Judy Newman notes that some Voice over IP providers do not support 608 telephone numbers. Packet8, a small Santa Clara firm, does. There are indeed tradeoffs, but given the explosion in cellphones (we seem to have more than one phone number these days), VOIP is ideal for residential users – or, perhaps, give fast growing Skype a try. James Fallows finds much to like.

Mayor Dave took my order today at the semiannual bratfest. I encouraged him to make city wide wireless internet (WiFi) happen. He said that they hope to have it in place by next summer.
I further encouraged him to make sure it was fully 2-way, not the poor upstream performance that the cable services offer. High speed 2-way access means that all users can publish text, audio and video (including VOIP), from anywhere in the city. The service should also be scalable so that we can take advantage of new, faster technologies (802.11g, for example) as they become available.
Email mayor Dave at: mayor at cityofmadison.com or call: (608) 266-4611

David Caruso:

For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world’s largest wireless Internet hot spot.
The ambitious plan, now in the works, would involve placing hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters around the city – probably atop lampposts. Each would be capable of communicating with the wireless networking cards that now come standard with many computers.
Once complete, the network would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel – including poor neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is now rare.

Judy Newman says that Mayor Dave is in favor of it (count me as a skeptic on this one. The Madison airport, as of August, 2004 still does not have wireless internet, otherwise known as wi-fi. Most other airports have had it for years). True two way high speed internet access should be a public good, just like our roads and utilities. This is the economic issue for the state.

Looking for a new mobile phone? This is the place to go for detailed phone information, along with a technology backgrounder.

Catherine Yang, Moon Ihlwan and Hiroko Tashiro summarize the woeful state of true broadband in our “advanced” nation (true broadband is not the slow internet connections available currently (DSL or cable modems; Korea & Japan have economical services with speeds up to 40X ours). I’ve commented on this problem a number of times.

Thomas Hazlett summarizes the path our politicians must take, to support economical high speed (not the slow products we have now) broadband adoption. There is no greater economic issue for Wisconsin than this:

In the mid-1990s, Korean policy-makers set out to inject competition into local telephone service. They enacted rules allowing rivals to challenge the erstwhile state monopoly, Korea Telecom. Yet, by mid-2004, KT still accounted for 95% of local phone lines.
A failure? On the contrary, Korea’s policy has proved a smashing success. Because, as an additional lure to attract phone entrants, the government ended regulation of advanced telecom applications. The result: While competitors largely avoided (regulated) voice services, they invested billions to create new (unregulated) high-speed Internet networks. The broadband technologies unleashed by telecom rivals forced KT to modernize its network, which now serves just half of the high-speed market.
And that’s a big market: 78% of Korean households subscribe to broadband, the highest penetration rate in the world and well over twice that of the U.S. While broadband via standard cable modems and digital subscriber line (DSL) services are available for about $27 a month, households paying about $52 a month receive lightning fast 20 mbps VDSL service — connections sufficient to receive live high-definition TV. In short, the apartment dweller in Korea enjoys the same level of Internet service as the largest corporate customers in
the U.S. All this in a country of 48 million which, in 1979, had just
240,000 phone subscribers.

The original blogger, Dave Winer is driving to Madison, hopefully arriving later this week. Dave’s site, scripting news spawned a revolution in personal journalism.
I’m hoping to organize a dinner (Sunday?). Email me: zellmer at mailbag dot com if you are interested.

Learn more about the GPS Watch here $129.00.

New Mexico’s Bernalillo County once again sets a great example for Dane County: Free WiFi (Wireless internet access) throughouth the 10-story courthouse. The WiFi network is intended to reduce juror frustration with waiting to be called for cases and to provide fast internet access for lawyers and judges as well. VOIP (Voice over internet protocol, or internet phone calls will also be supported on this wireless network).
North Carolina plans to install WiFi in all 100 of its courthouses. New York has similar plans.
Albuquerque provides free airport WiFi – while Dane county plans to eventually offer fee based WiFi access at MSN. This is a great example of our political leaders failing to embrace important new technologies that benefit everyone. Wisconsin needs pervasive true highspeed internet access. I’ve written extensively on this problem here and here.

Matthew Wald on the UW’s “little” nuclear reactor:

The University of Wisconsin’s nuclear reactor is an unassuming little model, operated (on Tuesdays and Thursdays only) by students in T-shirts and shorts. In the last few months it has been used to identify the source of pottery shards from an ancient settlement in India, to test whether heart stents work better if they have been irradiated, and to study the water and gas balance that would be present in a future generation of power reactors.
But its fuel is weapons-grade uranium. If it were stolen, experts say, it could give terrorists or criminals a major head start on an atomic bomb.
And Wisconsin is not alone. Five other university research reactors around the country use weapons-grade fuel, even though the federal government has promised for more than two decades to reclaim their uranium and substitute a less enriched variety that is closer to the kind that commercial power plants use.