Technical issues / Applications

Symposium participants will be sharing insights and discussing the myriad issues having to do with where the technology is today, what’s emerging tomorrow, and what are the barriers and solutions for helping rural communities envision and realize their place in the digital future. More than just collegial brainstorming, community reps will come away from these sessions with a working network of ideas and contacts for turning visions into reality in their local contexts.

Research

Broadband

Broadband World Forum
WORK 3.0 – THE NEXT GENERATION MODEL FOR SMARTER BUSINESS
The State of Broadband 2013: Universalizing Broadband With this Report, the Broadband Commission expands awareness and understanding of the importance of broadband networks, services, and applications for generating economic growth, and for achieving social progress.
O Canada, Land of Community Broadband?
BROADBAND FACTS, FICTION AND URBAN MYTHS There has been a lively debate surrounding the Australian Government’s plan to build a fiber-based National Broadband Network. Some of these myths are based on misunderstandings of the capabilities and limitations of broadband technology and some are out of alignment with experience in countries where broadband access is more advanced than in Australia. The objective of this article is to correct some of these misconceptions, to debunk some of the more common urban myths and to provide some basic facts for the lay person on the capabilities and limitations of various broadband technologies.
Analysis of the urban/rural broadband divide in Canada: Using GIS in planning terrestrial wireless deployment Millions of Canadians residing in Canada’s northern, isolated, rural, and remote communities do not have broadband Internet access. This situation has led to a national “broadband divide.” That is, the deployment of wireline broadband is very limited in Canada’s northern, isolated, rural, and remote areas because of the significant expense of installation and maintenance of the wired infrastructure needed to reach dwellings in these locations. This paper establishes the importance of broadband connectivity to Canada’s northern, isolated, rural, and remote communities. This discussion comments on the role of the Government of Canada in the provision of broadband connectivity to residents of these communities, and outlines the current regulatory issues that govern wireless services and policy formulation.
Local Government Broadband Initiatives This paper from 2003 identifies broadband as the future of Internet access. Discusses a few case studies of local government broadband initiatives and brings up the idea of municipal electric utilities (M.E.U.s).

Australia Broadband

Rural and Remote Broadband Access: Issues and Solutions in Australia Analysis of challenges for Internet access given Australia’s geographical landscape (and population). Proposal of various technical solutions.
WIRELESS BROADBAND TECHNOLOGIES FOR REGIONAL AND RURAL AUSTRALIA The central purpose of this paper is to explore the alternatives presently available for the deployment of wireless broadband networks for regional and rural Australia. The alternative technologies will be analyzed in terms of data rates and coverage distance in order to determine the best possible last-mile wireless connectivity solution for regional and rural Australia. The paper begins with an analysis of the broadband networks and services presently prevailing in Australia.
The National Cloud Computing Strategy

Emerging Technologies

The Future Role of Spectrum Sharing for Mobile and Wireless Data Services
A survey on emerging broadband wireless access technologies This paper summarizes emerging wireless broadband access technologies, ranging from WLANs to satellite communications. We explain the latest standards in the IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 families in detail. The MAC layer mechanisms of IEEE 802.11e, 802.11n, and 802.11s standards are explained as well as the pointto-multipoint and Mesh modes of IEEE 802.16. The recent mobility amendment to the WiMAX family, IEEE 802.16e, is also described. Though the earliest versions of some of these technologies date back to 1996 (such as IEEE 802.11) and some are obsolete (such as HiperLAN), they have been included in this survey for the sake of completeness.
Is broadband the future? An analysis of broadband technology potential and diffusion This paper examines the policy issues surrounding residential broadband technology, discusses how broadband extends Internet capabilities and at what cost, and makes recommendations for future applications of broadband. It focuses on residential broadband access, and in examining the future of broadband.
Broadband for the Bush Alliance Better telecommunications for rural and remote Australians The Broadband for the Bush Alliance (B4BA) is an alliance of organizations that seeks to advance the digital capacity and capability of remote Australians. B4BA seeks the best possible communication outcomes for the 7% of Australians not currently scheduled to receive fibre to the premise through the National Broadband Network, and to advance unmet telephony needs, as a significant related issue.
Community-based broadband organizations and video communications for remote and rural First Nations in Canada This study situates these two organizations within a broader social movement working toward self-determination for First Nations in Canada, exploring their use of video communications in this context. Video communications using broadband networks includes videoconferences (live and archived) and online videos. The research methodology for this study includes a content analysis of hundreds of archived videoconferences and videos on the servers of the two organizations as well as interviews with key informants using these technologies to develop remote and rural First Nations communities.
Evolution Toward the Next-Generation Core Optical Network With high-bandwidth and on-demand applications continuing to emerge, next-generation core optical networks will require significant improvements in capacity, configurability, and resiliency. These advancements need to be achieved with architectures and technologies that are scalable with respect to network cost, size, and power requirements.
Global Roaming in Next-Generation Networks In this article global roaming is addressed as one of the main issues of next-generation mobile networks. Apart from the physical layer connectivity and radio spectrum allocation plans, mobility in a hierarchical structured scheme is discussed. An all-IP wireless/mobile network combined with inherited mobility schemes of each network layer and Mobile IP extensions is proposed. In this respect the mobility management mechanisms in WLAN, cellular, and satellite networks are analyzed, and an all-IP architecture is described and an enhanced roaming scenario presented.
IPv6 – The Future of the Internet The transition to IPv6 holds the future of the internet infrastructure. IPV6 ! the protocol is a robust technology designed as a successor to IP version 4 (IPv4), the predominant protocol in use today. The changes from IPv4 to IPv6 are primarily in the areas of expanded addressing capabilities; header format simplification; improved support for extensions and options; flow labeling capability; and consolidated authentication and privacy capabilities.
Towards an energy-aware Internet: modelling a cross-layer optimization approach Discussion on the necessity of introducing energy- efficiency and energy-awareness in the design, configuration and management of networks, and specifically in the design and implementation of enhanced control-plane protocols to be used in next generation networks.

Websites

Dell’s Wyse Cloud Connect (Project Opehlia) gets previewed. (Oct 2013): Dell’s Wyse Cloud Connect is an Android PC-on-a-stick that can be plugged into a TV or monitor, transforming it into a thin client device. Meaning, users can login to a remote server to run Windows or other enterprise software.
New hardware design protects data in the cloud (July 2013): Report: New hardware design protects data in the cloud. Cloud computing – outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet – could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated Web services without building massive server farms. But it also raises privacy concerns. A bank of cloud servers could be running applications for 1,000 customers at once; unbeknownst to the hosting service, one of those applications might have no purpose other than spying on the other 999. At the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June, MIT researchers described a new type of secure hardware component, dubbed Ascend, that would disguise a server’s memory-access patterns, making it impossible for an attacker to infer anything about the data being stored. Ascend also thwarts another type of attack, known as a timing attack, which attempts to infer information from the amount of time that computations take.