The Network: Contributed Articles by Steve Wildstrom

The Future of Connected Cars: What to do With All That Data?

2013-02-17T23:00:00Z

The modern automobile has become a data collection machine. As you drive down the road, sensors in the car’s various systems report your speed, engine RPM, steering angle, brake pressure, and myriad other bits of information to the computers, perhaps several dozen of them, that control the vehicle’s functions.

But there ...

Healthcare Sensors: Data Science Meets Medical Science

2013-01-15T01:00:00Z

Devices that collect personal medical information are growing both prolific and inexpensive. As part of the burgeoning “internet of everything,” more and more of them come with wireless capability that lets them transmit data over either Wi-Fi or cellular network.

At the recent mHealth Summit in Washington, there was even ...

Network Trailblazer: A Conversation With Martin Cooper, Father of the Mobile Phone

2012-12-05T00:00:00Z

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper made history when he made a phone call standing in front of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue to the head of research at Bell Labs at a press conference inside the hotel. That first cell phone call set off a mobile communications revolution and earned Cooper the title of father of the mobile ...

Smart Services: Spotting Problems Before They Happen

2012-10-15T23:00:00Z

Not long ago, a network outage of one sort or another was an annoying but relatively minor problem at many businesses. If you lost your connection to the net, you just worked locally until the IT folks got it fixed.

This doesn't work anymore. The network fails and the point-of-sale terminal, formerly known as a cash register, is ...

Network Trailblazer: A Conversation With Larry Irving

2012-09-24T23:00:00Z

When Larry Irving joined the Commerce Dept. in early 1993, most Americans were considering dial-up Internet access. Broadband access wasn't widely available. By the time he left his post as head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration six years later, Americans were replacing dial up with broadband and the World ...

New Approaches to Spectrum: The Challenge of Wireless Data

2012-08-12T18:00:00Z

Since the U.S. government began assigning broadcast rights in the 1920s, the process has worked on a simple principle: A licensee received the exclusive right to the use of a slice of wireless spectrum, usually limited to a specific geographic area.

Today, we are facing a big problem. All of the usable spectrum has been allocated, ...

Government and Cloud Computing

2012-05-16T11:57:00Z

The federal government, like the private sector, sees great opportunities in moving its IT infrastructure in the cloud. A 2011 white paper by then-Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra estimated that $20 billion of the government's $80 billion in annual IT ...

How Wi-Fi Will Ease the Wireless Data Crunch

2012-04-23T12:01:00Z

Wireless data use is growing by leaps and bounds. The Cisco Visual Networking Index (Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2011-2016) forecasts that worldwide mobile data traffic in 2015 will be 26 times greater than it ...

Better Living Through Big Data

2012-04-09T14:57:00Z

You're on the hunt for a parking space in San Francisco's south of Market neighborhood. Instead of aimlessly driving from block to block looking for a free space, you take out your smartphone, fire up the SFpark app, and see a detailed map of available spaces.

Once you ease your car into a space, you use the same app to pay ...

Network Trailblazers: A Conversation with John R. Patrick

2012-02-13T13:00:00Z

In the early 1990s, the Internet was just beginning to make the transition from academic plaything to global communications revolution. John R. Patrick, an IBM executive who had been responsible for marketing the OS/2 operating system and now was in a vaguely-defined corporate role at IBM's Armonk, N.Y., headquarters, was fascinated ...