NEWS&ANALYSIS
the
buzz
WIRELESS NETWORKING
Libra MX comes with
upgrade guarantee
WI-LAN IS SCHEDULED TO RELEASE
the latest version of its fixed
wireless base station, which
comes with a guaranteed
upgrade to the
WiMax standard
when WiMaxcertified equipment becomes
available next
year.
Libra MX is
designed for car- Libra MX
will hit
riers and large
hot spots.
enterprises that
want fixed wireless for applications ranging from T-1 replacements to urban wireless hot
spots.
The base station operates
in the 3.5GHz frequency band.
Running in NLOS (non-line-ofsight) environments, it offers
data throughput of 288M bps for
up to 12,000 users per cell, at a
range of up to 30 kilometers, officials said.
The Libra MX base station
goes into beta tests next month
and will be generally available in
January, according to company
officials.
The initial deployments are
slated to be rolled out in Asia,
Europe and Africa, but officials
said U.S. customers have shown
tentative interest in the technology.
“The U.S. is gun-shy,”
said Sayed-Amr ElHamamsy, president and
CEO of Wi-LAN.
“They’ll probably be slower to
adopt, but there
is a market.”
—Carmen
Nobel
CHIPS
Intel, Nvidia will
swap technologies
INTEL AND NVIDIA HAVE MADE AN
agreement that will enable Nvidia
to bring its nForce platform to
Intel-based PCs.
The patent-swapping agreement will help both companies
expand their businesses.
Nvidia will be able to license
Intel’s front-side bus design—
front-side buses are used to link
processors and memory—while
Intel will license Nvidia patents
for high-end graphics technology.
For Intel’s PC customers, the
result will be the option to build
computers using the nForce chip
set for Intel processors. The
Nvidia chip set is due to arrive in
the first half of next year,
according to Nvidia officials. —Jeffrey Burt
many factors driving text messaging adoption in the United
States, said The Yankee Group
analyst Linda Barrabee. SMS
messages sent and received per
month jumped from 1.1 billion in
the first quarter of last year to
2.5 billion in the first quarter of
this year. —Shelley Solheim
E-MAIL
AOL adds
storage
FOLLOWING IN THE
MOBILE
footsteps of Microsoft, Yahoo
and Google,
America Online
is boosting its
TO HELP MOBILEe-mail services
device users more
with more storage.
easily compose text
AOL announced last
messages in multiple
languages, America T9 can translate multiple week that its ICQ (I
languages at once.
Seek You) subOnline subsidiary
sidiary is offering a premium
Tegic Communications has
$19.99-per-year e-mail service
added new language support in
with 2GB of storage.
the latest version of its T9 Text
In addition, the premium
Input software for mobile phones
ICQmail, which is run by Mail2and PDAs. New multilingual supWorld, will offer calendaring; WAP
port in Version 7.2 lets users
(Wireless Application Protocol)
switch easily between multiple
access to Web-based mail; maillanguages in text messages.
forwarding to wireless devices;
The software supports 45 difand support for POP3 (Post Office
ferent languages, with support
Protocol 3), IMAP4 and SMTP.
for Bengali, Tamil and Urdu new
Microsoft’s MSN this month
in Version 7.2, which also recogstarted offering 250MB of stornizes and automatically comage to new users of free Hotmail
pletes terms and phrases freaccounts in the United States and
quently keyed in by users. T9
Text Input 7.2 is available now for eight other countries, up from the
standard 2MB of storage.
mobile-device manufacturers.
Predictive text input is one of
—Ryan Naraine, eweek.com
Languages
added to app
BY THE NUMBERS
China IT spending forecast
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
While I may have some niggling concerns
with the GPL, they are in the details, and in
the end I actually think that the GPL simply
is the best license for the kernel.
Linus Torvalds
20 e W E E K n N O V E M B E R 2 9 , 2 0 0 4
25%
20%
2004
projected
growth
15%
10%
0
Hardware
Packaged software
Services
Source: IDC
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