Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 12

The Fixed Wireless Revolution

Getting Internet in rural locations is expensive, prone to environmental disruptions and usually offers less-than-mediocre attainable speeds. As I discuss in my book, the situation that my parents had was a prime example: ADSL via multi-kilometer copper wire that had been fried by lightning storms a couple of times, measly ...

Nokia's most profitable product: iPhone

Apple's quarterly results beat the expectations again: only the amount of sold iPhones was a tiny bit below the market estimates. Tim Cook really has made under-promising and over-performing an art form. But if we reflect this against what happened last week when Nokia produced its quarterly results, we gain ...

Chrome update will make a forced push towards safer networking

In Chapter 11: Home Sweet Home I discuss the security issues stemming from the fact that Wi-Fi signals are free for anyone to receive, and thus any traffic that is floating around can be tapped into with relative ease, totally unnoticed by the originator of the traffic. This is very ...

Will Google Duplex open new avenues for scamming?

The scammers on the Internet rely on the law of big numbers: they send spam email in tens of thousands, hoping that at least a handful of the recipients will eventually fall for their scam. This is easy to automate and thus very cheap, and is one of the big ...

The US net neutrality change is a global threat

There is an old, famous cartoon about two dogs sitting next to a computer, one saying to another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog”. This very much depicts the earlier view of the Internet: everyone is equal. The equality approach affected both the end users and the companies: ...

Norway's jump to DAB

As discussed in the book, Norway is the first country to say adios to the ubiquitous FM radio. All transmissions are now using Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) technology, and FM radios are destined to the ever-growing scrap heap of obsolete electronics. The switch in a country of high standard of ...

Iridium Next will become operational this year

I the book I go through the roller-coaster history of Iridium, and explain the new updates that started going into orbit last year. This year the second-generation Iridium Next will be in full use, so it is worthwhile to revisit what this is all about. Although the main news is ...

Expanding to new areas is hard. Just ask Nokia.

Nokia's dips into Health Technology and Virtual Reality cameras are now history. Why is it so hard for established companies to enter new areas? Nokia's roots are squarely in telecoms: despite its demise in handsets, the causes of which are discussed in my book, it has succeeded well in growing ...

Google Duplex + Lyrebird = even more convincing AI

A few weeks back I discussed what can happen when criminals start figuring out the new powers of AI and take advantage of systems like Google Duplex. We are far from seeing the limits of this kind of new applications: What if AI could not only have an intelligent and ...

Code Talkers: the safest encryption method of the WW2

One of the more surprising parts in the history of wireless communications was the use of Navajo Indians as a real-time encryption method during the Second World War. In the book I describe the history of Navajo Code Talkers: the real-time encryption system that the US army used in the ...