Take a look at your next laptop’s 80GB hard drive. Yes, I said hard drive. Intel has just announced their solid-state hard drive product line beginning with this drive, called the X25-M. You can’t quite tell from this photo, but the form factor is designed around the 2.5-inch width that current laptop arm-and-platter disk drives use. However, it’s only as thick and as heavy as a typical chip-bearing circuit board, which is to say significantly less than traditional disk drives. This model has 80GB of storage, but Intel’s roadmap has 160GB models in the marketplace by early 2009, and smaller models available even sooner. The throughput performance of this drive is better than most current shipping 80GB laptop drives, and Intel claims that the lifespan of the drive should be five years (a complaint about flash-based drives to date has been the relatively small number of read-write cycles, but they claim to have worked around that). Because they are so efficient on I/O, solid-state drives are likely to be very quickly adopted for use in servers, enabling server hardware to shrink even more and reducing the likelihood of server downtime due to mechanical failures.
Now that the XM-Sirius merger is a done deal, the next thing to think about with regard to satellite radio is interoperability. In other words, making it possible for XM radios to receive Sirius signals and vice versa without making all their customers go out and buy new hardware. The FCC has already ruled that any new satellite radio receivers must be interoperable, but now they’ve put out a Notice Of Inquiry to decide whether or not satellite radios must also be interoperable with terrestrial HD radio. Ibiquity, Clear Channel, and NPR have all lobbied the FCC to mandate including HD Radio interoperability, but the FCC would only go so far as to launch the NOI, which starts a somewhat lengthy review process. This is not unlike the deliberations in the 1970s to compel radio makers to include the FM band on every radio; FM radio was the bald-headed stepchild of radio for decades because no one had FM receivers. Once FM popped up alongside AM on car radios, FM stations finally caught on, eventually pushing AM radio into obsolescence. A lesson no doubt everyone involved in this melodrama remembers all too well.
The idea of using bar-code technology with your hand-held communication device has been around for a while, but has only just now turned into an actual service of some kind. USA Today reports that Air France will start letting passengers travelling from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam opt to receive their boarding passes as bar-code images or as text messages on their smartphones. Quite honestly, I don’t think this is such a great idea for airline boarding passes because of the ENORMOUS security risks it poses. Far better that this had been introduced as a service for something with a lot less inherent risk like movie tickets or supermarket deli waiting line numbers. It’s somewhat telling that Air France is only testing it on one route rather than their entire system, and I suspect that this will be slow to roll out, particularly with U.S. air carriers.
DSL Reports says that the number of consumers signing up for DSL service continues to free fall into nothingness. “DSL is the new dial-up” is the catchphrase du-jour in the broadband business as Verizon’s FiOS fiber-optical service has pushed cable companies to be more aggressive with their speed enhancements, leaving pokey ol’ DSL in the dust. According to that linked story, Verizon and AT&T together had a net LOSS of about 120,000 DSL customers in the second fiscal quarter. Anything that keeps the broadband market in the U.S. aiming toward the 100Mbps speed that’s standard in Korea and Japan is okay with me.
I’m not holding my breath, but this story from MuniWireless.com says that Boston is one of the cities where Sprint expects to rollout WiMax as municipal wireless service maybe even before the end of 2008. The rollout is underway right now in Baltimore, with over 1000 wireless access points in the city. Chicago and Washington DC are expected to be launched before the end of the year, and then the next tier of cities includes Philadelphia, Dallas, and The Hub Of The Universe itself. Seems they’ve figured out how to speed up the process of getting the WAPs out into the field so that they can place up to 25 per day, making the rollouts go much faster than originally projected.
