GigaOM » dialup

New Service Combines 3G and Wi-Fi For Ubiquitous Connectivity

Jason Harris — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:00:21 +0000

If you’re a road warrior or frequent traveler, what strategy do you have for staying connected to the Internet? Odds are you have use combination of Wi-Fi access, a 3G cellular card, and/or dial-up net access as a last resort.

A new service from iPass combines all three of these ways of getting online. After going after the enterprise market, iPass has launched iPassConnect for consumers. According to the company, they are the first to combine 3G data in the US, wired hotel broadband, and a global dial-up network.

Being a part if iPass will allow you to get online at nearly 1,000 hotspots in 500 airports, from hotels such as Hyatt, Hilton, and Marriot, and from retail location such as Starbucks, McDonalds, and more.

To get strted, sign up and at the iPassConnect website. Currently, the service is only available for Windows computer running Vista, XP, or Windows 2000. Pricing starts out at $29.95/month.

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Gmail IMAP and Mac Mail: Houston, we have a problem

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:25:22 +0000

This is at least my third mention of a problem between Gmail IMAP and Mac Mail, but I’m raising it again because many others have the same issue and I believe resolution is near. Switching from my hosted Exchange server to Gmail’s IMAP service has worked well in general, but for no apparent reason it just tanked for me about three weeks ago. There were no changes in my environment, nor to Mac Mail and I suspected something changed on the server side.

I spent the next several days doing my own testing and isolated the issue occurrence only when Mac Mail was running. No other client caused the delivery delays and constant message caching I was witnessing. My next step was to share my information directly with the Gmail support folks and over the past three weeks, I’ve written well over 1,000 words to them presenting the evidence in detail. It probably shouldn’t have taken that much effort, but I really don’t mind because I believe I finally got their attention on the right information. Here’s what they said:“We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to implement a solution for all users. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.In the meantime, during the course of our investigation, we’ve identified specific technical circumstances that would allow us to implement a fix for your particular account by placing it under maintenance for up to an hour. You’ll be unable to access your account during this time. Please respond to this message if you’d like us to implement the fix, and also please provide general timeframes and dates during which the maintenance of your account would be least inconvenient.”I provided them with the OK to take my account down and then proceeded to have no e-mail access for appproximately 18 hours… not the 1 hour I was told. I actually didn’t mind because that tells me all the more that there’s an issue between Gmail IMAP and Mac Mail. Unfortunately, I saw no change in the mail behavior after the maintenance, which was reinforced by the next message from the Gmail support team:“We regret that your account will require additional maintenace in order to resolve this issue.Please note that your account will be placed under maintenance again starting at 5:00 pm Pacific Time. We’ll make every effort to complete the maintenance as soon as possible, but please note you won’t be able to access your account for several hours while it is under maintenance.”I set up a time for that maintenance (yesterday), but didn’t see the account go down. It was just under maintenance a short while ago for a brief time, so I’m hoping that the issue is now resolved. If so, I anticipate a note from the support team indicating it is. If I’m correct in my premise that there’s an issue that’s more global than just my account, I expect it will get quietly fixed on the back end although I’d hope for some public information to come from Google. Needless to say, I’ll be happy when it is resolved. I can avoid the problem by keeping Mac Mail closed and using the web or other clients, but I like to have choices about what clients I want to use.

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Microsoft, Skinkers Ready With LiveStation

Om Malik — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:30:36 +0000

Skinkers, a Cambridge, UK-based startup, was in the news recently for its P2P software that allowed you to watch live television. The software was based on Microsoft’s technology, and today at the IBC 2007 trade show in Amsterdam, Microsoft (MSFT) announced that the technology is ready for large-scale technical trials. In other words, it is still not ready for prime time and needs further tweaking.

Microsoft calls its technology LiveStation, and says it will enable broadcasters to deliver live audio and video over broadband. As part of the offering, the company will release the LiveStation player, an application based on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. The company claims that it will bring the fixed-cost economics of broadcasting to broadband, thanks to a unique peer network distribution that is far more scalable and economic than conventional streaming.

“LiveStation is based on real-time peer-to-peer distribution technology exclusively acquired from Microsoft,” explained Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Skinkers. “This allows broadcasters to take advantage of a managed peer network to reach large online audiences with live radio and television and reduce their distribution costs dramatically.”

These type of new streaming technologies are good for broadcasting live events such as sports and fashion shows, but there are some who think that in this age of hyper personalization, where DVRs are de rigeur, streaming is a throwback.

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T teams up with Cable Cos

Om Malik — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 16:27:10 +0000

AT&T has finally teamed up with cable companies in a bid to push its VoIP service. AT&T will recommend customers to local cable co. for broadband service and this is a win-win for both parties. T gets the distribution, and no port blocking type of problems. Cable guys can quickly roll out VoIP service without spending a dime, so to speak. Turns up the heat on tiny players in the market. Boyd Peterson, an analyst with Yankee Group, told USA Today. “It’s a pretty simple thing to do that benefits both parties.” Dave Watson, an executive vice president at Comcast added, “AT&T’s selection of Comcast and other cable providers is a strong endorsement of the value, capability and reliability of our high-speed Internet service.” Net2Phone also works with cable companies, where it acts as their outsourced VoIP provider. Funny, how they don’t get much attention, compared to Vonage which is just a few miles south of them.

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