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Voting rules altered for IEEE 802.20 mobile broadband standard
Ah, so now we know why it takes those IEEE task forces so incredibly long to get anything done: infighting. Turns out, the working group for the emerging IEEE 802.20 mobile broadband standard -- "which was suspended last year after a fight over members' real company affiliations" -- has altered its voting rules. Now, each entity will be allowed one vote rather than members voting as individuals "regardless of whom they work for." Essentially, these changes are occurring amidst concern about "domination of the group," and 802.20 Committee Chairman Paul Nikolich reportedly hopes than the voting modification will "help deliver the standard in a timely way." Of course, considering that some of the technology in the protocol was developed by Flarion (which was swallowed by Qualcomm), there could certainly be more problems around the bend beyond a straggle of control freaks.
Digita to build Flash-OFDM wireless broadband across Finland
Remember Flash-OFDM? Yeah, us neither. Well, it looks like the little wireless broadband standard is going to get a big push in Finland from Digita, who has just announced a nationwide network rollout. Digita is teaming up with Siemens for construction, and they've got some 450MHz frequency to work with, and are planning to launch on April 1st of 2007 with the early stages of the network covering most of Finnish Lapland and urban southern Finland. According to Digita: "The goal is to make Finland world's first country with a wireless broadband network covering the whole nation," which is a bit of a dubious claim in light of Japanese and Korean accomplishments in that realm, but 1.5mbps speeds aren't nothing to sneeze at. We're sure the Netgear folks are happy for the news.
