Bonding and 802.3ad/802.1AX link aggregation it’s not, but dual- or mutil-WAN load balancing seems like a good way to improve overall bandwidth and reliability.

The Cisco/Linksys RV016 (just under $400) can group up to seven different WAN connections, but the customer reviews are only so-so. For a little more I can get a Peplink Balance 30 that can handle three WAN connections and seems built for speed.

There are other products, I know, but not a lot of information about any of them. And while I can see a user point out that load balancing “seems to really slow the speed significantly,” I can’t see much user discussion of Peplink. Netgear offers products that can group two WAN ports, but I want at least three for some reason. Richard Mackney, however, wants to group a bunch of USB cellular modems.

Now that I’ve moved I’ve finally set up my Fonera. I had hoped to offer a story about the process, but it was so simple I can’t really say much more than “I plugged it in, I registered it, it worked.”

The Fonera is a tiny little router/WiFi access point that looks worlds better than the average Linksys/Netgear/Belkin job, but the real sweetness is in what it does that they don’t do.

(Fon = the company, Fonero = users, Fonera = the WiFi router.)

Back in Warren I was happy to leave my WiFi open, I thought of it as my civic duty to leave it open for all in range — especially to test the stereotype that some nefarious stranger would be outside in a car sapping my signal. But here in the big city (*cough*), I did start to think that some sort of click-wrapper forcing users to agree to abide by relevant laws wouldn’t be a bad idea.

And though the public signal from my Fonera isn’t free to use (unless you’re a Fon user yourself), it’s still cheap ($2/day) and convenient.

The sweet thing is that the Fonera broadcasts both public and private channels, and I get a WPA encrypted connection for my personal use (note: WPA is thin protection, always use SSH or SSL). And, of course, anybody I share my WPA password with can get on for free as well.

Summary:

• A sweet router/AP
• Free roaming on the Fon network
• Click-wrap protection for your public signal
• A good feeling that I’m expanding the geography of available (though not really free) wireless coverage

What’s especially interesting in this, and something corporate types everywhere should pay attention to, is that Fon is getting suckers like me to build network infrastructure. Starbucks and T-Mobile had to do lots of talking and invest lots of money to get just 5000 locations, but Fon has already given away a batch of 10,000 routers, is selling more, and has 44,000 users (though I can’t tell if that’s users with hotspots, or all users including Aliens).

Fon advisory board member David Weineberger:

The aim is to provide enough incentives, and make it easy enough technically, that thousands of people will start providing Fon hotspots. Bottom up we can have a global network, usable for free by those who choose to share access for free and for an affordable fee by others.

It also doesn’t hurt that the company is now targeting the Starbucks/T-Mobile partnership that’s defined mass-market coffee shop WiFi since the dawn of ages.

In this context, it’s worth remembering what the FCC says about WiFi: landlords can’t regulate or limit radio emissions, only the FCC can (not that it hasn’t been argued).

Extras: The router software is supposedly based on the F/OSS DD-WRT, and Glenn Fleishman has way more details.

Fon, Fonera, Fonero, connectivity, crowdsourcing, grass roots networking, mass, network, wifi, wireless

It should be no surprise that journalists are talking about citizen journalism, but what of the disintermediation of other industries?

Man-on-the-street Mark Georgiev told Marketplace:

I didn’t want a certificate, I didn’t want any kind of accreditation, I really just wanted the knowledge. And I also wanted to work at my own pace.

Georgiev, the story explains, has a masters from Yale but wanted to learn programming. That’s when he found Foundations of Software Engineering in MIT’s OpenCourseware.

Georgiev finished the course in a few months time. Now, he says, he can now write rudimentary programs. His only expense was buying books.

MIT isn’t alone, and at least one professor has started selling his lectures as podcasts (via), without support from the school.

Noting that students may want to use the audio recordings while cramming for tests, as an alternative to taking notes, or as an aid for non-native English speakers, NCSU’s Robert Schrag cited policy that “each professor owns the words that he or she speaks in the classroom and can do whatever they wish with them — put them in a textbook, on a CD, sell them as MP3s — whatever.”

NCSU didn’t quite see it the same way and asked Schrag to stop, but that doesn’t change the fact that the role of educational institutions — like the role of publishers — is changing.

How long before Schrag, or somebody with a similar spirit, tries again? Audio recordings and downloadable courseware may not replicate the classroom experience any more than online communities replicate physical communities, but who would claim education will be any less affected by technology than any other industry?

college 2.0, citizen professor, Robert Schrag, OpenCourseware, courseware, education, ivory tower, network, podcast lectures

That headline might seem a little late among the folks reading this. But we’re all geeks, and if not geeks, then at least regular computer users. Regular computer users, however, are a minority. Worldwide, only around 500 million people have internet access, and fewer than 100 million people in the US have internet access at home. With populations of over 6 billion and 300 million respectively, there’s clearly a lot of growth potential.

Truth is, computers are the poor cousins to phones and television in terms of market penetration. In the US, Nielsen estimates there are over 275 million people with TVs in their homes today, and the CTIA says there are over 180 million mobile phone users.

The market opportunity is clear, but I think our notions of what a “computer” is have to change. Yes, computers have been through a lot of changes in 20 some odd years, but they’re still very much the same. Some might say that cars are basically the same as they were 100 years ago because they all mostly run around of four wheels and be happy with it. But transportation has seen tremendous change. Computers as we know them don’t own the internet any more than cars own the road or railroad or bike trails or skies.

Email was the killer app that made people interconnect their networks, the web was the killer app that got 90+ million users online already. And those users are the critical mass that pushes the development of real web applications — applications that are starting to beat desktop apps at their own game and doing things that desktop apps can’t.

With this flowering age of web applications, the age of internet connected information devices is coming. But we need something different from the computers we’ve become accustomed to. We need a device that is designed to serve the 90 million Americans who have cell phones, but don’t appear to have their own computers or home internet access. We need a device that replaces TVs as the leading entertainment and news medium. Because the information age will have arrived when there’s a dozen kiosks in every mall hawking internet tablets and we see them lined up at Best Buy with differentiated models for the kitchen, living room, the kids rooms, and for camping.

Background: this post is grew out of some discussion at TeleRead, NoSheep, and here at MaisonBisson.

tags: access, change, change computers, computer, computing, critical mass, desktop apps, email, geek, geeks, information age, information system, internet, internet access, internet connected, killer app, market opportunity, network, paradigm shift, penetration, portable computing, web, web applications

Geolocation by GPS my be the most straightforward approach, but we mustn’t forget the other ways to get lat/lon coordinates.

All current cell phones support aGPS positioning to comply with federal E-911 mandates, but not all phones make it easy for the user to get that information out of them. Still, some do and GPS-enabled moblogging is becoming common in Asia and Europe, and there’s at least a public proof of concept going in the US.

Then there’s ethernet/WiFi. Plazes is a kind of social networking application that allows users identify their location based on their network fingerprint. Using the assumption that networks are typically stationary, Plazes then associates lat/lon coordinates to that network based on information submitted by user who ‘discovered’ the network. Plazes’ real trick, however, is to show me who else is online nearby. Problem is, I live and work in New Hampshire where I appear to be the only user online north of Virginia.

But the Plazes folks didn’t invent the concept of using network information to identify location. If I wasn’t so lazy I’d find the story I read a couple of years ago that mentioned it, but this June 2004 article in New Scientist tells the story of one such effort: PlaceLab (extra coverage at Engadget and ExtremeGPS). A Google search turned up Herecast and now Engadget is reporting on AllwaysOnGPS, a replacement GPS driver (for Windows PCs) that mixes GPS and WiFi derived location data to provide the most accurate info despite changing coverage.

Finally, one of my favorite solutions is to use Earthcomber in manual mode. The Palm application allows you to scroll around a map and mark locations as though they were waypoints in a GPS. And though that’s neat, it’s the mapping features that make it a winner. It’s far better than those lousy tourist guides in cities. I used to go to AAA for maps and guides in preparation for a trip, but now I check Earthcomber for area maps and updates.

Technorati Tags: agps, cell phone, coordinates, geolocation, gps, lattitude, longitude, map, mapping, maps, moblogging, network, networking application, palm, picture phone, social networking, wifi