere, in September 2008. “Let’s do it, beginning in Stratford in this fantastic area of opportunity,” referring to the location of the main 2012 Olympic site. During Google’s Zeitgeist event in Hertfordshire, held on Tuesday, Boris Johnson once again pledged that the capital would become one huge wi-fi hotspot. He told 400 business leaders: “Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet, was born in London, so we claim paternity of the internet. ”London is the home of technological innovation. We in City Hall are doing our best to keep up, and one of our most important projects is called wi-fi London.” The mayor explained how street furniture, such as lamp posts and bus stops, could be wi-fi enabled using existing cabling.

Wireless Square Mile

London already has large areas covered by wi-fi networks. The City of London has 95% coverage allowing more than 350,000 people who work in and visit the area access to wireless broadband. It was launched in April 2007 and was the largest European outdoor wi-fi network of its kind. Steve Nicholson, Chief Executive Officer of The Cloud who provided the City of London with its wireless network said: “The key telecoms executives meet with Boris and the 2012 Olympic organisers once a quarter to chew over how the industry can respond to the anticipated surge in mobile Internet as the Olympics come to town.

“It’s great for Londoners to have broad industry agreement that the only credible means to cater for high performance mobile broadband is over wi-fi.” ”I suspect Boris is articulating his thoughts around how we can conceptually deliver a wi-fi service across all the key London boroughs to create a wi-fi city. ”The cloud has multiple networks similar to what Boris describes, in the Nordics and of course in the City of London, which is mounted on street furniture, so it is logical to assume a similar network across London.” Steve Nicholson continued: “As ever with such public ambitions it will come down to costs and I suspect a worry is the probability of budget cuts as the new government curbs public expenditure. The clock’s ticking and hopefully our current financial woes will not stop us showcasing UK PLC at the Olympics.” Canary Wharf has also been enabled with wireless broadband since 2005.

Do we need it?

Some would say that London is already covered by wi-fi. You can walk along most high streets and you will find hotspots in coffee shops, restaurants, hotels, sandwich bars, pubs and several public places. However, it will be the open spaces and streets of London without local wi-fi or fixed broadband that would benefit. Modern technology has also driven a need for more public hotspots. Wireless enabled devices include laptops, PDAs, media players and smart phones. The huge rise in social networking will allow users constant communications. Businesses will also benefit from the knowledge of broadband available anywhere in London. Wi-fi is also much faster than mobile phone data networks and traditional dial-up connections. At the moment if you were to travel around the capital with a wireless device you would have to connect and re-connect many times to several different hotspots and possibly pay for more than one service. There is also no guarantee that where you are has wi-fi. British web users are spending 65% more time online than three years ago, according to a recent survey. When using wi-fi your data (e-mails, internet addresses, keystrokes) is being transmitted across the airwaves and encrypted for security.

How much will it cost?

Price plans have not been detailed yet but at the moment you can pay anything from £5 per hour to £9.99 per day from a range of suppliers. Free wi-fi access within pubs, coffee shops and other public places is becoming more common.

Boroughs on board

Twenty-two London boroughs have signed up to the plan. The project is expected to work by installing thousands of ‘hotspots’ (wi-fi zones) into street lights and bus stops. Wi-fi transmitters could use the existing electrical supply and wiring found within many public street items. In 2009 Swindon Borough Council switched on the first phase of its plans to install a wi-fi wireless mesh covering the whole of the Borough of Swindon – the first town in the UK to provide free internet access for all its residents.

]]> http://www.gaiacomwn.co.uk/featured/can-the-whole-of-london-go-wi-fi/feed/ 0 http://www.gaiacomwn.co.uk/featured/public-wi-fi/ http://www.gaiacomwn.co.uk/featured/public-wi-fi/#comments Sat, 14 Aug 2010 13:33:22 +0000 admin http://www.gaia.ie/?p=1130 Wireless hotspots are spreading across the world's cities, with blanket wi-fi zones now being rolled out in many city centres. Operators are providing wireless surfing at the touch of a button from the park, the bus or the street corner. So what does the wireless future have to offer?

Users of the new city-wide wi-fi networks will be required to pay access charges to an account provider, such as BT Openzone or T-Mobile. The revenues will be shared between the owners of the street furniture on which the equipment is installed (usually local councils), wi-fi hotspot suppliers and the internet service providers.

Devicescape SoftGPS is a software-driven positioning service for devices and location-aware applications. SoftGPS uses Devicescape’s global, high quality database of Wi-Fi access points in order to provide location in a uniquely cost effective manner. Want to try out SoftGPS? Get an evaluation version here. With Devicescape SoftGPS, users can rapidly determine their approximate geolocation without the use of a GPS or cellular chipset, making SoftGPS especially suitable for Wi-Fi only devices such as netbooks. If the device already contains a GPS by reducing power consumption by reducing the need to turn on the GPS or cellular radio to determine a location.

Of course, they’re now in competition for some of the location services dollars. It makes sense. Skyhook Wireless bootstrapped itself into the Wi-Fi positioning business through brute force driving. It still uses driving as a primary component in how it provides fairly precise latitude and longitude based on an analysis of Wi-Fi network IDs and the corresponding signal strength around a device. But Skyhook also gathers data, massive massive amounts of data, from mobile devices, largely smartphones. Each time a smartphone snapshots a network environment and sends that information to Skyhook, the company not only replies with GPS-like data, but it adds the collected information into its databases to refine, update, or expand its knowledge. Devicescape thus finds itself in a similar footing. Without having fleets of wardriving trucks, Devicescape does have its software installed in millions of devices worldwide, and gathers the same kind of snapshots. The company has also collected the information and positions of millions of hotspots. This information put together leads inexorably to the desire to make money off it. You don’t collect a billion or 10 billion pieces of such information without wanting it to generate some cash in return.

The demand for location services is extremely high now that the pieces are in place by many content providers to deliver general and specialized information relating to where you’re precisely standing. That ranges across simple mapping, navigation and directions, advertising, yellow page-like business data, and augmented reality (where information is overlaid on a live video stream of your surroundings, for instance). While the focus has been on smartphones and other cellular devices, that may be misplaced. In most such devices, GPS (and, most of the time, Assisted GPS) provides primary information with Wi-Fi and cellular triangulation a secondary or supplementary factor.

But what about the thousands of current and future mobile doodads that won’t have a GPS chip, but for which location is a useful component? That’s where Devicescape and Skyhook will contend. And Devicescape has an advantage there. Devicescape has relationships with many hotspot networks and the software that allows authentication to free and open networks. That means Devicescape’s SoftGPS will likely be able to connect to its back-end servers quite a lot of the time, where Skyhook will be relying on a network connection made by the user, or a 2G or 3G cellular data connection. Both companies can offer “deferred” lookup, too. That’s what I get with my Eye-Fi cards, the SD camera cards with Wi-Fi built-in. The Eye-Fi with the right model or add-on subscription captures Wi-Fi scans along with photos. When you use its software to transfer photos, a Skyhook lookup happens and adds geotagging (EXIF metadata) to the images.

Applications like Google latitude can now easily display you location information in real time to yourself and others via smart phones. Attempting to calm the nerves of those who worry about the potential implications of disclosing their location to their friends, Google have been at pains to ensure the necessary privacy controls are in place for the release. Those who use Latitude will be able to screen which of their contacts are able to see their location, or even enter a fake location manually, should they wish to hide what they’re up to without it appearing obvious to contacts. The market for location is expanding, and not everyone wants to be in bed with Google, nor will Skyhook have the right mix or technology for each potential customer. And, Om omits the fact that Google has agreed to be or is prohibited from collecting Wi-Fi data from Street View in many countries, although Android-based location collection is likely unimpaired. The addition of Devicescape to the Wi-Fi location market seems like a clear win for everyone but Skyhook, which now has to contend with a potentially strong and savvy competitor that knows plenty about device-level driver and OS integration. For manufacturers, service providers, and customers, there will likely be a faster pace of devices knowing where we are.

World radio enthusiasts used to have to buy expensive communications receivers and antennas and put up with patchy shortwave reception. This has all changed with the development of internet radio. Now world radio is available to everyone. Internet radio brings you radio stations worldwide, easily accessible over GPRS, WLAN or 3G. Using the Station Directory you can search for stations by name, genre, language or location. If you’re looking for radio inspiration you can browse ‘Top Stations’ to find out what everybody else is listening to. Variable download rates offer a quality listening experience. What is even greater about this is that you can listen to it even without your computer.

How would you like to have 30,000 radio stations at your fingertips, streamed wirelessly to your little world. Yup, we thought that sounded like a pretty good proposition. It can be had with the new Tuner Wireless Radios which taps into numerous web radio stations and web streaming audio sites to deliver more worldwide radio than you can possibly handle. Among the many Internet options you get to choose from are Reciva, iheartradio, CBS Radio, Pandora, Premium Sirius Internet Radio, Live365, MP3tunes, NOAA and NPR. Then, of course, you can also plug the Tuner Wireless Radio into your larger and higher-performance home stereo system to get some bigger bang from all of those tunes.

Music enthusiasts and Internet savvy individuals will have a field day with these wifi radios. Most of these products support WMA, MP3 and real media streaming. They also come with LCD displays which allow you to have access to thousands of radio stations without being interrupted by the annoying abundance of commercials. Aside from songs, you can also get sports and weather reports straight from your wifi radios. The sound quality also adds up to the amazing listening experience.

There are a number of portable wifi radios available on the market. All of them share the same generic features of a wifi radio, but differ when it comes to packaging and functionality. They allow you to bookmark your preferred stations so you will not have to waste time browsing and looking for music you want to listen to. It is time to fully enjoy information on the Internet. With millions of songs, and thousands of radio stations to choose from, you can surely find one that fits the bill.

Mobile operators are adding WiFi hot-spot locations to their networks. The hot-spots are designed to offload network traffic from the company’s 3G network and boost performance for customers. WiFi hot-spots are being lit up on a daily basis and mobile operators are giving their customers access to them. This is prompted by the proliferation of smart phones, ipads and other wireless devices.

The idea of a hotzone makes perfect sense for a firm that’s getting criticism for being unable to meet the data needs of subscribers in some cities and neighborhoods. Wi-Fi cells can be quite small, and have much higher capacity than cell channels, while being enormously cheaper to run, partly because there’s no opportunity cost related to expensive cellular spectrum licenses.

These hot-zones differ from municipal Wi-Fi efforts started in 2005 and mostly abandoned by 2007. Municipal networks were typically designed to require private investment by firms to provide indoor and outdoor network coverage to ninety to ninety five  percent of a city.

Hot-zones will cover outdoor areas of high traffic, and work only for customers. There’s no specific municipal benefit involved, and mobile operators will control their deployments entirely.

It’s a smart move. Operators could likely spend less a tenth as much in high-traffic areas to add Wi-Fi as to beef up cellular. And there’s only so much spectrum available, meaning that in many areas there may be no real way to enhance the 3G data side.

This is Wi-Fi as a 3G network heat sink.

The telecom behemoth is also gigantic in giving away Wi-Fi to customers: AT&T’s quarterly report on Wi-Fi usage finds the firm serving 121m sessions in the first six months of 2010; that compares to 86m sessions in all of 2009. Second quarter 2010 saw 68m sessions used, compared with 15m in the year-ago second quarter. Second quarter was also a 30-percent increase over first quarter.

AT&T WiFi Map

That’s great, but you’ll note that the names McDonald’s and Starbucks aren’t mentioned anywhere in the press release. McDonald’s and Starbucks represent about 19,000 of AT&T’s “more than 20,000″ locations.

In January, McDonald’s opened its Wi-Fi network to everyone at no cost; previously, AT&T customers (wired, DSL, fiber, remote business, and laptop 3G) got access at no cost, and so did roaming network partners. One expects that McDonald’s drove part, but not all, of the increase.

Likewise, on 1 July 2010, Starbucks shifted from its modestly complicated free two hours’ offer, where you needed a Starbucks stored-value card, to unlimited free service for everyone. I expect we’ll see a big jolt as a response, because it removes friction for short, casual use, as opposed to longer use in which anyone who figured it out would already have been using Starbucks’ Wi-Fi at no cost.

You can’t disregard other factors, however. AT&T continues to add wireless, laptop 3G, and fiber customers (although I believe DSL and landline markets are static or shrinking). Those users gain free service on subscribing. And existing users rely more on using free service as available.

The couple of million iPads that AT&T sold as part of the 3m+ worldwide totally likely are part of that jump in usage. A single iPad user could consume dozens of sessions a day, either on the AT&T free locations (with a Wi-Fi only unit or a 3G iPad without an active 3G subscription), or across AT&T’s network with a 3G iPad and an active 3G data plan. (The active data plan gives you access to hotels, airports, and other otherwise for-fee locations, and some roaming locations on reciprocal networks.)

Finally, AT&T switch a few weeks ago from unlimited service plans to cheaper, limited plans for new customers or those that opt to switch away from unlimited will likely mean bargain hunters like yours truly will work harder to find free Wi-Fi instead of consuming expensive 3G juice.

The Japanese technology corporation Kyocera, one of the leading manufacturers in the field of photovoltaics, is aiming to expand its project business in the future. Acting as the main contractor in this pilot project with regional relevance, Kyocera has fitted out a grammar school in the state of Baden-Württemberg with a complete solar plant. It was completed in June 2010 and has an output of 130 kilowatts peak kWp.

The Otto-Hahn-Gymnasium in Nellingen has set itself the target of becoming the first CO2-neutral school in the region. And progress is good: since the end of June, a Kyocera photovoltaic plant with an output of 130 kWp has been feeding energy into the electricity grid. With a total of 606 modules of the type Kyocera KD215GH-2PU, the school is achieving an annual energy yield of 123,000 kilowatt hours (kWh). This is enough to supply roughly 30 four-person households per year with energy. The CO2 saving in the same period amounts to 76,000 kilograms. As the plant was completed on time by Kyocera before 1 July, the school additionally profits from a higher feed-in tariff.

Kyocera as main contractor provided support for the OHG during the planning and assumed control of the material supplies as well as execution of the project. For the future, the company has set itself the target of providing greater support for the implementation of solar projects, above all for partners from the region.

In close coordination with the project partner, Kyocera is fulfilling individual customer demands for sustainability with tailor-made solutions, while at the same time guaranteeing the respective target margins. “Kyocera sees itself as a quality supplier and this aspect also guides our selection of project partners,“ says Dr Stefan Wiebach, European Product Line Manager at Kyocera.

In this way, photovoltaic plants from the premium segment are adapted precisely to customer requirements and handed over on schedule as turnkey solutions.

Top quality in modules and project management

Kyocera is a front runner in the solar energy market and began to develop solar cells in 1975. The company has therefore gathered many years of experience and established a close link to the solar industry. In its production, Kyocera attaches particular importance to covering the entire value-added chain itself, starting with the processing of the raw material through to module production, and thus guaranteeing quality and performance of the modules.

Kyocera Corporation (President: Tetsuo Kuba; herein “Kyocera“) announced that the company has started supplying solar modules for “Toyota Solar Panels,“ which are to be installed in recreational boats manufactured and sold by Toyota Motor Corporation (herein “Toyota“). Toyota Solar Panels can also be installed as an optional unit on recreational boats manufactured by other companies.

This solar module had been exhibited in the Kyocera booth at PV Japan 2010, the solar energy trade exhibition, held at Pacifico Yokohama, Japan from June 30 through July 2, 2010.

Electricity generated by the solar modules can be charged to a battery and used as a supplemental, durable power source for the various electronics and appliances installed on recreatioinal boats creating a more comfortable boating experience. Its use not only helps the reduction of CO2 emissions but also prevents a boat’s battery from deteriorating in times of non-use for extended periods during docking at port.

Kyocera already supplies its solar modules for the Toyota Prius, which was launched in May 2009. Following on from the company’s solar modules introduction into the automotive field, they are now being expanded to use in marine vessels.

For this product, Kyocera has implemented strict quality control evaluations, done through rigorous testing to confirm heat resistance, vibration resistance, shock resistance and other aspects, in order to ensure reliability. For the production of this module, Kyocera has set up a dedicated production line with specialized engineers to ensure thorough manufacturing control.

While seeking to further enhance the quality of its solar cells and modules, Kyocera will also continue to explore new possibilities for the application of solar power.

Solar Module Specifications

Output:Maximum approx. 60Wp (solar module)

Conversion efficiency: Maximum approx. 17.5% (solar cell)

Production bases – Cells: Yohkaichi Plant (Shiga, Japan)

Production bases – Modules: Ise Plant (Mie, Japan)

Application: Battery charging for boat’s equipment

The Japanese technology corporation Kyocera, one of the leading manufacturers in the photovoltaic field, is manufacturing solar modules in California since June, to serve the U.S. market’s growing demand for clean energy. The new solar manufacturing line has an initial production target of 30 megawatts per year. Kyocera is targeting a global production capacity of one gigawatt per year, by March 2013.

Kyocera decided consciously for San Diego as production location, in order to react to the increasing demand of the American market for private, commercial as well as for ready-to-use solar plants.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said: “Even in this recession, green jobs in California have grown, and Kyocera’s decision to locate its solar manufacturing operations in San Diego will create even more jobs at a time when they are needed most.“

Kyocera’s San Diego plant will provide locally manufactured high-quality, high-efficiency solar modules to serve the expanding U.S. market. With a 35-year experience of providing clean energy through solar modules, Kyocera is targeting a global production capacity of one gigawatt per year by March 2013 to meet worldwide demand“ said Mitsuru Imanaka, European president of Kyocera Fineceramics.

In addition to the operations coming to San Diego, Kyocera currently has solar module manufacturing facilities in Japan, China, the Czech Republic and Mexico. Kyocera Group companies currently employ more than 4,000 people in the United States.

In its production, Kyocera attaches particular importance to covering the entire value-added chain itself and thus guaranteeing quality and performance of the modules.
Thanks to the interplay between 35 years of experience in the solar business, a close control and the fully automated manufacturing process Kyocera achieves an exceptionally high product quality. This means efficiency, durability and reliability, which provides benefits for private users and operators of large-scale solar plants alike.