Foreign aid workers dedicated to delivering emergency telecoms in disaster areas have been prevented from going into cyclone-hit Burma. Like many charity groups, the Telecoms Sans Frontieres (TSF) organisation has so far been denied entry visas by the military-run government.
A TSF team has been waiting in Bangkok, Thailand, with its equipment all week. "We're stuck for the moment; so much time has been wasted," TSF spokesman Oisin Walton told BBC News.
If visas are eventually granted, the team will go in to set up phone and other network links. These will be used by many aid groups to co-ordinate the huge relief effort that is needed.
Locals will also be offered "welfare calls", to make contact with friends and family who will have been worried about their safety. The UN fears more than 1.5 million people have been affected by Cyclone Nargis which struck on Saturday.
Tens of thousands have made homeless; communications are down an... More »
Super-fast broadband could be delivered via the underground pipes of the UK's water and electricity companies, regulator Ofcom has said.
It is conducting a survey of the UK's ducting network to see its suitability for carrying fibre networks.
Some companies in the UK and France already offer fast broadband via the sewers.
Ofcom also wants to see the three million homes earmarked to be built in the UK by 2020, fibre-enabled.
Change perception
It has opened a consultation - which will run until June 25 - to see how best to regulate next-generation networks.
Critics have warned that the regulator is not doing enough and that the UK is in real danger of falling behind with the rollout of superfast broadband access.
"The fact that this is just a consultation is another indication that the UK is lagging behind," said Ian Fogg, an analyst with Jupiter Research.
The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communica... More »
The University of Surrey is to lead a five year £5m Government funded study into silicon photonics.
“There is renewed interest in silicon photonics because of the microprocessor interconnect bottleneck,” programme leader Professor Graham Reed told EW. “If you do it optically, you get a huge bandwidth.”
Although far from an ideal optical material, silicon can transmits light at the telecoms wavelengths of 1550 and 1300nm, and its oxide can be used as a cladding to constrain light. On-chip and chip-to-chip communications are targets.
Surrey with its partners will work on silicon optical modulators, detectors, filters and couplers. “What we are not doing is any light sources, partly because there is already enough heat on a microprocessor,” said Reed. “We will bring it in through an optical fibre.”
Couplers are particularly important, said Reed, because silicon optical modulators use carriers to alter refractive index, a... More »
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