Seven more California regional broadband consortia up for funding
California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) staff are recommending approval of the remaining seven regional broadband consortia grant requests. The full commission is set to vote on the recommendation at its 16 February 2012 meeting.
In December, the commission funded the first seven of the fifteen applications it received and rejected another that did not meet minimum application requirements. The remaining seven consortia were provisionally endorsed, but told to work with CPUC staff to further develop their proposals, particularly where definitions of deliverables were concerned.
Six of the seven are regional consortia that were nurtured by the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF), which accounted for thirteen out of the original applications. All of the CETF-backed applicants have either been funded by CPUC through the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) or are on the list for approval on the 16th. One independent applicant from Los Angeles County – the California's One Million New Internet User Coalition – is also on track for funding. The legislation that set aside CASF money for regional consortia allowed for higher funding and multiple projects in Los Angeles County. The CETF-backed consortium in LA was funded in the first round.
First year funding of $150,000 (or near to it) would be approved for the remaining seven applicants if the draft resolution is adopted as is, with second and third year funding dependent on performance. The total, three-year amounts of the seven grants that the commission will consider are:
- California’s One Million New Internet User Coalition - $450,000
- Central Sierra Connect Broadband Consortium - $450,000
- Connected Capital Area Broadband Consortium - $448,301
- Eastern Sierra Connect Regional Broadband Consortium - $450,000
- Gold Country Broadband Consortium - $450,000
- Inland Empire Regional Broadband Consortium - $450,000
- San Diego Imperial Regional Broadband Consortium - $450,000
More information about the regional consortia, including geographic coverage, is available here.
3G networks reach deep into Australia and New Zealand
Travelling through New Zealand and Australia with a smart phone or iPad is painless and relatively inexpensive for a traveller. Three national mobile networks – Telstra, Optus and Vodafone – cover Australia. Optus also markets service under the Virgin Mobile brand. In New Zealand, it's Telecom NZ and Vodafone, with newcomer 2degrees building out its network.
My assessment of actual coverage is subjective. I used Vodafone in both countries, and Telstra in Australia. Vodafone NZ and Telstra do a very good job of covering the areas I visited: long swathes of both North and South Islands in New Zealand, and Melbourne, Adelaide and the countryside in between in Australia. Vodafone Australia's coverage is less comprehensive. I occasionally checked on Optus' and Telecom NZ's availability, and could not see any significant difference between their coverage and that of Telstra and Vodafone NZ, respectively.
All four companies market their services through their own stores and resellers, and do a good job of reaching out to travellers with iPads and unlocked GSM/3G phones. I have a long standing pre-paid account with Vodafone NZ that lets me use its Australian sister network on the same terms. Just topping up once a year keeps my phone number active.
Getting a microsim for my iPad from Telstra took longer than it should have – I spent about 45 minutes in a Melbourne store going through the bureaucratic steps necessary for setting up an account, and the other three carriers appear to have similar procedures. It's a far cry from Vodafone's UK operation. Travellers there can pop a credit card into an airport vending machine and, for £10 get a microsim and 250 MB of data.
Costs are very reasonable. In Australia, Telstra, Vodafone and Optus all offered a microsim with 3 GB of data for A$30. Published prices are different but, judging from discussions with store staff, all three aggressively meet or beat each other's special deals on the street. There are a few Virgin Mobile brand stores as well, and they're aiming at more even more cost conscious buyers: a A$5 microsim comes with 300 MB of data. Avoid a couple of hotel or WiFi hotspot day use charges and it's paid for itself. In New Zealand, microsim costs range between NZ$20 to NZ$50 for up to 3 GB of data.
New Zealand and Australia have always bee very pleasant places to do business. Ubiquitous, fast and cheap mobile broadband coverage makes it very easy, too.
Thinking forward from CES 2012
First, going forward, mobile telecommunications manufacturers and core technology companies will be the primary innovators. Computer companies provided much of the innovation for the industry in the past ten years, but they are all but gone from CES.
Second, the business of consumer electronics will focus less on physical products and more on services connected to those products. As technology becomes more capable and cheaper – and it will – the differences between hardware brands and devices will become diminishingly small. Services will be the primary differentiator for products and brands.
Arguably, the most influential consumer electronics company of the past ten years began the last decade as Apple Computer, and finished it as simply Apple, a music, cloud service and telecommunications company. They were so far ahead of the curve that they didn't have to join the other computer-oriented companies in pulling out of CES. They weren't there in the first place.
Qualcomm launched its Qualcomm Life subsidiary to provide a cloud platform that will support medical services delivered through mobile communications devices, including but not limited to those powered by the chipsets it makes. It's also putting up $100 million in venture funding to back connected medical device and service start-ups.
But that's small change compared to the amount of money that health insurance companies can bring to bear as they move into the networked personal health care space, and mandate such services for their customers. The digital media and automobile sectors will follow closely behind, providing more opportunities and platforms for the consumer electronics industry.
Qualcomm launches consumer M2M industry with 2net medical monitoring platform
The first consumer-focused M2M (machine-to-machine) ecosystem is on the market. Qualcomm launched its Qualcomm Life subsidiary last month, folding in its wireless health business. QL's flagship offering is the 2net platform, a medical-grade (it meets HIPAA standards and is FDA listed) cloud server that links personal health and fitness monitoring devices to medical professionals and, when appropriate, directly to consumers.
Qualcomm is building and managing the network and cloud computing infrastructure. The health and fitness monitoring devices on one end and the interface with health care providers and consumers on the other are provided by Qualcomm's customers. Forty companies signed up in 2net's first month, and the list can be expected to grow quickly.
2net partners feed data to the platform any way they choose, but it's clearly built on the assumption that most personal medical monitoring devices will be wireless. It makes sense. The more data, the better, and what could be better than continuous readings from a mobile monitor?
Not surprisingly, Qualcomm is making sure the platform is fully enabled with mobile data links. It's supporting smartphone developers, such as Macaw, that are building apps that directly assess fitness activities (for example, via GPS tools) or that link to a wide range of sensors, from Bluetooth-enabled bathroom scales to blood pressure cuffs to blood glucose meters.
Medical and fitness monitoring devices can also link to 2net via Ethernet (for, say, a home respirator) or an embedded M2M cellular radio or directly from a proprietary platform. To jumpstart the market, Qualcomm Life is producing a wireless Swiss Army knife gateway with a plug form factor. It supports Bluetooth, WiFi, ANT+ and a UMTS radio that's backwards compatible to 2G. First and foremost, QL wants to drive the 2net platform. GSM or CDMA, it doesn't matter: Qualcomm is happy to support it.
Partner companies are already leveraging the gateway device. BodyMedia makes a fitness monitor that takes galvanic skin response, heat flux and skin temperature measurements, and combines it with accelerometer readings to send real time fitness information back to a subscriber's smartphone.
QL makes money by running the platform. Parent Qualcomm will make a ton of dough as M2M drives mobile subscriptions from 6 billion today to a projected 50 billion by 2020 (that's not a typo, it's billion with a B).
Partners make money by manufacturing health and fitness gizmos, selling them to consumers and then, in many cases, charging an ongoing subscription fee to crunch the data and send it to their physicians and other health care providers. You can bet the ranch that health insurance companies will push the technology and buy OEM services for their customers.
Qualcomm is supporting the medical M2M sector with a $100 million venture fund and its just announced $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize. "The mission is to drive radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity," said Dr. Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation, as he joined with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs to announce the competition at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show.
They should have called it the "Medical Tricorder X Prize", because every Trekkie knows that Dr. McCoy's Tricorder was different from the general purpose units the rest of the Enterprise's crew carried.
Okay, for 10 million bucks, we'll cut them some slack.
M2M is about machines. But as Mr. Spock observed, machines are merely servants of people. Qualcomm could have picked no better way to pioneer the consumer M2M space than by putting human health first.
No mass market home automation players yet
Incremental advancement but no break through into the mass market for the home automation sector at CES this year. It remains a niche for hobbyists and specialty contractors.
Core technology companies, such as Qualcomm, NXP and Marvell, continue to support it. And there's no shortage of companies offering, or at least developing, home automation products and services.
Part of the problem is the multitude of standards. Some device makers support more than one, but interoperability is the exception rather than the rule.
The missing piece is a home hub/gateway that's both consumer friendly and network protocol agnostic.
You can find one or the other. For example, MiOS's Vera router handles WiFi, Ethernet and Z-Wave natively, and can manage X10 and potententially other protocols via plug-ins. But its user interface is balky and basic. You need to be confortable with programming code to do anything ambitious.
Jakks Pacific's baby monitor product is easy to use, and the wrist watch-style viewing screen is a nice innovation. But it's a one trick pony. Canadian company 2D2C's SafePlug is an interesting RFID-enabled solution, but they only have one item in their product line ready for market. Spain's q1tecno is targeting the low cost end of the market with their Domotics Toys.
Home Protect, from France-based Moai, is a wonderfull piece of design work. They put their gateway and remote sensors into Tiki God cases that they claim will be plug-and-play simple to install. Unfortunately, it's not ready for market yet. All they had to display at the show were solid plastic Tiki God statues.
Companies like Greenwave and Dutch manufacturer Freelux are positioning themselves as OEM suppliers to utilities. The advantage to that approach is that the electric company can provide customer support and incentives to use it. If the incentives are good enough, they can also dictate technology and network protocol choices to their subscribers. No one had any utility partnerships to announce, though.
