Tuesday, March 30, 2010

What can WiMAX bring to smart grid program?

GE exec Mark Hura looks at ambitions for smart grid program.
 GE last week announced that it has launched a pilot program to implement smart grid technology that uses Clearwire's WiMAX network to deliver data to both customers and utility companies.
What makes a carrier green?
 GE says that it will work with utility company Consumers Energy to deliver WiMAX-based grid sensors and energy meters to more than 6 million customers in Michigan. Smart grid technology is typically defined as any information technology that helps power companies more efficiently monitor power demand and allocate capacity. GE says that this particular smart grid pilot project is intended "to demonstrate how real-time wireless communications between meters in the home and the utility's network management and control systems can improve efficiency and reliability for all."
 In Network World's interview with Mark Hura, GE Energy's smart grid commercial leader, we discuss GE's broader ambitions for its smart grid program, its timeline for deployment and its reasons for choosing WiMAX over LTE.

 What do you hope to achieve with this pilot program?


Our WiMAX smart grid deployment is an opportunity to showcase the advantages of leveraging 4G communications for smart grids for both utility companies and consumers. It allows utilities to have a standard communications technology that includes the proper security protocols. WiMAX technology is based off of standards that are already being used in the industry.
 This is a communications standard that has the appropriate amount of bandwidth and latency, and that allows utilities to use their networks for more than automated metering and communicating with metered devices. It also allows for enabling renewable energy sources on the grid. It has more capabilities than the infrastructures that exist today and they allow for new applications on the networks such as alternative energy sources and storage technologies on a community level.

 Can you give a timeline of what we can expect to see implemented and when?
Our timeline is going to be based on utility decisions of how quickly they are going to implement their own road maps for deploying this technology on the grid. The important thing to remember when we look at WiMAX technology is that it will be widely deployed by end of 2010, covering all major markets across the U.S. So based on that I think you'll start to see deployments picking up in late 2010 and then accelerate over the next two to three years.
Why should consumers and businesses care about WiMAX-enabled smart grid technology?
Consumers and businesses will have the opportunity to understand how they use their energy and to understand how to manage their energy consumption more effectively. Having a communications platform based on 4G technology can provide real-time information back to consumers. It can tell you what your usage is at a particular moment and that can help project what your usage may be into the same day or the next day. So for instance it can tell you how you can use different energy sources for different times of the day. It can tell you how to best program devices that perform energy-intensive tasks to work only at off-peak hours to save money.

Why did you decide to go with WiMAX instead of waiting for LTE?

We took a look at the two real 4G paths that carriers are deploying, WiMAX and LTE. LTE has not been released commercially yet, whereas WiMAX is based on an IEEE standard and is commercially deployable right now. It also has a huge ecosystem all around the world. Eventually we see a future ability for appliances to leverage both WiMAX and LTE but for right now we think this is a good opportunity to leverage an existing network technology to benefit both consumers and businesses today.

Networkworld.com




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Friday, March 19, 2010

Scientists find turbulence in Saturn's rings


The ringed planet Saturn, brilliant jewel of the night sky, has revealed new insights into the behavior of its rings for scientists studying signals from the Cassini spacecraft still flying through the Saturnian neighborhood after six years in orbit.
"We now have the clearest view of the rings' beautiful crystalline structure pasted onto the real night sky," said Jeffrey Cuzzi of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, leader of the Cassini-Huygens mission. "Gazillions of icy particles are constantly colliding with each other up there as they orbit the planet ... moving as waves under the influence of moonlets we've discovered orbiting inside gaps between the rings."
The tumultuous nature of the particles in Saturn's seven main rings and the gaps between the planet's rings, where those tiny moonlets cause ring edges to wave like ripples on the shorelines of space, are being described today in the journal Science.
Saturn's rings, through even the best of telescopes, look like series of thin flat discs grooved like an old phonograph record. But that's far from the truth: From Cassini's images and data, researchers have determined that each ring is a turbulent collection of orbiting particles - 95 percent water ice glistening in sunlight and the rest some strange kind of rubble tinged in red-brown here and there.
"That color may be some kind of organic materials," said Cuzzi, "but to me it looks like just plain rust - iron oxide. How it got there we don't yet know."
The ice chunks range in size from a few inches to tens of yards. As they orbit the planet, gravity turns some into huge clumps and pulls others apart, and they batter each other chaotically.
Beyond Saturn's major rings, Cassini scientists report they have detected several other faint rings that seem to be composed of minute amounts rubble and "microscopic dust."
The physics involved in their evolution suggests they are similar to the "protoplanetary discs" of rubble that on a much larger scale mark the earliest stages in the formation of the planets in the solar system.
But just how long ago the rings of Saturn formed and where their material came from originally remains a mystery, the scientists say.
The rings and the icy matter they contain are far from stable in their orbits around the planet. Instead, they appear to be changing constantly.
"Saturn's rings show dramatic variability (over) decades, years, even weeks," said the scientists.
Cassini's instruments have also revealed that strange objects occasionally shoot through the rings from far beyond the planet - comets, or asteroids, perhaps, but know one knows, Cuzzi said.
Each of Saturn's rings is labeled by a letter according date when it was discovered. Between Saturn's A and F rings lies a space 200 miles wide called the Encke gap. The gap holds several "ringlets" and gravity from a strange object named Pan, only 12 miles in diameter, disrupts the rings and causes waves along their edges.
Another gap exists between the thin ringlets of the Encke gap. It is called the Keeler gap, and here Cassini has discovered a lumpy little moonlet only 5 miles across that is also creating waves on the edges of Saturn's rings.
Amid all of Saturn's rings and ringlets lie 13 significant gaps, where Cassini mission scientists have been hunting for evidence of other moonlets. The absence of moonlets inside Saturn's C ring remains "baffling," the scientists say.
For now, the origin of the rings and much of their turbulent behavior will remain unknown, the scientists say, "until we have understood the powerful dynamical processes that have formed, and continue to shape, these elegant structures on time scales reaching from yesterday to billions of years" ago.

From http://www.sfgate.com/

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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Cisco Quits WiMax Radio Business

The decision to cease making WiMax base stations gives a boost to Cisco's Long-Term Evolution portfolio.

 WiMax is taking another hit as another major supplier -- Cisco -- confirmed that it is quitting the WiMax radio access network business and will cease making WiMax base stations. However, the networking company said it will continue supplying IP core and WiMax edge products like Wi-Fi and femtocells to WiMax customers.


The decision gives a boost to Cisco's Long-Term Evolution portfolio, which was strengthened in recent months by Cisco's acquisition of Starent Networks. Clearwire, which is majority owned by Sprint Nextel, has been the major deployer of WiMax in the United States.
Cisco got into the WiMax business through its acquisition of Navini Networks for $330 million in October 2007, but most carriers have since snubbed WiMax for the more efficient LTE. WiMax has been more popular in non-U.S. markets and its users, including Clearwire, have noted that it is relatively easy to shift network infrastructure -- and subscribers -- from WiMax to LTE.

Navini had a head start in WiMax and had supplied equipment to several startups scattered around the world. Its largest U.S. customer, Xanadoo, in Texas, said it had signed up more than 14,000 subscribers two years ago. Navini's use of MIMO antennas and Smart Beamforming technologies received high marks from many carriers. Navini's networks also were selling in countries with emerging business technologies.
When Cisco acquired Starent for $2.9 billion a few months ago, the acquisition also appeared to seal the doom of WiMax as a Cisco base station supplier. Starent was already gaining major contracts from LTE carriers like Verizon Wireless, which is scheduled to roll out the first U.S. LTE network later this year.

InformationWeek

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