Mobile Broadband Growth 2009

Lynnette Luna from FierceBroadbandWireless has an interesting post titled Two studies point to explosive mobile broadband growth. In the post she first refers to Informa Telecoms & Media's newest World Cellular Data Metrics report, quoting the following:

• Mobile broadband subscribers worldwide almost reached a quarter of a billion at the end of March with more than 225 million subscribers. The figure represented 93% year-on-year growth.
• The popularity of mobile broadband is at its highest in the Asia-Pacific region, which supports more than 90 million subscribers.
• Latin American subscribers represent 385% year-on-year growth and support more than 10 million subscribers as 3G operators offer emerging market subscribers a primary Internet connection.
• The spread of the iPhone continues to boost data usage for those operators that distribute the model with O2 reporting that 40% of its data traffic in UK comes from the smartphone market.

Lynnette also quotes Allot Communications' first Global Mobile Broadband Traffic Report (GMBT). This report tracked global IP application usage and growth, collected data from leading mobile operators worldwide with a combined user base of more than 150 million subscribers:

• Worldwide mobile data bandwidth usage has increased by about 30% during the second quarter of 2009.
• Asia leads the growth with 36%.
• Europe posted 28% growth.
• The Americas recorded 25% growth.

Allot also says the report shows how subscribers, particularly heavy data users, do not distinguish between their fixed and their mobile networks, and seem to expect the same service from the Internet, irrespective of their access method. Specifically:

• HTTP browsing is the most popular application globally and usage increased by 21%.
• HTTP streaming is the fastest growing application with a usage increase of 58%. This includes streaming sites such as YouTube and Hulu.
• HTTP downloads, which experienced 34% growth globally, are now almost as popular as P2P, and in EMEA have even overtaken P2P in popularity.
• P2P accounts for 42% of bandwidth utilization in the busiest cells on the network, but only 21% in the average cell.

You can get information on the Allot report here and get information on the Informa report here.

Plastic Logic E-Reader

Plastic Logic has a new e-book reader coming out early next year that looks pretty interesting and should give the Kindle DX some competition. Here's some preliminary specs on the device:

• The device will be slightly larger than the Kindle DX and have a touchscreen.
  
• The device will be marketed to business users which probably means it will be priced higher than the Kindle DX. The Kindle DX currently sells on Amazon for $489 with free shipping.
  
• The device will have a built in 3G radio for access over AT&T's network and also have a built in WiFi network.
  
• Barnes and Noble will manage the devices electronic book store.
• In addition to e-books, the device will display several other document formats including PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, JPEG, PNG, TEXT, HTML, BMP, RTF and ePub.
• The first version will be grayscale but Plastic Logic says color is "in the works".

Here's a short video from CNN that includes Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta demoing the new device.

I'm wondering how long it will take before we see heavy bulky textbooks replaced by devices like these.

Mike Q HI-TEC Educator Of The Year

Today I had the honor of presenting Mike Qaissaunee the HI-TEC Educator of the Year Award. HI-TEC is a national conference on advanced technical education where technical educators, counselors, industry professionals, and technicians can update their knowledge and skills. HI-TEC uniquely explores the convergence of scientific disciplines and technologies.

Here's the text from the presentation:

The HI-TEC Educator of the Year Award recognizes a community college educator for outstanding contributions to advanced technological education. Nominees for the award must have had a demonstrated impact on technology education on both a local and national level.

This year there were several excellent nominees and the decision was a difficult one. As you probably know, Michael Qaissaunee is this year’s awardee.

Many of you know Mike, an Associate Professor of Engineering and Technology at Brookdale Community College and founding director of the Mid-Atlantic Institute for Telecommunications Technologies . As Principal Investigator of this NSF project, Mike led the development and implementation of numerous courses related to wireless communications technologies. He’s also Co-Principal Investigator for the National Information and Communications Technologies Center in Massachusetts, serving as a subject matter expert in wireless communications and leading ICT Center's national dissemination efforts.

He’s been involved with many projects around the United States and in 2007 was selected as recipient of the Global Wireless Education Consortium (GWEC) Wireless Educator of the Year Award.

He is a national leader and expert (many refer to him as a Rock Star) promoting the adoption of new technologies and approaches to teaching and learning, including: blogs, audio and video podcasts, wikis, mobile computing and educational gaming and simulation. This includes workshops and keynote addresses in wireless, wireless security, iPhone programming, and Web 2.0.

Here’s some things you may not know about Mike:

His father Abdul was the first person from his village in Afghanistan to go beyond elementary school. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) brought him to the U.S. in the midst of his 11th-grade year. He graduated with honors from the University of Wyoming and returned to Kabul, where he headed the technology department at the technical high school he had left only two and half years earlier.

Three years later, USAID brought him back to America to study highway engineering. Barbara (Mike’s Mom who is here today) and Abdul met at the University of Illinois where she was completing her master's degree in library science. After Abdul completed his PhD, he and Barbara moved back to Afghanistan where he began working at Kabul University, eventually becoming Dean of the Engineering school.

In Afghanistan, his parents had three children--Mike is the middle child. In 1973 Barbara and Abdul moved their family from Afghanistan to Delaware where Abdul took a faculty position and Barbara worked as a librarian at Delaware State.

Both of Mike’s parents were a great inspiration and instilled great value on teaching and learning. Mike graduated from high school in Delaware at the top of his class and was accepted at a number of top engineering schools including MIT. He selected the University of Delaware for his Mechanical Engineering degrees.

Mike now lives in New Jersey with two other great inspirations - his wife Laura and daughter Haley.

I’ve had the honor of working and getting to know Mike for the past 6-7 years. He’s intelligent, honest, respectful, humble and has a great sense of humor. We’re pretty lucky to be working with him and his students are pretty lucky to be in his classes.

I can’t think of a more deserving person for this first HI-TEC Educator of the Year Award.

Please join me in congratulating Mike!

Some of the pictures from the conference are linked here.

Way to go Mike Q!!!!!!!

NBC's New Comedy - Community (College)

There's a new half-hour comedy about higher education...and lower expectations coming from Emmy Award-winning directors Joe and Anthony Russo to NBC this fall titled Community. The comedy is centered around the fictitious Greendale Community College. Here's an interesting quote from the NBC website describing the show:

It's been said that community college is a "halfway school" for losers, a self esteem workshop for newly divorced housewives, and a place where old people go to keep their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity. Well, at Greendale Community College...that's all true. Community focuses on a band of misfits, at the center of which is a fast-talkin' lawyer whose degree has been revoked (Joel McHale, The Soup). They form a study group and, in "Breakfast Club" fashion, end up learning a lot more about themselves than they do about their course work.

NBC is going all out with this show - they're even going to put together a Greendale Community College website that will introduce the show characters including: the student body, Dean Pelton, the faculty, etc. Here's a 4 minute promo you may find interesting.

What's the real story? Here's some current stats from the American Association of Community Colleges website (I've quoted these in the past).

Number and Type of Community Colleges: Total: 1,195 Public: 987 Independent: 177 Tribal: 31	Enrollment: Total: 11.5 million Enrolled full time: 41% Enrolled part time: 59%
Selected Demographics: Average age: 29 Women: 60% Men: 40% Minorities: 35% First generation to attend college: 39% Single parents: 17%	Percentages of Undergraduates: All U.S. undergraduates: 46% First-time freshmen: 41% Native American: 55% Asian/Pacific Islander: 46% Black: 46% Hispanic: 55%
Employment Status: Full-time students employed full time: 27% Full-time students employed part time: 50% Part-time students employed full time: 50% Part-time students employed part time: 33%

Sound familiar? Maybe your neighbor, your friend, your grandchild, maybe even you. Community colleges are wonderful, inexpensive places to get the first two years of a four year degree or learn a specific skilled technology.

I just don't get where this show is coming from. Is it tongue in cheek humor? We'll see and we'll see how long it lasts..... The series premieres Thursday, September 17th 9:30/8:30c.

Massive Internet Traffic Volume During Michael Jackson Memorial Service

Akamai has released some interesting network traffic data today, the day after Michael Jackson's Memorial service. The service started at 1 Eastern yesterday with many watching from there office computers. Here's some of theinformation Akami has reported:

The company delivered more than 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams in Flash and Windows Media formats.

Total traffic on the Akamai network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second during the memorial service.

Early on in the online streaming of the memorial services, at about 1:00 pm EST, there was a peak on Akamai's Net Usage Index for News at 3,924,370 visitors per minute, with more than 3.3 million visitors per minute coming from North America.
In contrast, on June 25^th, at about 6:30 EST, as word of Jackson’s death began to spread, traffic on the Net Usage Index for News spiked to 4,247,971 global visitors per minute at its peak as compared to average of approximately 2,000,000 visitors per minute globally. Seventy-five percent of visitors were accessing sites from within the United States.

Also as a point of comparison, the largest day on the Akamai network in terms of total traffic on its network was the Obama Inauguration live streaming online in January
2009. During the Inauguration, the Akamai network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second at approximately 12:15 p.m. ET. Akamai also delivered over 12,000,000 requests per second at the same time

Here's more from the press release:

“When a public figure of global prominence such as Michael Jackson passes away, the public’s desire for up to date information and news is rarely satiated,” said Robert Hughes, executive vice president of Global Sales, Services, and Marketing at Akamai. “Akamai’s network has seen a steady stream of online traffic when news of any sort related to Michael Jackson is updated, and we expected demand from a global online audience around the online streaming of his funeral would be no different. For an event of this scale, Akamai's globally-distributed EdgePlatform is unique in its ability to bypass congestion points on the Internet, and to ensure a reliable, high-quality experience for our customers. While this event was supported without any issues for our broadcast customers, it is also important to point out that Akamai continued to deliver perfect quality of service for the remainder of our 2,800 enterprise customers. This is just the beginning of what is possible when broadcasting live to audiences around the world.”

Akamai, a Massachusetts based company, has created a digital operating environment for the Web. A global platform of thousands of specially-equipped Akamai servers helps the Internet withstand the crush of daily requests for rich, dynamic, and interactive content, transactions, and applications. When delivering on these requests, Akamai detects and avoids Internet problem spots and vulnerabilities, to ensure Websites perform optimally, media and software download flawlessly, and applications perform reliably.