Ofcom's announced intention to permit increased power levels in the wifi band in rural area drew some interesting comments today. The Cloud's chief marketing officer told the BBC he believes this will deliver broadband to rural places for the first time! Those poor, deprived rural folk have been sitting around all these years waiting for The Cloud to ride in on a fluffy white charger and save them!

And there we were, believing marketing was all about understanding your market. He clearly isn't aware that over 200 communities have been quietly building wireless networks in rural communities for many years now. Even though his colleagues had met with board members of CBN, the organisation which supports community-run broadband schemes.

Many rural communities, having striven for several years to become self-sufficient, are feeling somewhat nervous that the wireless noise from commercial organisations, carrying out such extensive market research, will in fact be causing interference to the long-standing community-run network which is serving the community well.

Up until now Ofcom has rarely intervened in unlicensed spectrum issues, even when there was a clear breach of existing regulations. While the majority of operators stick to the rules, it is clear that there are rogues using over-power systems today but Ofcom's priority has always been to licenced bands and to protecting emergency services; the wifi band comes a very poor third. 

Many rural communities chose not to offer their views on the proposed increased power levels. Firstly, Ofcom has rarely listened before, and secondly the rules are irrelevant unless Ofcom is willing to enforce them.

So when the storm cloud drifts over a community, shutting down the preferred services, who is Ofcom going to protect? Anyone?

Apparently, T-Mobile customers **don't** want to use VoIP so badly that they have asked their mobile operator to ban it!! In fact, just so they feel sufficiently cared for, the kindly phone company will disconnect them should they ever be tempted over to the darkside. T-Mobile may apparently launch their own service soon, akin to Vodafone's own walled-garden of services. Seems the mobile operators haven't heard about AOL; they too were forced to either rebrand as a private walled garden, or open up and join the Internet. By the way, my new Nokia E61 is great; it has vpn software built-in, allowing me to do as I please unless they fancy a privacy suit!

GTC has joined the throng on Yellowikis , the opensource business listing, not because its a great way to promote your business, although that may come too, but because Yell thinks its damaging their profile and may confuse potential customers and users.  If you want to know more about Yellowikis see the Wikipedia entry and the BBC news item about the threat from Yell .

Joel Smith of DalesIT posted ths curious tale - certain models of Japanese cars may interfere with home wifi networks. The video diary of his investigations show how locking the doors of some cars creates significant wireless interference in the middle of the licence exempt spectrum used by 802.11b/g wifi systems.

For several months, a friend’s wireless mesh network had been experiencing vastly increased noise between the hours of 5.30pm and 7am, and most of the weekend; it was almost like clockwork, and caused parts of the mesh to drop out. They spent ages looking for known sources of interference  for wifi networks, such as video senders and wifi cameras. The odd thing was that the noise was isolated to a single network node, and not on any of the neighbouring nodes, yet it was picking up ~30db of noise.

Joel used a Wi-Spy spectrum analyser to investigate. Switching the meshnodes to channel 1 away from channel 11, highlighted an unusual signal at channel 9; a constant signal, which revealed itself because the average signal strength was close to the peak - normal wifi signal will show bursts of activity. After some moving around, they homed in on a Mazda 6 parked nearby.

Turning the car alarm off eliminated the wireless noise; turning it on brought it back. Turning the alarm on and disabling the internal motion sensors gave no problem. Culprit found. Most cars use ultrasonic motion detectors for their alarms. Mazda 6s use channel 9 of the 2.4 GHz licence exampt ISM band which interferes with all neigbouring bands between 11 and 6.

Whilst making this video , they also discovered that recent Mitsubishi Shoguns and possibly Chrysler Crossfires have the same problem.

Thanks to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it of DalesIT for this item.

CBN and ABC recently published their report looking at Britain's broadband-free areas - or notspots. While some of the findings are not a major surprise - cable length and quality are the key causes - some of the regional differences were. For example, almost a quarter of the reports submitted were in the South-east of England - even when adjusting for population, the South-east pretty much equalled rural Yorkshire for the rate of reports.

The report also looks at the different approaches adopted by development agencies across England. The South-east differs here as well - most of the remaining unenabled exchanges are now in the South-east, and SEEDA's unique policy of not taking a centrally strategic role in the development of a universal broadband strategy for the region has meant that they have decided not to intervene in areas where broadband isn't available for reasons other than an un-enabled exchange. With no universal grant, such as Rabbit, available to businesses in the South-east, there was a clear frustration communicated in the responses to the study.

The reason cited by SEEDA for their approach is that they don't know the full extent of the notspot problem; intervening in one case sets a precedence with incalculable financial implications. Interesting then to contrast the South-east with the North-east of England; here OneNE and Northumberland Strategic Partnership commissioned a detailed study by Adit North, permitting them to accurately target their intervention funds - the North-east reported fewer problems than any other region of Britain outside of London.

That said, SEEDA are apparently keen to provide widespread hotspot access. In a quote from their recent broadband survey: "The County Broadband Partnerships are seeking to help the county, by ensuring that no one is more than 10 minutes travelling time away from their nearest wireless broadband hotspot". A service in direct competition with some of the regions businesses and with a plethora of commercial operators already happy to service demand so hardly a "market failure" issue, especially as SEEDA's partner in the hotspot business is BT OpenZone.

In a submission to SEEDA's board on 5 May this year, outlining their role as the lead development agency for broadband in England, they state that they wish to drive GVA for the region and reduce digital exclusion. Its clear how this could be achieved by focussing on notspots, but the hotspot market is vibrant and competitive - their intervention will surely have the opposite impact. For want of a single letter, SEEDA appears to be heading for confrontation with communities like Hambleden, who have no access at all, and drawing the ire of the regions homegrown WISP's trying to compete with Openzone.

For more information on the CBN notspot report and its findings contact This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it