As I first noted back in January, Sprint is in fact now officially spinning off its WiMAX project as a joint venture with Clearwire (and that's the name of the new company), Comcast, Time-Warner, Intel, Google (that's interesting) and others. This should given the new company enough money to build out many US markets, so WiMAX really is coming to town, perhaps in 2010. Note that LTE should appear around the same time, so any talk of WiMAX having a lead in time-to-market should at this point be moot.

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See, this is just what I meant in my recent entry on mobile applications. RIM and SAP have formed one of those all-too-common partnerships/alliances/whatever (a colleague of mine from long ago used to refer to these as the "rules of engagement") that basically puts SAP code on BlackBerrys. First question - why is the porting of an application such a big deal? Obviously as a hardware vendor, RIM would love to have as much code running on their handsets as possible. This is simply good business, especially if (a) the software vendor pays for the port and (b) no other competing vendor has that specific application. But what's in it for SAP?

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Happy Cinco de Mayo!

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Here's a truly fundamental question: what form will applications take as mobility becomes the dominant element in future IT solutions? Should we just keep doing what we're doing, handing out notebooks, duplicating (or replacing) the desktop, running great big applications locally, and using other mobile devices (wireless handsets, PDAs, ec.) only for simple apps like making phone calls, basic e-mail and messaging, and checking our calendars?

Or should we perhaps expect and demand more from our smartphones and wireless PDAs? Shouldn't these devices be platforms in their own right, hosting local applications and (perhaps much more importantly) providing remote access to intranet-based apps and Web services?

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First of all, my apologies for the title of this entry. I've been spending way too much time following the presidential election this year, and I'm actually pleased to see Hillary Clinton still in the race. The old advice about never quitting has never been proven more valuable than in the situation here. In fact, I expect her to be the democratic nominee and then to lose in a fairly close race to John McCain. Not that I personally would vote for either of these two, but my point here is that persistence pays off - assuming, of course, a focus on the elements that really matter.

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I've been using the Asus Eee PC for a few weeks now, and I have to say my overall impression is very favorable indeed. It's very portable (small and light), has reasonable battery life, a very fast boot time (and fast shutdown as well - ever needed to head to the airport while Microsoft wasted your time shutting down XP by installing updates?), and overall easy manageability. Now, of course, this is LINUX, and you'd better be comfortable using the command line (terminal window) interface from time to time.

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I have to admit I have mixed feelings about much of the progress that mobility has made over the past couple of decades. On the one hand, mobility is all about going where the action is while remaining connected to the IT resources that make us productive. It's about improving customer service, lowering costs, and improving productivity. I don't think any of us would give up our mobile computing or communications tools without a fight. And yet, there are downsides to all of this.

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My last real job before I started Farpoint Group was with a supercomputer manufacturer, Stellar Computer (RIP). There I spent a lot of time working on scientific visualization, the art of mapping large, multivariate data sets onto appropriate graphical representations in hopes of quickly finding insight in what would otherwise be a tangled mess of data. The result of our work back then is still available, in an evolved form, from Advanced Visual Systems, and other firms have similar software tools.

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So I'm sitting here this beautiful, sunny weekend, in the office, running benchmarks. Of course, I really like running benchmarks, but not on beautiful, sunny weekends. The reason for this is that Microsoft's Windows Vista is a total piece of junk. I'd use stronger language than that if I could.

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Do you remember the analog television channel numbers? They were 2-13 for VHF and, back when the broadcasters were the most powerful lobby at the FCC, 14-83 were reserved on UHF. I assume that policy makers actually thought there might eventually be 82 channels operating in some metro areas, but such just wasn't economically viable, any more than having 500+ channels on cable makes sense today. But, regardless, frequencies were allocated and there were lots of broadcast stations operating. What's left of these stations are moving to new channels where they will broadcast only digital signals starting next February. And, yes, there once was a channel 1, but it was re-farmed out of existence in 1945.

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The subject of instant messaging came up this week (and the week is just getting started) via a call from an editor who wanted to talk quite broadly about this topic, particularly with respect to how IM is being used in business. In general, I am not personally a fan of IM, and rarely recommend it beyond purely personal use, for two reasons: it's not secure, and, even more importantly, it's not auditable. This is why many enterprises ban the use of IM at work - there's no trail of what was communicated as there is with e-mail.

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It's hard not to recommend some form of IDS/IPS in any enterprise-class WLAN installation. But there's usually some pushback when it comes to the price of this capability; after all, we're installing sensors and servers and software and the cost can add up quickly. Some organizations thus (foolishly, I believe) forgo having a suitable IDS/IPS installed. I'm personally so concerned about WLAN security that I have a small-business-class IDS/IPS system installed in my office, protecting all of six APs.

On the other hand - and hearing about this was a smack-myself-in-the-forehead moment - why not provision IDS/IPS as a service, effectively leasing the infrastructure and offering the rest as a managed service?

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Nokia's announcement of the WiMAX version of the N810 this week at the CTIA show in Las Vegas lifted the curtain on yet another poorly-kept secret. Rumored for some time, the Internet Tablet WiMAX Edition is pretty much an N810 with a WiMAX radio added. As I've noted before, I really like the N810 (the version without WiMAX; I've not tried the new one), and I expect it to do well - once there's a US WiMAX network to run it on. In the meantime, BTW, the WiMAX N810 also has Wi-Fi and GPS - enough to keep you busy until service comes to your neighborhood.

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Ah, the first of April - the first official day of spring for me. It's the start of the second quarter of the year, the weather is getting warmer (although really slowly this year here in New England), and innovation sprouts anew.

I refer, of course, here to the most significant development in antenna technology that I've ever seen. I've noted in the past that antennas are analogous to the tires on a car - the only part of the machine that actually touches the medium upon which it operates. If you're a driving enthusiast, like I sort of am (I live in new England, after all), you know that changing your tires to a set more appropriate to your vehicle and style of driving can make all the difference.

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So I watched a piece on the possible investment by Comcast and Time-Warner in the likely spin off (as I noted a long time ago) of Sprint's WiMAX operations on CNBC today (there was also an article in the WSJ). CNBC is usually pretty good for such reporting, by the way; I do worry about how much their anchors actually know, but the frequent guests are all clearly investment professionals and usually have the facts to back up their opinions. I often leave CNBC on in a window on my display, just in case something is going on.

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Well, I guess as I expected, Motorola is indeed going to be spinning off the handset business. While I'd hoped that Motorola would keep it all together and generate synergies that really no other wireless firm on this planet could, what I really expected was that someone would snap up the Mobile Devices business (as Motorola calls it), and I suppose that could still happen at any time, even after the spinoff occurs. In fact, I'd still bet on it.

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So, here it is, Sunday, and I'm getting ready to hit the road again (where I spend half my life anyway), whip out the old notebook, click on the workgroup icon, and - that bizarre Windows XP error message that inexplicably creeps in from time to time about <workgroup> is not accessible, and that I might not have permission to access it, and to contact the network administrator, who is me. And I know I've solved it before, but this time I'm stuck, at least for now. And it's happening on both of the notebooks I use when traveling, which means I'll have to synchronize data a different way. OK, fair enough, not a showstopper, but a major irritation nonetheless.

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Every few years I purchase a new "Web tablet" device for personal use. This is not yet a recognized category of product (although some call it an "Internet tablet"), so let me define it first. A Web tablet is a device that fits between the smartphone and notebook form factors - it's larger than the former and won't fit in most pockets (although it would in many purses), but smaller than the latter and isn't (usually, anyway; see below) running Windows. It's designed first and foremost for quick-and-not-at-all-dirty Web and e-mail access, and many of these have also attracted a good deal of attention from the LINUX community as well for all kinds of applications as well as general use. Pricing is typically in the US$300-$400 range.

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I remember, many years ago, in Farpoint Group's early days, wandering the halls of trade shows looking for a simple, low-cost spectrum analyzer. If you've not looked at this type of product before (even many engineers have only very limited experience with them), spectrum analyzers have traditionally been big (like a breadbox), expensive (like US$20+K), oscilloscope-like test equipment used to see what's going on in a particular chunk of radio spectrum. The more spectrum the device covers, the higher the price. Precision test equipment has traditionally been, therefore, off limits in production environments and limited to product-development labs, although there are few (but still expensive) portable spectrum analyzers available.

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My friend and colleague Keith Shaw [http://www.networkworld.com/Home/kshaw.html] forwarded to me a note with the following question from a NWW reader (slightly edited here):

"I need to set up five different wireless networks in one building. Three need to be to be separate (three offices that can't connect to each other; traffic must be encrypted), one that is open to public and one that is a backside router (open router). How would I go about doing this?"

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