An adventure in electronic uselessness on the way to IBM Impact 2011

I am on my way to one of the world's high-techiest conferences, IBM Impact 2011 in Las Vegas. However, I was sent a travel plan that a) keeps me in the air as long as I think, it took me to get to Australia in 2003. b) I was unable to check in online due to the travel having been ordered by IBM's travel agent. Fortunately, Riga Airport this morning was not as much of a zoo as I expected.
Then here at Schipol in Amsterdam, I was also unable to check in on one of the automated machines because I had checked baggage in Riga (the Riga check in machine didn't let me check in either). So I am finally checked in and typing this in one of the two 30 minute free WiFi sessions you get from KPN. Otherwise, it is starting at EUR 3 for 15 minutes. Insane. At least Las Vegas airport has/had free WiFi. I will see what Minneapolis offers, must spend a couple of hours there, too. All together, I am 24 hours, almost, from door to door. And then, with a 10 hour time shift, IBM expects European journalists not to write gibberish about their event :).
Anyway, will try to post both text and video from the event, with my Latvian day job taking precedence. Watch this space...

Latvian Railways offers WiFi on Moscow trains

Latvian Railways (Latvijas Dzelzceļš) in cooperation with the wireless telecommunications company Triatel will start offering free wireless internet access from October 1 on its daily trains from Riga to Moscow. The service will be available along the entire route from Riga to the Latvian-Russian border at Zilupe, allowing passengers to surf the internet for just over four hours. WiFi internet is not available once the train crosses into Russia. It is understood the service will also be available on Latvian-operated trains on the return leg of the trip on Latvian territory.

The internet on the train service is apparently provided through Triatel's EV-DO wireless internet network, which offers users speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps on direct connections. Evidently the WiFi on the train will re-route signals from Triatel towers and base stations along the railway right of way allocating adequate bandwidth to each train passanger using the service, rather than sharing a single 3.1 Mbps link to the whole train.

Latvian Railways will be holding a press conference on October 1 at Riga's main train station to explain details of the new service.

The internet-on-a-train is the latest project in which Triatel has teamed up with a major Latvian or international enterprise to co-sell or resell its wireless internet services. Triatel has been cooperating with Lattelecom to provide fixed wireless voice telephony and internet in remote rural locations, it has used the cable television and telecommunications services company IZZI as a reseller of its fixed wireless internet and just teamed up with the satellite TV company Viasat (part of the Swedish Modern Times Group)to offer a combined TV and internet packages (the television by satellite, the internet by EV DO) called Viasat Connect. Triatel is also behind a mobile internet service under development by Lattelecom (with USB plug modems), which are already being sold or leased to direct customers of Triatel and, apparently, as part of the ViaSat Connect package (the internet service is called " mobile").

With HSDPA networks run by the mobile operators in Latvia and offering speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps and possibly 14.4 Mbps in the near future, it may be time for Triatel to move to the next higher-speed generation of EV DO in order to keep up. LTE (promising an unlikely 100 Mbps, but probably a decent two-figure speed) is just around the corner, too, some say. Tele2 is building out in Sweden in 2010 and local sources say the Latvian "little brother" wants the same toys as the Swedes and soon!

Swedish expert on the future of wireless broadband

Jens Zander, a professor of radio communications at the Royal Institute of Technology and head of the research institute wireless@kth, recently talked to me about the future of wireless broadband technologies.

Click to play

What sucks? Yahoo? Dulles Airport WiFi??

Another Foxtrot, Foxtrot Sierra* moment as I cannot get into my Yahoo e-mail (I am logged in, just doesn't click through to my mail) here at Dulles International waiting to fly back to Latvia via Frankfurt (I was at Lotusphere 2008 in Orlando). Is it Yahoo (time to switch completely to Gmail???) or the Dulles Wifi? Dumbassedness seems to be abundant here, I can hardly see what I am writing while sitting in a waiting area seat (ok, I could move...) because the bozo architect who did the terminal (a huge indoor hiking area) apparent;y wasn't taught about the sun (as in low winter sun shining blindingly through the windows). Hello! Photosensitive awnings?

*for fuck's sake!

Pirates of Place de Maillot

Made it to Paris. Charles de Gaulle is a "fantastic" airport, a 1970s or 1980s hallucination of what the future, that is now (2007) was supposed to be like, with no one walking, everyone riding on people conveyors. Trouble is, the froggers actually built the thing (OK, no snide remark about the French meant, the US has Epcot Center) The monitors are there to say that one's baggage will be delivered at this Spaceport 2000 (vintage 1978) like 40 minutes after the plane lands.
Arrived at the Hotel Concorde de Lafayette, rode the elevator to my floor, which opened on a scene out of what upscale whorehouses look like in the movies -- winered wall-to-wall carpeting and mirrored wall panels. The room is nice, 25 + TV channels, many of them bizarre Arabic TV shops and Japanese channels with elderly people doing strange things and huge captions in Japanese characters, apparently so the elderly watching can read what is going on.
The cathouse hallways were a premonition of what this place charges for wireless internet. EUR 30 for 24 hours (people do sleep and attend events, so figure it out). Fortunately, the press center set up by Alcatel Lucent has free wireless. Considering that the newly merged company went several hundreds of millions into the bag in Q4 2006, I would not have been surprised had they charged for it :). This promises to be interesting, as everyone is probably waiting to hear how the company will get it together over the next few years. It is a supplier of switches to Lattelecom (wrote that earlier).
I am yet again glad that most Baltic hotels have free WiFi by default (or for the price of a cup of coffee if you walk into one of the Revals in Riga off the street). EUR 30 is more than I pay for a month of 5 Mbps Lattelecom DSL, FFS*!!!! (for f**k's sake, if you didn't guess)