WirelessMoves

The way we experience time and change is a strange thing. Sometimes I feel changes in telecoms are slow. A recent article in a German online magazine which looks back on how the telecoms world in Germany looked like 10 years ago made me change my view slightly. Back in January 1996, the German telecom monopoly started to fade away and Deutsche Telekom had to lower their prices for short and long distances call considerably. However, even after the first round of price reductions, a 10 minute nationwide call still cost €3.25! Ten years later, the same call is only about 17 cents… Calls between two voice over IP clients are virually free, apart fromt he monthly flat charge for the high speed Internet connection.

Speaking of high speed Internet at home. Back in 1996, 14.4 or 28.8 kbit/s was state of the art, ADSL and speeds of several megabits per second to the home not even conceivable.

Also, who used a mobile phone back in 1996? Almost no one, which included me. Today, 10 years later, everyone seems to have at least two. UMTS and HSDPA are a reality, the wireless Internet is a reality, even though just being in it’s infancy and not used by many today. But the wireless multimegabit connection to the Internet is already there so it is very likely that it will have become just as much of an everyday commodity in a couple of years from now as ADSL today.

Lower prices have not led to cheaper phone bills for most people. Instead, they just communicate more, communicate while on the move, and spend the money they’ve saved on other multimedia services such as Internet access, music and audio book downloads, blogs, online photo albums, etc.

There are interesting times ahead!

Every now and then, I find a digital marble which seems to make my PDA and mobile phone twice as useful as before. Wapedia, a service of Florian Amrhein, is my recent discovery. The website offers an interface to the Wikipedia database for (wireless) devices with small displays. The result of a query is reformatted for small screens and pictures are reduced in size for quicker download times and better viewing on a small device. Answers to questions such as "Where is Austerlitz?" or "What is a Home Agent?" at the breakfast table or while sitting in my favorite cafe in Paris or in a train are now only a couple of clicks away. Great, thanks very much, Florian!!!

In the past
years, the media has speculated just how much of a threat WiFi hotspots are to
UMTS. Well, from what I have experienced over the last few months, it is just
the opposite. Equipped with a prepaid SIM card from Italian Operator WIND and a monthly data volume of several
hundred megabytes for 20 Euros a month, I’ve travelled through many countries
in the past months.

Many hotels
offer WiFi coverage and if one is really lucky, there is even coverage in the
room. However, in the days and age of UMTS, I am showing it the cold shoulder. As
the price is right, I prefer to use a UMTS network, even if it is somewhat
slower than a WiFi hotspot connected to the Internet via a DSL connection. I
don’t have to worry about whether I have coverage in the room, no need to select
the network, no fumbling with the credit card for buying expensive online time,
and most of all: coverage directly in the room or wherever else I am when I
need to communicate instead being forced to sit in a noisy and crowded hotel
lobby.

As even
Internet telephony via UMTS and Skype works flawlessly, the final advantage of
Wifi hotspots is gone. At the airport I also don’t bother to search for a WiFi
hotspot, UMTS or EDGE (in case my Italian SIM card can’t roam to a UMTS network
in the country) is where I go. Great! 

Well, the
only place where the WiFi hotspot still has an advantage is in the plane at
30.000 ft 😉

With the right SIM card and a good wireless data tariff such as the prepaid offer of the Italian operator WIND, the mobile traveler can surf the net these days anytime and anywhere. Costs are moderate and a GPRS/EDGE or UMTS networks can be found almost everywhere. While the web surfing experience with UMTS is close to that of DSL, EDGE and especially GPRS can not quite compete with a high speed fixed Internet access. For such slower connections, a number of manual Firefox browser settings can make a big difference.

A very effective method to speed-up the web browser is ‘Pipelining’. If enabled, several embedded elements of a web page, such as pictures, are requested at once after opening a TCP stream instead of being requested one after another. This decreases download times when using GPRS or EDGE, as fewer TCP connections are required to download a web page. Fewer TCP connections reduce the effect of longer round trip delay times of GPRS and EDGE compared to fixed line Internet connections. More detailed background
information can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/pipelining-faq.html

Activation of Pipelining in Firefox:

• By entering ‘about:config’ in the URL line, the browser presents  a list of all configuration parameters.
• Basic pipelining is activated by double-clicking on the „network.http.pipelining“ parameter and setting the value to TRUE.
• I achieved the best pipelining effect by setting the value of the „network.http.pipelining.maxrequests“ parameter 8 again by double clicking on the parameter name.
• The browser should then be restarted to make sure the changes take effect.
• Additional information on the process can be found here: http://www.port80software.com/200ok/archive/2004/12/30/231.aspx

The Result:

A test with an extensive web page and previously deleted browser cache at first shows no difference in the time it takes to show the first part of web page. A big difference can be observed, however, in the time it takes to load the complete page. Instead of 60 seconds for loading the complete web page, the modified browser settings decreased the required time to 40 seconds!