I tried it myself, and it wouldn’t let me take the test because I put in an English zip code, because that is where I happen to be this week. So I put in my Dallas zip code instead and it ran the test. I hope that there is some check in there that compares the zip code to the geographical location of my IP address, and discards the ones that don’t match, or the results will presumably be worthless.

[Update:]Lauren Weinstein mentions this issue, as well as several others…

Something is wrong with broadband access in the US. It was ranked 15th in the world in 2008 on a composite score of household penetration, speed and price.

Google is setting out to demonstrate a better way, though other countries already offer such demonstrations. The current international benchmark for price and speed is Stockholm at $11 per month for 100 mbps. There are similar efforts in the US, for example Utopia in Utah. One of the key features of these implementations of fiber as a utility is that the supplier of the fiber does not supply content, since this would impose a structural conflict of interest.

Google does supply content, so it will be interesting to see how it deals with this conflict. I doubt there will be any problems in the short term, but in the long term it will be very hard to resist the impulse to use all the competitive tools available; “Don’t be evil” isn’t a useful guideline to a long, gentle slope.

OK, it’s easy to be cynical, but at least Google is trying to do something to improve the broadband environment in the US, and it may be a long time before the short term allure of preferred treatment for its own content outweighs the strategic benefit of improved national broadband infrastructure. And this initiative will undoubtedly help to accelerate the deployment of fiber to the home, if only by goading the incumbents.

I touched on the issue of municipal dark fiber a while back.

The certificate is dated December 28th 2009, the same date that the first smartphone was certified for 802.11n - the LG Veri/VS750. The VS750 Wi-Fi appears to be more advanced than the Samsung, since it is certified for short guard interval and WMM Power Save.

While these are the first phones to gain Wi-Fi certification for 802.11n, they may not be the first to market.

Rethink mentions iCall and Skype as beneficiaries. Another notable one is Fring. Google Voice is not yet in this category, since it uses the cellular voice channel rather than the data channel, so it is not strictly speaking VoIP; the same applies to Skype for the iPhone.

According to Boaz Zilberman, Chief Architect at Fring, the Fring iPhone client needed no changes to implement VoIP on the 3G data channel. It was simply a matter of reprogramming the Fring servers to not block it. Apple also required a change to Fring’s customer license agreements, requiring the customer to use this feature only if permitted by his service provider. AT&T now allows it, but non-US carriers may have different policies.

Boaz also mentioned some interesting points about VoIP on the 3G data channel compared with EDGE/GPRS and Wi-Fi. He said that Fring only uses the codecs built in to handsets to avoid the battery drain of software codecs. He said that his preferred codec is AMR-NB; he feels the bandwidth constraints and packet loss inherent in wireless communications negate the audio quality benefits of wideband codecs. 3G data calls often sound better than Wi-Fi calls - the increased latency (100 ms additional round-trip according to Boaz) is balanced by reduced packet loss. 20% of Fring’s calls run on GPRS/EDGE, where the latency is even greater than on 3G; total round trip latency on a GPRS VoIP call is 400-500ms according to Boaz.

As for handsets, Boaz says that Symbian phones are best suited for VoIP, the Nokia N97 being the current champion. Windows Mobile has poor audio path support in its APIs. The iPhone’s greatest advantage is its user interface, it’s disadvantages are lack of background execution and lack of camera APIs. Android is fragmented: each Android device requires different programming to implement VoIP.

The price is right, as is an option to go without a 3G radio. The weight is double that of a Kindle, and half that of a MacBook Air.

I am disappointed that there is no user-pointing camera, because as I mentioned earlier, I think that videophone will be a major use for this class of device.

Update 3 February 2010: Linley Gwenapp wrote up some speculations in his newsletter.

Josh Silverman also mentioned that Skype was being downloaded at a rate of well over 300,000 downloads per day. Yes, per day. This number matches CKIPE’s observation that Skype added 2.5 million new users in the 11 days after Christmas 2009.

If you are interested in Skype numbers you can get more at CKIPE and SkypeNumerology.

Google is not a handset OS company. Android is simply a means to an end - the end being to create a vast new expanse of real estate which Google can beam its advertising inventory to. This demands a level of consistency and interpretability from Android so that, regardless of who implements the platform on whichever device, application compatibility is maintained.

Alas, Matt was over-optimistic (or under-cynical). Here’s what Rethink said this week about Android:

As for Android developers, many are angry that there is no SDK as yet for Nexus One. This, in turn, has highlighted the issue of fragmentation, with different OS releases and even different devices requiring different SDKs, with limited compatibility between apps written for the various versions. Until there is an SDK for Android 2.1, the latest OS upgrade, which so far runs only on Nexus One, programmers cannot be sure their apps will work properly with the new handset.

Percy’s take was that in the “Crossing the Chasm” technology adoption lifecycle, HD Voice is right at the chasm.

Here is his list, augmented with input from Jan Linden of GIPS,Tom Lemaire of FT/Orange, Doug Mohney of HD Voice News and Dave Erickson of Wyde Voice:

The main codecs in each of these deployments are: Skype:SILK; QQ, Citrix, Freeconferencecall:iSAC; mobile:AMR-WB; all others: G.722.

Alan pointed out the conspicuous lack of involvement of the cable companies (MSOs), even though Cable Labs has done a good job of creating HD specifications for them.

At CES last week I stopped in a booth lined with LCD TVs from several different manufacturers, displaying 3D images to people wearing polarizing glasses. According to a person manning the booth, the technique used in these TVs is to encode the images on alternate scan lines, and to have a polarizing filter attached to the screen, arranged in horizontal stripes, one stripe per row of pixels, with each row polarized orthogonally to the adjacent ones. The effect was very good, roughly equivalent to cinema 3D.

The booth also had a DLP projector projecting 3D onto a screen. This required bulkier glasses. According to the person in the booth, the technique used here was to encode the left and right images in alternating frames, with shuttering in the glasses synchronized with the display, occluding the right eye when a left frame is showing, and vice versa. This flavor of 3D didn’t work for me - maybe my glasses were broken…

Confirmation that these are currently the two primary methods of doing 3D on TVs comes from an excellent series of blog postings by Lenny Lipton.

Bearing in mind that we know from observation that consumers value both mobility and price above call quality, these survey numbers fall into the “interesting if true” category.

Lemaire and Buchanan also said that their logs show that the average call in HD lasts longer than the average narrowband call, though they didn’t give numbers.