Cell-site outages fall to 19 percent in area hit by Sandy, FCC says

About 19 percent of cell sites in the area hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy were still out of service on Thursday as recovery was slowed by other network failures and power shortages, according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

By 10 a.m. EDT Thursday, the outages had declined from about 22 percent of all cell sites in the region a day earlier, the FCC said in a statement on Thursday afternoon. That was an average across the area most affected by the storm, stretching across parts of 10 states. In addition, cable TV and cable Internet outages had been reduced to about 12 percent to 14 percent, the agency said.

"Overall, we're seeing both continued improvement in communications networks and also that much work remains to be done to restore service fully," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in the statement. As a key part of the recovery effort, the agency is working with federal, state and local authorities to help get fuel to generators, he said.

Service gaps in hard-hit areas

There was steady improvement in the wired and wireless communications networks across the storm area, but restoration of service in the areas hardest hit, such as New York and New Jersey, has been more difficult, said David Turetsky, head of the FCC's Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau. Some sites that could otherwise have come back online were held back by failures elsewhere in the communications infrastructure, he said.

The FCC said its Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) remained active, and the agency was still collecting data from carriers about the effects of the storm.

Emergency 911 calls are being received throughout the storm-affected area, though in some cases they are being re-routed to other 911 centers or don't contain location information, the FCC said.

On Thursday, the major wired and wireless carriers continued to bring facilities back up and deployed portable cell sites, some of which offered free device charging for people who had lost power.

T-Mobile USA reported that its network had been 85 percent restored in New York City and 80 percent restored on Staten Island. Verizon Communications said it had restored backup power to four critical facilities in lower Manhattan and one on Long Island that had suffered from flooding on Monday night. Those included the company's Manhattan headquarters.

Though Sandy had been downgraded from hurricane status before it reached land on Monday, it devastated a wide swath of the East Coast from North Carolina to Canada, stretching west to Michigan. The worst damage was in New York City and northern New Jersey.

At a press conference on Thursday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said AT&T was deploying portable cell sites near emergency assistance centers that have been set up around the city to help residents and distribute food. The trucks use satellite to connect to the rest of AT&T’s network and the Internet. Visitors can charge their mobile devices at the portable cells.

Verizon Wireless has also deployed cell sites on wheels where needed throughout the Northeast. The company has set up Wireless Emergency Communications Centers (WECCs) at Monmouth University in New Jersey and at two sites in Toms River, New Jersey, plus “stores on wheels” in Sea Girt and Howell, New Jersey. It’s offering device charging and free domestic calls to local residents at the WECCs and all its open store locations.

Meanwhile, Verizon Enterprise Solutions said cloud and data centers operated by Verizon and Verizon Terremark have remained operational and their services were unaffected.

Late on Thursday, Sprint Nextel said its network had been fully restored in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Vermont, Ohio and Kentucky. After “significant progress,” the network was more than 90 percent operational in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

But service was harder to come by in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where the network was only 80 percent restored—only 75 percent in New York City.

Source: techhive.com

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Comcast offers free Wi-Fi in the wake of Sandy

Comcast will offer use of its Wi-Fi network free of charge to those hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy, the cable and Internet provider said on Wednesday. The network, which is typically free for unlimited use by those with an Xfinity Internet account, is now open to the public through November 7.

Hotspots in Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. are part of the offer. A list of these hotspots can be found using Xfinity’s Wi-Fi coverage map available from the Comcast website.

Comcast’s hotspots can be found both indoors and outdoors in parks, public places, public transportation, and shopping malls. The cable provider operates some 50,000 of these hotspots across the country, mostly across the Northeast and in California.

To use the free Wi-Fi, look for the “xfinitywifi” network at a participating hotspot. On the page that pops up after connecting, look for the link that says “Not a Comcast Subscriber?” toward the bottom of the page. Click it, then select “Complementary Trial Session.” Comcast will allow you to renew your connection every two hours.

Obviously, the availability of these hotspots is dependent on both power and cable service being available at that location. In the hardest hit areas, that may be a bit tough: Current estimates put some 7 million people without power, and as much a a quarter of residents in the ten states affected by Sandy without broadband service.

Another caveat is that Comcast’s offer of free Wi-Fi only extends to hotspots operated by Comcast directly. Those operated by partners such as Cablevision and Time Warner Cable are not part of the promotion. That includes some of the hardest hit areas—including New York City, Long Island and Connecticut.

Neither company had announced similar plans for free Wi-Fi to those affected by Sandy as of Wednesday afternoon.

Source: techhive.com

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iPad mini tablet said to be Wi-Fi only

3G iPad mini not coming near term to help keep price down, report says

The widely expected smaller version of the Apple iPad tablet will have Wi-Fi but not cellular connectivity, according to unnamed sources in a news story about the so-called iPad mini. But it's not clear why that would be the case.

The new Apple device is said to have a 7.8-inch screen instead of the 9.7-inch screen in the current tablet model and will be marketed as a smaller, less expensive iPad, competing with Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7 among others.

The claim about having only Wi-Fi connectivity was made in a story posted at the U.K.-basedThe Guardian, by Charles Author.

"Industry sources indicated to the Guardian that they do not expect to see 3G-capable versions of the iPad mini," according to Author. "That would allow Apple to produce it comparatively cheaply and to limit the top price of the product, while retaining mobile broadband connectivity for its pricier iPad line."

Yet it's not clear why Apple would refuse to offer buyers a cellular option for a smaller tablet, if they want it. Apple's pricing for the current iPads is very simple and clear: you get a choice of three Wi-Fi models, based on storage capacity, and you have the option of adding $130 to the price tag if you opt for cellular connectivity.

For example, the new iPad, with the standard 9.7-inch screen, starts at $499 for the 16GB Wi-Fi version; adding a LTE cellular modem increases the price by $130 to $629. The newest and just released iPod touch, which mimics many of the features found in the new iPhone 5, has a 4-inch screen and is only available with Wi-Fi, priced at $299 for the starting 32GB model.

With a 7.8-inch screen, the iPad mini would be nearly 3 inches larger than the iPod touch and 2 inches smaller than the full-sized iPad. Many pundits and analyst say Apple will have to price the mini at about $250 to compete with rivals like Amazon. Even assuming that they're right, having a $130 cellular option wouldn't prevent consumers from buying a less expensive Wi-Fi iPad mini.

Even Amazon offers cellular options on its tablets, complicating a somewhat confusing array of screen sizes, storage, and connectivity features. Currently there are three Kindle Fire models, two with 7-inch screens. One of those, the Kindle Fire, has only single-band Wi-Fi, and is priced at $159; the second, Kindle Fire HD, has a higher resolution and supports dual-band Wi-Fi (5GHz in addition to 2.4GHz) as does the iPhone 5, iPod touch and presumably the iPad mini. This model is priced at $199.

But the newest Kindle Fire model has a larger screen at 8.9 inches, high resolution displays, and dual-band Wi-Fi for $299; adding a LTE cellular modem boosts the price to $499. And the 6-inch Kindle Paperwhite e-reader tablet can be bought with a 3G modem for $179.

The Guardian's sources are at odds with at least one other rumor, from a Russian language Ukranian website, noted by 9to5Mac's Seth Weintraub earlier in October. 

"Ukrainianiphone.com reports to have obtained parts for the upcoming iPad mini," Weintraub wrote. "The parts, labeled in the gallery above, according to the Russian-language website, were from a source who visited the factory in Asia. Notables include the plastic spacer bars, which Apple has traditionally used for 3G and 4G radio equipment...."

Source : networkworld.com/

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Hacker to use cloud for brute force WiFi crack

WPA-PSK not powerful enough in a cloud world.

A security researcher claims to have figured out a quick and inexpensive way to break a commonly used form of password protection for wireless networks using powerful computers that anybody can lease from Amazon.com over the Web.

Thomas Roth, a computer security consultant based in Cologne, Germany, says he can hack into protected networks using specialised software that he has written that runs on Amazon's cloud-based computers. It tests 400,000 potential passwords per second using Amazon's high-speed computers.
That leaves businesses as well as home networks prone to attack if they use relatively simple passwords to secure their networks.

Amazon leases time on computers to developers and companies that don't have the money to buy their own equipment, or don't use it frequently enough to justify doing so. Customers include individual programmers and corporate users.

A spokesman for Amazon said that Roth's research would only violate his company's policies if he were to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing service to break into a network without permission of its owner.

"Nothing in this researcher's work is predicated on the use of Amazon EC2. As researchers often do, he used EC2 as a tool to show how the security of some network configurations can be improved," said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener.

"Testing is an excellent use of AWS, however, it is a violation of our acceptable use policy to use our services to compromise the security of a network without authorisation."

Roth will distribute his software to the public and teach people how to use it later this month at the Black Hat hacking conference in Washington, D.C.

He said he is publicising his research in a bid to convince skeptical network administrators that a commonly used method for scrambling data that travels across WiFi network passwords is not strong enough to keep crafty intruders from breaking in to networks.

That encryption method, dubbed WPA-PSK, scrambles data using a single password. If a potential intruder is able to figure out the password, he or she can gain access to computers and other devices on the network.

Roth said that the networks can be broken into if hackers use enough computer power to "brute force" their way into figuring out the passwords that protect networks.

Those passwords were difficult for the average hacker to break until Amazon.com recently started leasing time on powerful computers at relatively inexpensive rates: It takes the processing capability of multiple computers to perform mathematical calculations needed to break the passwords.

The online retailer charges users 28 cents a minute to use machines that Roth used in his attack. It would cost at least tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and maintain that equipment.

Roth said that he used his software and Amazon's cloud-based computers to break into a WPA-PSK protected network in his neighborhood. It took about 20 minutes of processing time. He has since updated his software to speed its performance and believes he could hack into the same network in about 6 minutes.

"Once you are in, you can do everything you can do if you are connected to the network," he said.

Roth said he was not publicising his discovery to encourage crime, but to change a misconception among network administrators:

"People tell me there is no possible way to break WPA, or, if it were possible, it would cost you a ton of money to do so," he said. "But it is easy to brute force them."

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T-Mobile Refreshes the BlackBerry Curve

T-Mobile's update of the BlackBerry Curve, the 8900, isn't an earth-shattering revision of one of Research in Motion's most successful QWERTY keyboard models. But for those who are content to browse over T-Mobile's somewhat pokey EDGE network when Wi-Fi isn't available, it offers an improved camera, a sleeker design, and a snappier processor than its predecessor, the Curve 8320 (which is still available from T-Mobile but for US$100 less than the 8900).

Like the 8320, the 8900 is a quad-band phone, meaning you can use it on pretty much any GSM network worldwide. For data, it supports EDGE, the 2.5G network technology that approximates dialup in real-world performance. That's fine for e-mail, but Web browsing is somewhat sluggish (although the desktop-style browser does a good job of rendering large pages and then letting you zoom in on sections of interest).

Black with silver accents, the 8900 is slightly skinnier, a tad more lightweight and more sculpted looking than earlier Curves, with some of the design motifs we've seen in the BlackBerry Bold and Storm. I'm on the fence about the use of red type for keypad numbers, which is more subtle but also makes them slightly less legible than on the 8900's predecessors (which used black on silver). Still, when the phone screen is on, the red numbers do glow so I had no problems dialing. RIM continues to refine its keyboards, and thumb-typing on the Curve is eminently doable. Of course, you get the terrific corporate and Internet e-mail features RIM is known for.

Voice call quality was solid in my tests, Like its predecessor, the 8900 uses UMA technology to let you make voice calls over Wi-Fi when a Wi-Fi network is present. However you must sign up for T-Mobile's Hotspot at Home service to enable seamless transition from Wi-Fi to cellular calls.

The supplied media clips looked good, given the smallish but bright high-res screen. The 8900 comes with the updated media manager introduced since the last Curve, a definite plus. The 3.2-megapixel camera with built in flash and autofocus is also an upgrade from the previous 2-megapixel model, and it definitely shows in the improved images; shutterbugs will appreciate the difference.

Overall performance on apps definitely seemed snappier thanks to the upgraded CPU RIM is touting. Wi-Fi setup was easy and quick. GPS location, on the other hand, wasn't so hot with my production-level unit. The device hung for quite some time on its own requests for satellite fixes, and ultimately appeared to give up. I'm trying to figure out what happened here and will update as needed.

That glitch aside, the Curve 8900 should appeal to T-Mobile BlackBerry fans who feel the original Curve is starting to get a bit tired-and who have no particular need for a handset that supports faster UMTS/DSMA data networks. The rather high $300 pricetag (with a two-year T-Mobile contract) can be lowered to $200 via mail-in rebate when the device hits T-Mobile's retail outlets next week (B to B customers can start ordering now).

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Nortel quits WiMax deal with Alvarion

Nortel Networks has pulled out of a deal to resell WiMax equipment from Alvarion and help fund development of Alvarion's WiMax base stations.

The troubled networking vendor joined with Alvarion last June after cutting back its own WiMax efforts. After years of struggling to recover from a financial scandal and compete against bigger rivals, Nortel filed for bankruptcy earlier this month. Alvarion said in a press release Thursday that Nortel had informed it of the decision to quit the WiMax deal.

Alvarion is a WiMax specialist based in Israel. The collapse of the deal will hurt its fourth-quarter financial results, due to be announced Feb. 4. The company won't be able to recognize about US$2.4 million in revenue from sales of products to Nortel in the quarter. Alvarion expects that to take $0.04 per share out of its fourth-quarter bottom line, which the company now expects to show a loss of $0.08. Nortel is obligated to pay Alvarion for certain research and development services beyond the fourth quarter, but in the wake of the bankruptcy, Alvarion said it's not certain whether it will be able to collect.

"The action, while difficult, was a necessary step addressing Nortel's current situation and intention to narrow the company's focus," said Richard Lowe, Nortel's president of carrier networks, in the press release. The companies are working on shifting over their joint WiMax customers to Alvarion, he said.

Nortel has its own WiMax infrastructure products, but they're best-suited to use in developed markets, said IDC analyst Godfrey Chua. Alvarion's gear is better for the developing world, which still makes up the lion's share of the WiMax market, he said. But Nortel's move didn't surprise Chua.

"They really need to make some hard choices," he said. "They can't stay at the scale where they are now."

Going up against larger rivals, including Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei Technologies, Nortel is likely to sell off parts of its business and become a specialist in one or two technologies, Chua said. The company will probably focus on LTE (Long-Term Evolution), the fourth-generation mobile data system most mobile operators are expected to adopt, he said. But that will be a hard technology to translate into revenue, since it won't be widely deployed until 2010 or 2011.

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