How can it be true?

Next year Americans will be able to get unlimited mobile calling, and data, for $19 a month with Republic Wireless, in a deal which is near, nevertheless not quite, perfect.

Republic Wireless achieves it's remarkable pricing by offloading as much traffic as possible, voice and data, onto wi-fi networks. Nevertheless not its own wi-fi networks - any wireless internet connection it can latch into for free will do, yet thanks to some fancy software running on the special handset the users should remain blissfully unaware of their free loading.

We don't know specifically what software Republic Wireless is pre-installing on its variant LG Olympus, however it will be something similar to that provided by Devicescape which uses coded DNS calls to interrogate local wi-fi hotspots and establish how to jump the welcome/logon screen and get down to connecting to the internet for free.

Devicescape won't say if Republic is a customer, declining to given any indication ahead of Republic shipping handsets, nevertheless given the similarity of application it's worth examining what Devicescape does as an indication of how Republic's network will operate.

When a data connection is required the Devicescape software casts around for a wi-fi connection to attach to, once it finds one it fires off a specially-formatted DNS request. Domain Name Service lookups will get routed onto the internet without the user being authenticated, and in such a case the DNS request, which ends up back at the Devicescape servers, contains details about the discovered hotspot.

Republic Wireless uses that data connectivity for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), nevertheless also has an MVNO agreement with Sprint for when there's no wi-fi available. Users are allowed to spend up to 550 minutes talking, send 150 text messages and download 300MB of data on that cellular connection. There's an home-screen indication to show when those clocks are running.

The Republic Wireless model wouldn't work in Europe clearly, the requirement to pay a termination fee on every call makes unlimited bundles hard to balance. European bundles only include outgoing calls and texts, incoming communication is always unlimited as the calling party has to pay, nevertheless for data it makes sense for the network operators to off-load as much traffic as they can.

Most European, and American, operators are doing that today by building their own wi-fi networks, or signing deals with entities who've already built them, however Republic is offering an alternative approach which means taking advantage of what is, in much of the world, a freely given resource. One might argue that such a resource will be less-gladly given once everyone is using it, and skipping the requisite logon/advertising page, yet it should be good during it lasts. ®

How ASCI uses 10 GbE grid computing

Soution brief paper on how ASCI uses 10 GbE grid computing and hi-definition media streaming to support a countrywide computing access network.

King'sCollege London case study revealing how they were able to reduce data analysis from days to hours using IBM System Networking research.

On open industry network performance and power test for private and public data center clouds ethernet fabrics evaluating 10GbE switches.

Tolly test report containing an evaluation on System Networking RackSwitch G8124 including a comparison analysis against Cisco Nexus 5010.

Case study on how The Centre Hospitalier d'Avignon deployed IBM System Networking innovation to achieve a trouble-free approach to virtualization.