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Comment Re:Just in Time! (Score 1) 118

That's an American problem. GSM was sparingly rolled out in the US due to the prevalence of CDMA, so reclamation of those frequencies is manageable. There are no such plans for the rest of the world, where there are hundreds of millions of GSM devices still in use.

Australia is shutting down it's 2G networks to make room for LTE.

Comment The Players in this Market (Score 1) 118

I've been researching M2M for new products we have been developing.

The main players are
Telit (HE910 sereis), Italy
Sierra Wireless (HL6528/HL8548), Canadian
Quectel (UC20), Chinese
Gemalto EHS6, French
U-Blox (Lisa and Sara), Swiss

I'm not sure if there is even a USA company that plays in this space.
All the modules are of similar sie but have incompatible footprints.

Essentially, these modules will embed a Broadcom SOC and a custom OS. Broadcom was charging the module makers too much, so they have started moving to Intel and others. These product cost mega bucks to develop, and even after you buy a module with all the R&D done, you still need to spend a another $60k in certification if you want to get it on the AT&T network (per product).

There is going to be a lot of growth in this area as people develop IoT gateways. (as we are doing)

Comment Re:Polarization modulation. (Score 0) 122

It's still modulation, modulation creates sidebands, and sidebands require bandwidth.

Nothing has changed, the Shannon–Hartley theorem still rules.

It's not modulation, it's multiplexing using a constant angular momentum. Modulation requires a change in something. With this case the they are sending seperate radio streams using different but constant rotated angluar momentums.
Think of it like 3D glasses in movie cinema that use right and left hand polarised light.

Comment Synthetic Grass (Score 1) 99

One reason I turfed my backyard with artificial turf.
I was sick of weeds, animals digging in it, mowing it, fertilizing it, the kids trampoline killing it.

Synthetic grass can now look as good as the real deal. It can get hot in summer, but otherwise its nice having an always perfect looking lawn.

Comment Knee Jerk (Score 2) 123

NO mine wants a tailings dam to collapse. There are regular conferences on how to design the things and specialists who design them. NO CEO wants this to happen, because the cost reparations is horrendous, and contrary to what the comments have been like here, the bosses of these companies (well the ones I've know of) want to be good corporate citizens.
Mining has risks, and incidents like this will ne analysed and fed back into the future design models, and like all things in life, will improve over time.

Comment Re:Wouldn't electric cars have the opposite effect (Score 1) 502

To add to what you said.
Australians now pay about 25c/kwh compared with 12c/kwh 10 years ago.
The overinvestment in wires and poles was due to stupid legislation that GAURUNTEED a 10% return on any capital investment. (Gee lets spend a billion so we gaurunteed to make $100M)
We put 40kwh of solar in at our business that with the current subsidies nets us 18% return on capital (vs 2% cash in the back)

Comment Re:I'm probably one of them (Score 1) 570

I had a debt collection agency come after our business for $100 unpaid cell phone bill.
It was from a lone disused cell phone where we had either never received the invoice or admin had misplaced it.
I said no problems, just give me a copy of the invoice and we'll pay up.
They said. Can't do that.
To cut a long story short, the phone company sells anything past due date to a collection agency BUT doesn't bother to give them the supporting documentation.
How retarded is that!

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