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White Spaces Coalition launches DB Group, letting devices find their own piece of the spectrum
The white space debate over how (or whether) to utilize unused frequencies in the broadcast spectrum has been going on for nearly two years now, and, despite all the ups and downs (and fear mongering), the various members of the White Spaces Coalition have continued to fight the good fight in the hopes of bringing faster downloads to more places. The latest initiative/olive branch is the formation of the White Spaces Database Group, mapping areas of unused spectrum and enabling devices to verify what frequencies are available based on positional information (likely GPS or cell tower triangulation). It's still early days so there aren't any details about the database itself yet, except that the group intends to keep things "open and non-proprietary" and will work with the FCC to populate it. Now, can't we all just get along and work toward a summer of worry-free wireless?[Via ars technica]
GSM Association proudly endorses NFC and Carrier ENUM
The GSM Association has been gung-ho about near-field communications (NFC) for a good while now, but just recently at a meeting in Macau did it take the opportunity to officially proclaim its support for NFC and Carrier ENUM. As for the former, it's urging manufacturers to have NFC technology (which is most commonly used for mobile payment systems) in "mainstream mobile phones by mid-2009 by using the standardized single wire protocol (SWP) interface, which enables communications between NFC hardware and a SIM card." Furthermore, it gave a hearty thumbs-up to ENUM (previously known as Number Resolution Service), which is an IETF-sanctioned standard for converting traditional phone numbers into IP addresses. It also announced that a related service (dubbed PathFinder) was generally available to mobile and fixed network operators from NeuStar. All this sounds fine and dandy, but what we're really interested in is what these folks did in Macau after the business was settled. Lucky...[Via phonescoop, image courtesy of ISOC]Read - Official GSMA support for ENUMRead - Support for NFC / ENUM
