not sure how you did your research, but most of these countries changed time exactly a week ago, with the main exception being usa and canada... you are a week late mate ;-) as per wikipedia, it's 10 countries that are changing time this weekend, most were changing last week

4G definition is quite precise (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G ) Following the ITU recommandation, a 4G wireless broadband network has to deliver a data rate between 100 Mbps to 1 GHz, depending if you are mobile (read: moving) or stationary.

Just an extra info on this: a cell phone will not be able to connect, not because that the plane is too far away from the tower, but rather due to the speed of the plane itself. Above 300km/h a cell phone cannot stay attached to a wireless network. It is also why in the landing approch (when the plane is slowing down) that you may (can, most of the time) connect to cell site.

I never switch off my phone on a plane and I fly about 20 time per year. As far as I know, those planes had always taken off and landed correctly. That would be a very very bad design/conception if such a low-power transmission would interfere with plane control. Specially since cell-tower transmit (and reach the plane) with 10x time the power of those cell phone.

6.4 MB per day
2.3GB per year
--
4.6GB per DVD
1 DVD per 2 years
--
1$ per DVD
0.50$ per year.

Seems even more economical.

There is for sure some free alternative out there, but on the off-the-self side non-free software, but for sure you cannot ignore IBM/Tivoli Netcool.

The Netcool suite have been purchased by IBM a few years ago. That portfolio came from Micromuse which was really telecom oriented. That suite can monitor easily the required 5000 nodes. Across the suite, there are multiple products that covers most of NMS needs from basinc alarm/stats collections such as receiving/parsing SNMP traps, SNMP pooling, node discovery; up to higher-level business requirement like alarm management, ajax or java GUI for alarm display; dashboarding, etc.

Feel free to have a look: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/sw-atoz/indexN.html

Sun is actuallay comparing their ZFS, which has received a couple of new features and enhancements in the past few years, agains the old jounalized version of ext2. They should at least compare to a newer linux file system.