Normal service is resumed....

Apologies for the patchy posts over the past 2-3 weeks - a combination of moving to a new house, travel for a week or so, and getting a new broadband line sorted has soaked up a lot of time.

There's obviously a lot to catch up on, including 3's flatrate pricing, a bunch of chat around picocells, and an attempt at enterprise-grade UMA. I'll try & backfill as much of this as possible over the next few days.

Actually, on the broadband front it's interesting that my new gateway/WiFi router (a BT Home Hub) has no trouble blasting 802.11 through 3 ceilings from basement to bedroom at 5 bars' signal strength, giving my laptop 80% of the throughput I get on my wired-ethernet desktop. Anyone want to lend me a trial 3G femtocell to see if the inhome RF transmission is just as good?

One last "thought for the day".... GSM and its UMTS 3G siblings often like to bill themselves as "the world's most popular communication technology". Actually, although the majority of it is wired, I suspect that actually that accolade goes to Ethernet, which has apparently sold more than 8 billion ports during its life. It's also got breadth as well as volume, spanning from plain-old PC connections to WiFi and carrier backbones, and scaling up from 3Mbit/s in its first incarnation to 10Gbit/s over fibre today... it's probably what makes me think that WiMAX has more of a chance than some observers believe, especially given Intel's longstanding love of ethernet (and Microsoft's, and Cisco's....)