Communications

There you are standing at the bus stop when your mother’s voice starts emanating loudly from your pocket, asking if you’ve got to the bus stop alright and to let her know when you reach the other end. This could prove embarrassing for anyone, even those under the age of 14, but similar situations could be occurring in the UK ...

There has been a radiation spill at a nuclear re-processing plant which has triggered an emergency response. An unstable isotope-laden cloud drifts off into the surrounding countryside, but where is it depositing radioactivity? With current technology, people drive into the area with radiation monitors and take measurements. These people have to arrive from all over the country, and none of ...

Headlines in wireless are dominated by standards. GSM, DECT, Bluetooth, 802.11, ZigBee, and WiMAX have evolved – or are still evolving – through meetings and international committees, as companies and engineers try to influence the final form of the technology. Invariably, it seems, these standards take a long time to finalise, and, once the committee process has run its course, ...

Firms are racing to gain a share of a European market for high resolution camera phones predicted for next year. The market for image sensors in particular has become a target for firms looking to take advantage of this growth. Cypress Semiconductor last week spent $100m acquiring 46-person Belgian imaging sensor firm FillFactory. It is a first time entry for ...

The telecoms industry is now moving from proprietary systems to a modular building block approach. This is according to Intel and Motorola, which both made announcements about AdvancedTCA (telecom computing architecture) last week. “Communications is a vast industry, based largely on proprietary systems,” said Richard Lissenden, marketing manager EMEA at Intel. “But all large unregulated, unrestricted, industries modulise over time. ...

Bookham Technology is to become a US firm as part of a plan to “strategically position” itself in the North American market. The Oxfordshire-based supplier of optical components will become Bookham Inc as soon as September this year with its shares listed on the NASDAQ stock market. “The Board believes the move will improve its strategic positioning by placing it ...

The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) and University College London (UCL) have launched an initiative with the aim of promoting the level of innovation in the communications industry. The Communications Innovation Institute (CII) will look at tackling some of the major obstacles blocking innovation in communications technology and draw up roadmaps for the future. “Our hope is to solve some of the co-ordination ...

BT’s plan to switch the majority of its customers to an Internet protocol (IP) network by 2008 has created a multi-billion pound bonanza for telecoms hardware and software suppliers. The replacement of the existing public switched telephone network (PSTN) will mean investment of £2bn a year for an unspecified number of years from 2004 onwards. Dubbed the 21st century network ...

Bluetooth is being touted for a wider range of applications as its data rate is tripled to 3Mbit/s. The upgrade, announced at WiCon World in Amsterdam, is called Bluetooth EDR – enhanced data rate. “Portable music is the hottest [Bluetooth] application right now,” said Glen Collinson, co-founder of Bluetooth chip firm CSR. “EDR is needed for streaming to multiple users ...

Texas Instruments (TI) is talking to telecommunications equipment manufacturers and network operators about adopting a unified DSL standard called Uni-DSL (UDSL) which incorporates all the DSL types – ADSL, ADSL2, ADSL2+, VDSL, VDSL2 and UHDSL (ultra high-speed DSL). “We’re in discussions with worldwide operators on the concept and we’re in strategic discussions with key customers,” said Michael Seidl, TI’s European ...