quicklink | blast out test on the bike on bambuser

finally had the cash to be able to get this mount.  it's overpriced but i wanted to move forward on the idea and start the ball rolling with the bandwidth in a box concept for extra bandwidth for mobility for events and conferences.

the idea originally was to install two cameras and some heavy duty wifi connectivity with a stack of external aerials on the roof to drag in the cellular signals so we had a good solid constant stream but with lack of reception from car companies we started with what we have -- a bike! :)

if you are a car company, leasin or otherwise we are looking for a smart car sized (electric ideally) motor that will do 10,000 miles in that year driving three times a week a rough total of about 400 miles a week.  you can send me a tweet with hashtag #transport in it to get some information back about what we are doing -- just send that to my twitter account @philcampbell

we are happy to rent, lease or something from around £99 up to say £150 per month but we are looking to give it back after the year is out.  i simply have no use for a three year contract on car as i'm happy with using rail and public transport not having a car now for over two years.

anyway, back to the bike! ;) - had a successful first stream out to the jubilee campus and the second fibrecamp premises.  i'm doing a presentation there tomorrow, i did one yesterday with the ntu students (i did it in css3 with impress.js to be flash) and so went to grab an interview with nick gostick on audioboo.

i'm not sure why the stream dropped on the way back maybe i caught something inside the case or something or the camera screen went off.  i need to do more testing to see what the problem was there and i've reported it to bambuser because when it dropped the connection after 45 seconds of starting recording (i did'nt noticed till i was nearly back to the studio) it stopped all together so i had no locally recorded video stream on the phone to upload as a complement after which was a bit annoying.

that said, i discovered a bunch of new tagging features on the website when i got back to the desktop that allow for timed comments on the video (see top picture) so that means you can jump to certain sections.  i have a plan about grabbing streamed event video and piping that to another service to do all kinds of things.  i've been wanting to get streaming again.  

expect more of this stuff now that i have the mount.  next is to build a decent lightweight mini bandwidth in a box (bag?) to see if we can improve on the speed and quality of the connection (wifi via cellular router with more redudancy involved) as we had it set on medium today -- i'm also thinking that the new iphone4s with the new sony based camera will handle the low light better so i'm looking to source one of those badboys too.

a happy first test run thou.

at the moment i'm still waiting to find a uk power supply that can give it 12v at 1.5amps as the power unit that it came with was a stateside psu.

the mbr1400 is a great piece of kit for many reasons. the big ones are that it can run five devices for cellular connection, one of if not the best unit for enterprise class redundancy and failover.

utilising these five device connections will enable me to run 3 x usb dongles (the hope is hspa+) on a variety of different networks (the big four in the uk) to really nail the coverage in areas where wireless might be patchy on one network the others may overlay and cover it.

the other two pcmcia slots are for expresscard devices. i've got some stateside cards that would work with the device but would not work in the uk - the satellite and network does not work over in europe. useful when i'm stateside thou as long as you can re-activate the devices with a provider.

other powerful features of the device are the ability to have twin ssid networks - i'm presuming you can do levels of traffic management here - for instance i can see myself having one wireless network for just twitter and status updates to a variety of social destinations where as i'll allocated more bandwidth to a locked channel for our video stream when mobile - very useful.

i'm yet to really play with all the features and to see what it truly possible but if it's anything like the phs300 or ctr500 like i have used before i should have stacks of different features to go through.

the idea with this router is that it will built into an explorer case, a reinforced injection moulded case that can withstand lugging about with onboard power, internal wiring for external aerials on the outside of the box and maybe some kind of SPOT messaged internal location tracking for where the box is.

the aim of the bandwidth in a box is to provide venues with dropin, long throw wifi cloud networks that have a level of redudancy and utilize the latest up and coming super fast hspa+, 4g and future lte level style mobile networks.

i kinda hope that cradlepoint make pushes towards allowing you to bond all the connections into one fat pipe with failover that is fast enough that it does not effect a mobile video stream. we will have to see how it holds up on testing. ..

currently have one hspa+ dongle to test with it and as soon as i get the power unit i'll be giving this a test drive at the start of the new year between nottingham and the national forest.

watch this space!

it's 8:34 am and i'm speeding home from the first of many christmas meals and parties. i spent the evening in exeter last night for the #tweetfellows christmas meal and gather. lovely food, great company.

wanted to get back into blogging this morning and tell you about some tinkering i did last week with the cradlepoint phs300 wireless hotspot router that i've had for well over a year now.

i upgraded the firmware (a download you can apply to the modem to give it the latest and greatest drivers) to test to see if it would support the latest hspa+ modem that three has out.

the new modem now has a much faster startup time and supposed faster rates than previous models -- they say on the box 40% faster, why they put these numbers is beyond me. it's a stab in the dark and pointless.

in testing however i have found that especially in nottingham that the modem initialises really quickly and that i got some great upload/download speeds - really surprising for a mobile modem, enough so that i think you could do some really fairly decent streaming with it.

i'd heartily recommend that if your purchasing some kind of dongle or mifi for christmas that you look into the hspa+ modems -- if you have coverage you'll get a great speed bump.

i'm expecting that three will roll out more hspa+ across the country during 2012 and will only get faster. it's a good time to start dabbling with the 'bandwidthinthebox' stuff again.

sitting in section 16, seat 88 being shot at velocity back to my own country, through a tunnel under a channel of water - we do build some splendid things between all the failures i guess.

when things run properly if fills me with a renewed adventure spirit to explore the locality and engage in a less 'frustrated with the way' i encounter the world normally -- stupid, slight things that nibble away at your focus and lay a foundation of frustration.

as we near the end of 2011 and i find myself in a different place in my life where i was over a year ago, in fact i was travelling back from boston after a previous year of pain, self inflicted in some ways of 2010, that was a hard year.

it's important to position yourself away from the things that drag you down and don't allow you to be the best version of you that you can be -- not only do you miss out those that you encounter never get to see your true value, passion and skills.

throwing myself into a different way of living has been a blessing and a different change in mindset. i met many people over the last few days that thought i was mad not to think about how i would be when i would 'retire' - how would i live, what would i do.

but you have to understand, it's not about me. i'm done, i've been to and seen some amazing places and i'm sure i have a few more to come yet but it's about ella now -- making foundations for her life when i'm not here.

and i'm not talking money -- who knows what money, status and success looks like in a digital always on demand world that we are living in, what's her digital frontier look like in the next ten years based on our last five? - intense right?

giving her some foundations and knowledge to get the most of her life on this planet. making preparations for an unknown and unpredictable future maybe the difference between being agile and smart enough to shift to the places she will be needed and what she intends to do to fulfil her wants for her life.

sigh. much progress this year, lots more to go, it's all in place, a need of finances to cerment things down but i intend to work my ass off and build the things i think those new brand advocates are going to need as the social media arena explodes in business over the coming year.

so, one more week to go really. ..

christmas parties next week and more trains, i'm hoping they are on time and efficient as this one, the eurostar has been a pleasure to ride on and gave me time to take time out and reflect on my ever changing life direction that i have seemingly allowed my sub conscious to take the lead on!

next week, transportation finally and back over to the site of the ark project, exeter and antenna christmas party mashed together in seven days.

after that gym all week as i crash into shopping and christmas day itself with poppet -- really looking forward to that, my little girl is going to be five next year. wow, that blasted by.

this time last year for christmas day i was sitting in the studio with the electric fire with humous and pitta bread for lunch (cj and dan had gone to see family) at least this year i'll be able to upgrade the lunch!

now time to let this train take the strain of the kilometres between lille and london, quick lunch turnaround and back to nottingham. let's hope our trains are on time so i can go and get my princess.

wish she was with me in ghent this week, she will love the place - all cakes and waffles, i'll be taking her back there next year for a week i hope (getting an airbnb) so she can see for herself!

have a great weekend! :)

• Good news for the travel industry (staveleyhead.co.uk)
• Strike Action Hits Eurostar Service (confused.com)
• Brussels hotels near Eurostar (ebookers.com)
• Europe by Eurostar (ebookers.com)
• Green Holiday Travel (leggotunglei808.wordpress.com)
• Illegals can exploit loophole to get in to UK on Eurostar (telegraph.co.uk)

a few months back when i had problems with my connectivity in houston airport stateside i let boingo know about the issue and they were great in getting back to me about it via social media (twitter) engagement.

as part of a freebie for the month of december (so we could truly see if it was worth the monthly/yearly payment) they gave us an access account that we could use between locations that supported boingo.

we used the boingo login (as a third party provider option) effectively at brussels train station and ghent station without issue and it was a really useful interconnect actually -- checking in between points is always good, especially if your travelling alone and need to update family back home.

if you are travelling alone i heartily suggest you give path (now at v2) a go because you can do a lot of private sharing of your location and media between your family members -- saves on the expensive phone calls to say you have landed that's for sure!

i never actually used the boingo application which i should have really to see what kind of coverage they had around the city.

i guess i would have needed a net connection before that however to get the potential places back, would be better if those were on the phone.

you can also see from this picture on this blog post that i used my witopia vpn to lock and secure, encrypt all my mobile data comms, i suggest you do this if your posting a lot of social media from public wifi systems.

as witopia has a lot of vpn services dotted around the globe i also added the local belgium vpn provider to give me speedy local access instead of connecting to america and sending things over the pond for them to come back again! :)

thank you boingo for giving us that month long access test account, it seems that the european networks are super speedy in comparison!

• Boingo and Nintendo Team to Connect Nintendo 3DS Users On-the-Go (geardiary.com)
• 4-Star Stocks Poised to Pop: Boingo Wireless (fool.com)
• 3DS now has free Wi-Fi access at North American airports with Boingo (joystiq.com)
• Nintendo 3DS users get free Boingo Wi-Fi access (slashgear.com)
• Boingo Expands HotSpot Options For Mobile Devices (readwriteweb.com)
• Boingo brings free airport Wi-Fi to Nintendo 3DS (digitaltrends.com)
• Yet Another Reason to Use Boingo, Free VPN! (readwriteweb.com)