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By Marin Perez
InformationWeek
The next generation of mobile broadband access is shaping up to be a showdown between WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE), with one technology winning and the other potentially going the way of Betamax or HD DVD. But one executive from Intel said customers would be better off if the 4G services were unified.
"In our view they ought to be harmonized," Sean Maloney, head of sales and marketing at Intel, told reporters on Wednesday at the Computex show in Taiwan. The major concern Maloney cited was confusion among consumers between the two competing technologies.
"We would much prefer to see over a period of time that it looked to a global consumer that simply high-speed bandwidth was available," Maloney said.
Both standards are faster than the existing mobile broadband networks, but LTE is expected to offer higher speeds than WiMax.
Unlike rivals GSM and CDMA, both 4G networks are based on OFDM, so a unified standard is possible. Motorola has said 85% of the technology and work for WiMax equipment will be reused in its designs for LTE equipment.
Intel, which has been a staunch investor in WiMax technologies, is introducing processors later this year for WiMax that could technically be used for LTE, although Maloney said that wasn't in the company's plans.
WiMax networks and products should be rolled out by the end of the year. Chief proponents include Sprint, Google, Intel, and Time Warner.
LTE, on the other hand, isn't expected to be rolled out until 2010 at the earliest. But the majority of wireless carriers are backing it for their 4G networks.
BOSTON (Reuters) - Online retailer Amazon.com Inc said its U.S. website was down for about 2 hours on Friday but said it was unsure what had blocked access to the world's biggest online store. An Amazon spokeswoman said the site was unavailable for a couple of hours starting at around 10:25 a.m. California time (1725 GMT). Web monitoring company Keynote put the outage at 2-1/2 hours and said the site was fully back up just before 1 p.m. in California (2000 GMT).
Users in the United States who tried signing onto the popular portal during the outage saw a message saying the service was unavailable. It urged shoppers who were making purchases when it went down to check back later to see if the sales had been properly rung up.
While the cause of the outage remained unclear as of Friday afternoon, one expert said it was likely due to the sheer complexity of the site, which tailors content to visitors depending on factors such as their location, purchase history and behavior during previous visits.
"Amazon is one of the most complex retail sites online today. The more complex something is, the more likely it is to break," said Shawn White, director of operations with Keynote.
He said that less likely scenarios were that the site could have collapsed if it were suddenly overwhelmed by a surge in traffic or succumbed to an attack by hackers.
Those scenarios were less likely, White said, because Amazon has plenty of expertise in dealing with heavy traffic and protecting itself against criminals.
Amazon's international sites, such as amazon.co.jp, amazon.co.uk and amazon.de, were not affected, nor was its online storage service or other Web services that it sells to computer programmers, the company's spokeswoman said.
But Web surfers who tried to access amazon.com, from the United Kingdom and Germany to India, said they were unable to connect with the company's U.S. flagship site.
Internet content delivery company Akamai Technologies Inc, which counts Amazon among its customers, had no problems with its network on Friday, said Akamai spokesman Jeff Young.
Amazon shares fell 4.6 percent to close at $80.63 on the Nasdaq. Akamai shares fell 4.9 percent to $37.38.
(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando, Ken Li in New York; Editing by Phil Berlowitz, Gerald E. McCormick, Gary Hill)
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysians have turned to the Internet to vent their anger at one of the biggest hikes in fuel prices, and some are using it to rally support against the measure in a country with tight restrictions on street protests. Much of the rage was directed against Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, already fighting for political survival since leading his ruling coalition to its worst election showing in March.
"We used to think you were nice. Now you are just nasty, plain nasty," read a post from someone calling himself a "hungry Malaysian" on rockybru.blogspot.co, arguing there was going to be less food on the table for millions of poor people.
A post on apanama blog said "it was a matter of time before Abdullah was given the proverbial pink slip in UMNO" or the United Malays National Organization.
Some have taken the battle into the government's camp. A hacker tried to deface the official website of the prime minister's office, the pro-government New Straits Times said.
The hacker left a drawing of a skull with a sword through its neck, blaming the prime minister for the fuel rise, the newspaper said. There was a notice later put up on the website www.pmo.gov.my saying it had been temporarily shut down for maintenance, it said.
The government raised petrol prices this week by 41 percent and diesel by 63 percent, in line with a global surge in oil prices. It said the measure would save 13.7 billion ringgit ($4.23 billion) as part of a broad overhaul of its energy system.
But Malaysians are questioning why they have to face a steep rise in prices when the country, Asia's largest net oil exporter, earns 250 million ringgit ($76.76 million) a year in revenue for every $1 rise in crude prices.
"Simple logic: As an exporter of fuel, how can fuel price increase hurt us? Why, why, why?" read one comment on rockybru.
Unlike in neighboring Indonesia, India and countries in Europe where there have been mass protests, attempts to organize mass demonstrations have met with limited success in Malaysia.
Protests have been scattered and small, but the opposition has called its biggest one yet on July 12, when it plans to bring 100,000 to the capital's centre.
"Support is there. I have received so many SMSs and calls about this issue," Salahuddin Ayub, leader of the youth wing of the Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS), the main Islamist party told reporters on Saturday. Some 10,000 people are expected to attend a protest next Friday, he said.
The government has said it will act against people taking part in illegal demonstrations, the pro-government Star newspaper reported, quoting Home Minister Seri Syed Hamid.
Under the rules, organizers have to obtain a permit from the authorities before holding any assembly of people.
(Additional reporting by Niluksi Koswanage; Editing by Alex Richardson)
