Headworx

Summer holiday season ends tomorrow. As usual I have traveled a lot in a car recently. The roads down here in Poland are very crowded, so more often than ever I tried to depart as early as possible, like 3AM in the morning. By the way this pattern reminds me the early days of the Internet, when the only way to get decent download speed was to get up at 3AM and log on to a computer... This time a year ago I posted on predictive mobile navigation, a system utilizing a feedback from GPS devices, even as early as users plan their journeys... A year later and there is a GPS device with bi - directional communications. But it has been introduced to the market for quite a different reason... Yanosik bears its name after Juraj Jánošík , the legendary outlaw who robbed nobles and gave the loot to the poor and has always been a symbol of resistance. This time it is the resistance against police highway patrol and speed cameras, but if properly developed can have many more implications in future...

My fascination with the CDMA Ev-DO @450MHz has been fading recently. Actually it simply does not work here at the seaside, where I am now... By the way this was the secret selling point - I was hoping for a decent mobile data connection spending my holidays at the seaside. As reported a week ago, the first day I arrived, I found there was no coverage at all. Then I moved to another place by the sea, where signal of three bars looked promising... But unfortunately I was not able to connect and filed a tech support incident with Orange. They promised to reboot the base station... The next morning I tried to set up the CDMA connection again, but the results were no different... Three to five bars of signal and no connection... A few hours later Orange called me just to explain everything was fine, only the network was congested, and the signal meter was just a mock-up... "You may not be able to use the service even if there are five bars... The signal meter reading is irrelevant... ...

I have been pretty high on the new CDMA Ev-DO service @450MHz by Orange.PL recently... Consistent 1Mbps connection for the entire Krakow to Warsaw train ride... I have been testing the dual - mode CDMA/GPRS-UMTS ADU-635HA modem for two weeks now... The service has been very promising, but to be honest the modem itself does not seem to be the state of the art... Being the size of a soap bar, it requires a battery of its own (thankfully the battery recharges from USB port while the connection is not active) and works best with an external antenna... And most importantly... being dual mode... it DOES NOT support EDGE. No EDGE did not seem to be a big problem initially... I thought "well, OK, why would I need EDGE when there is much faster CDMA Ev-DO...?". Unfortunately things are not as simple... Two days ago I arrived at my friend's place - a small village at the Baltic Sea. An guess what... No CDMA there... (it was supposed to be everywhere... but it seems the coverage is...

As promised (and as I was hoping...), I already have some days of playing with the ADU 635 modem behind me. A short explanation. ADU 635 is a dual mode CDMA / GSM usb modem. I got mine from Orange.PL. Orange has a CDMA Ev-DO mobile data network running in the 450MHz band - the band they have had since the early 1990's, when analog NMT mobile network was operating there. Orange has a GSM - UMTS network too, so dual mode CDMA / GSM - UMTS device makes sense for them. My personal goal wast to test the 450MHz Ev-DO network performance on the go. I often travel on a train from Krakow to Warsaw, and it usually takes three hours one way, so together this is six hours per day. Trains, operated by a state - owned company are not the state of the art and they do not have an on board broadband connection. So people (like myself) use cellular modems. These modems are GSM / EDGE / UMTS, but the UMTS network is not available along the way. EDGE is sometimes very bad (I assume this is when many p...

The title says nothing. It is funny watching all those marketing departments from a distance... Every now and then they come up with - what they think - clever names, that mean nothing... Anyway... Freedom Pro is the name of the new mobile data service by Orange in Poland, operating in the NMT 450 MHz band, the band they initially acquired for the pre - GSM, analog NMT, the first mobile voice network in Poland. Regardless of the name of the new service, what they have done is quite interesting. They took CDMA EV-DO, probably the most spectrum efficient mobile data technology, and implemented it in the 450MHz band. 450 MHz has some unique characteristics. The most important is the range - the cells are large and as they already had the entire country covered by the NMT towers, it was just a matter or replacing the NMT nodes with CDMA ones. The result? Mobile Internet with rural coverage at broadband - like speeds. At the moment Orange.PL has just one device working on the CDMA network ...