Wireless

I'm not a big fan of this. The strangest part of it all is that people recently went from having an AT+T branded cell phone on a Cingular network service, and now in the upcoming weeks, they will have a Cingular brnaded cell phone on an AT+T network service.

Someone on the SA forums summed it up best by saying, "Remember that part in Terminator 2 when the T-1000 was frozen and smashed apart, only to reform a few minutes later? Yeah, that pretty much describes the fall and rebirth of Ma Bell."

That is how I feel about it too. Of course, if this somehow means that FiOS will reach my house, my opinion will change but I doubt that will happen any time soon.

Good news for people that work for Grand Rapids, the city, and for the residents. WiMax has a much longer range than WiFi, so I'm curious just how far the reach of the signal will go. You can read about it more here. Clearwire LLC seems to be providing the service.

I'm hoping this wasn't a fluke because I thought the rollouts were complete but a few times tonight, my Q has switched into EVDO mode. As soon as I called my wife over to see, it had switched back to 1xRTT.

It is like they are teasing us with high speed, but I'm hoping it switches to EVDO for good, soon. It'll save on battery life on the Q and it will also make our "series of tubes" to the internet a little bit wider.

Another powertoy collection that will be going on my Q:

Network Analyzer for Windows Mobile runs network utilities, for example ping and ipconfig, on a Windows Mobile powered device. Network Analyzer for Windows Mobile facilitates the troubleshooting of network connectivity issues. You can extend the harness. You can add user-defined tests (DLLs) to the list of tests to be executed. An xml input file defines the list of tests to execute. You can use Network Analyzer to send information about network traffic to a .cap file. You can then view the .cap file with the Network Monitor tool or the Ethereal tool.

Grab it here.

My wife had a doctor's appointment this morning and her Motorola E815 switched into EVDO mode. The next time she goes into Grand Rapids, she is going to try to figure out which tower is the cutoff point for EVDO if it is still active.

There is a Verizon tower near our house and I am really hoping a truck stops by and puts some new panels and electronics on it this month. If by chance anyone at Verizon reads this, you will have a couple new data plans for sure out of that upgrade alone. I know our population density isn't the greatest, but we are by a lake that has some very upscale homes on it that lack any type of broadband access.

We are in the no mans land of being just west of Kent county, just east of Muskegon county, and right in the little "spike" of Ottawa county. Lots of people on Crockery Lake are wanting broadband access. We don't have DSL available. We don't have wireless ISPs available even though we are in Ottawa county which is supposed to be getting wireless internet county wide. We have analog cable through Charter that is just on the border of cable modem access to the east. Anyone I talk to at Charter has no idea when our neighborhood is going to be rebuilt.

I hate to admit but having an IT job in this region isn't much fun when you have to RDP into servers from home and you can watch the screen repaint with 8-bit color depth on 1xRTT. If I am lucky, I can connect into a Citrix box that has 16-color support enabled. Heck, I'd be fine with monochrome support as long as I could get my work done.

So, if any type of broadband wheeler-dealer sees this, you could make a killing in this region. If I had the capital and balls to put a T1 line into my house and run a WISP, I would, but I don't have the funds or the balls to do it.

Heck, I own 2.5 acres of land where my current house is - I'd be willing to rent my land and put up a tower if it brought EVDO to the area. I'd actually be more inclined to put up a WiMax tower but I'm still uncertain how much penetration they are going to get in the market.

I've also heard that Alltel is testing out EVDO 850 in the area on the towers they gained from the AT+T Wireless deal. They are converting the old GSM towers over to CDMA/EVDO. Of course, what I hear and what is really going on could be two different things. All I know is that Alltel has a big presence in northern Kent county and elsewhere.

People with a single-line calling plan, or a Family SharePlan, with monthly access bills of $79.99 or more are qualified to join this program. You also have to have 3 months of uninterrupted service, but anyone that has been a customer of theirs for an extended period of time should already be at that point.

Right now you end up getting:

1. A new primary phone every one year instead of new every two years. This is the most attractive benefit to me.

2. Free address book transfers. This isn't a selling point to me because I typically backup and my address books from my computer, but I'm not a typical cellular user.

3. 25% off accessories and free shipping from the online store. I typically get my accessories off
eBay so this isn't a selling point for me but it could be for others.

You can apply and get to the special program page by going here.

I'm still unsure which category I should place these entries in, and I really need to flesh out the Serendipity default client to allow you to select multiple categories at once within the editor. Ideally I want to find a nice XML-RPC client application to do all the dirty work but I might have to end up whipping out Visual Studio again and writing something just for me, and potentially others, eventually.

Anyway, I've got the new drivers installed and on a whim, decided to check out the client applications included again. I don't think a wireless driver should require as many system services as these drivers seem to need. Maybe I'm stuck in the old age of 'the less context switches, the better', but it seems like a bit of overkill/sloppy to require so many add-on services.

Mind you, I have the same complaint about Symantec's antivirus services and also even some of the built in Windows services. I still don't believe 'svchost.exe' is a good idea overall because of how difficult it can be to track down which thread or service running under svchost.exe is causing the problem. Although, even mentioning svchost.exe contradicts some of what I have said up above.

On a good note, the memory issues seem to be gone but the drivers still seem to slow down my machine overall if I don't use the XP native wireless support. I wonder if the group of 10,000 Intel employees that are getting the axe soon, include the wireless driver division.

They are probably the same team that moved the configuration tabs for the wired drivers into the driver pane and made them essentially terminal services incompatible due to the way they expose their settings. They seem to be using some type of IE widget that does not launch properly in a RDP session and also throw up XP SP2 / W2K3 SP1 'information bar' security warnings within the driver tabs. I am guessing it was forced upon them due to a change in WHQL requirements, but I've seen other drivers handle it just fine, like NVidia's control panel.

At least they seem to be SMP safe/hyperthreading safe, unlike early Soundblaster Live! drivers. One of my favorite things about hyperthreading and dual core CPUs becoming popular is that it finally exposed a lot of race conditions and locking problems that had always existed in some drivers. Most companies didn't put a priority on bugs that only affected multi-CPU setups. My ASUS P2B-D and Abit BP6 motherboards would act a lot better today than in the past because of this. I will admit the multiple CPU support in the BP6 was a dirty hack, but it was a great, cheap, platform if you were lucky enough to get a good Abit BP6. Sure, you would still end up with spurious APIC errors from time to time due to the way the board was laid out, but overall it was a solid motherboard under Windows and especially Linux. The Highpoint UDMA-66 kludge chipset was a nightmare to deal with but if you snipped off the chip off the board, you ended up with a much better machine and one less IRQ "line" shared.

I still have two Abit BP6 motherboards in storage somewhere. One motherboard fried due to the now well known 'leaky caps' problem, and as far as I know, the other motherboard is still in working condition and fully populated. I need to dig that out someday and revisit the glory days of Abit motherboards. I'm still amazed how many Celeron 300a chips would easily reach 450 to 500mhz with stock cooling. Quite a few Celeron 366 chips would easily reach 550mhz and above if you were lucky. It looks like history is repeating itself with the new Intel Conroe chips.

Wow, I never knew this entry would morph into a trip down (SDRAM) memory lane, but it did by accident.

Bob Baranauskas tipped me off to some updated Intel wireless links - many thanks to him!
I'm passing them along here.

http://support.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/cs-010623.htm

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3947

The news of buggy drivers seems to be hitting the web more and I've noticed a lot more traffic in the past few days.

Here are some of the bigger name news places reporting about it now:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3887

http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1633

I've even noticed some hits from Intel's IP space visiting here.

Updated drivers for the Intel Wireless 2200BG, 2915ABG, 3945ABG wireless chipsets.

It is a bit hard to find on Intel's site when I went looking for it but here is the direct link to the page. I don't know/don't think this includes the service that likes to leak memory like crazy so I suggest only using the bare drivers with the default XP support.

http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Detail_Desc.aspx?&DwnldID=11342

The subject line says it all - I would like to be able to use and abuse the Exchange Push technology on the Verizon Wireless network. I know the Motorola Q is running Windows Mobile 2005 but everything I have read is that it doesn't include the Messaging and Security Feature Pack, which is required to get Exchange Push technology the right way.

Anyone know?

I don't know if I should call it a memory leak or a memory hog but either way, wireless drivers shouldn't be using 512MB of ram just for tracking events. No wonder performance suffers as the day progresses. For now, I am just going to strip the driver components to the bare minimum and see if S24EvMon.exe behaves better.

My house is a stones throw away from Muskegon county. We are technically in Ottawa county but our mailing address is in Muskegon county. We are within a few miles of Muskegon and Kent county.

I *really* hope that their coverage reaches our house because right now I am using 1xRTT CDMA for "broadband".

News article about it:
http://wimaxnetnews.com/archives/2006/04/samsungs_80216e.html

The company involved:
http://www.arialink.com/residential_products/home_services.html

My dad needs one, and this will do the trick.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833338016

90% of the Bluetooth adapters out there are 10 meter range (Class 2)

If you really want the 10 meter version, you can get it for $0.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833338017

I have always wondered where the towers were in my neighborhood.
Thankfully I have a Verizon phone and the closest tower to my home is a Verizon tower.

http://www.cellreception.com/towers/index.html