Internet service 133 times faster than standard high-speed will be tested in Edmonton this summer, an official with Shaw Communications said Thursday.

The Calgary-based company is launching a trial of gigabit Internet technology in Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. A community in Vancouver will get the first look at ultrahigh-speed downloads in April.

It will be tested in an area of Edmonton during August.

"The stuff that we're all getting used to on our wireless devices, like watching the Olympics wherever you are, are in high definition. If you're going to deliver that over the Internet, that's incredibly intensive," said Jay Mehr, Shaw's group vice-president of operations.

"So this really just sets up for what's possible and what the customer wants in the next few years."

The technology is 10 times faster than Shaw's Nitro service, which runs at 100 megabits per second (Mbps) and more than 133 times faster than the 7.5 Mbps offered in the company's standard high-speed package.

"It's more a technology trial than a product trial because we still have to figure out the product and pricing definitions that we're going to deliver," Mehr said.

"But it makes possible the whole range of Internet-based applications for residents, and the same network will make a lot of things possible for businesses. In the short term, there may be even greater opportunities on the business side of the market."

The service will be delivered over fibre-to-the-home (FTTH).

"Depending on where you live in Edmonton, you probably have a fibre node that's a block or two from your home."

Shaw claims it is the first provider in Canada to launch a trial of gigabit Internet.

"It's technology that we haven't used before, and we certainly don't want to employ it before we understand it. And there's a significant network build to set it up," Mehr said.

It's still unclear when ultra-high-speed downloads will be widely available for subscribers.

"We could certainly see it available in the consumer market at some point in the next calendar year. In order to get to every customer in Edmonton, that will take a number of years, because as you can imagine in some areas the current coaxial cable is underground so you're digging up streets in order to get fibre to homes."

Mehr said the pace of the network build will depend on the economics of the model and what competitors do.

"I'm not sure whether I'd be in a hurry to sign up for it myself, but conceivably down the road," said Brian Nelson, associate chair of computer engineering technology at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.

Shaw is likely preparing for the future rather than responding to current consumer demand, he agreed. "Over the years, the amount of memory in computers and the size of hard drives and users' expectations just keep going higher and higher.

"As more and more things go onto the Net, including your voice over IP, your television, it may be that every house has a fat pipe like that coming into it for a variety of applications."

Telus Mobility has announced it will begin selling the Apple iPhone on Thursday, November 5th along with a range of 3G data plans.

The move will coincide with the launch of its HSPA+ high speed wireless network developed in conjunction with Bell Mobility.

 

Telus will be offering three versions: the Apple 8GB 3G iPhone, along with the 16GB and 32GB 3GS version in black or white.

Pricing for the 8GB, 16GB and 32GB models will be $600, $700 and $800 respectively with a $500 discount for consumers signing up for a three year plan. Data plan pricing was not announced but is expected to be comparable to data plan pricing currently offered by Rogers.

Along with the iPhone, Telus will be offering a number of new devices when it begins offering service on its new HSPA+ network, including the HTC Hero, LG New Chocolate, Blackberry Bold 9700 and Nokia E71.

Telus says the new wireless network which is based on the GSM standard – the same standard currently used by Rogers Wireless – will offer smartphone users theoretical peak download speeds of 21.6 mbps and 5.76 upload speeds and will run in parallel with its existing CDMA networks.

However the new iphone will not be currently available in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. I have been unable to find any network maps to see if GSM coverage will be available in these provinces. Maybe a better idea till they launch that will be to get a dual cdma/gsm phone such as a the Blackberry Storm or Tour which has both CDMA and Sim Card support.

Many Canadians are cheering as Telus and Bell announced plans Tuesday to begin selling Apple's popular iPhone, ending Rogers reign as the exclusive iPhone carrier in Canada.

After completing a $1 billion upgrade so its network could support high-speed packet access (HSPA) used by the iPhone, Bell and Telus will both begin offering the iPhone in November, the companies said in separate statements.

Neither company provided any further details on pricing or an exact launch date for the device in Canada. Both companies will offer the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, according to the statements.

As the Financial Post points out, until the network upgrade was completed, Bell and Telus both ran on CDMA networks, which is not compatible with the iPhone.

Rogers had a rough start when adding the iPhone 3G to its roster last year. The company drew the ire of users when it refused to offer an unlimited data plan like the ones available in the U.S. from AT&T.

Rogers finally broke down and offered users an (almost) unlimited plan a month later, but by that time it was too late. Users across the country began to organize petitions and Web sites like RuinediPhone.com to protest against the company.

Rogers says it has tripled the current download speeds of its network, which will deliver mobile Internet with speeds as fast as a home or office Internet experience.

Rogers says it began deploying the HSPA-plus network earlier this year and consumers can now access the new wireless speeds through its Rocket Mobile Internet Stick.

In the face of increasing innovation and competition in the search market, Google is upping the ante by developing new technology which will speed up indexing search results and create a larger index.

Web developers have been invited by Google engineers to test the new search engine and give their feedback. The front end of the engine looks no different. It is the back end technology which Google developers hope will noticeably index new content faster and reduce the time between new content being published online and it then appearing in a Google search result.

Matt Cutts, a principal engineer at Google and Sitaram Iyer, a staff software engineer posted an entry on the company’s webmaster central blog, appealing to developers to try the newly improved service and send them some feedback.

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

“The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback,” they explained.

A Google spokesperson added: “"Google is always working on new technologies to improve the quality of our search services. We hope this new system will improve search in the areas of speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness."

Martin McNulty, director of search marketing specialist, Trafficbroker, who has tried the new version, said: “Google's caffeine is undoubtedly faster, almost twice as fast at times. It's like a Google GTi.

“Caffeine may be 'under the hood' but with this noticeable injection of speed it won't remain under the radar for long.

“As for accuracy, it's hard to say at this early stage but Google is clearly upping its game by including real-time results and more breaking news, as well as updates from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.”

In the last few months Microsoft has revamped its own search engine, formely called Live, rebranding it Bing and claiming it performs more intuitive searches. Prior to that, Wolfram Alpha launched, which performs searches based on computational knowledge.

Mr McNulty added: “The launch of Bing has been a good thing, although unfortunately more for Google than Bing if the level of innovation continues at this frantic pace. Google is still very much in the driving seat and is still setting the pace." You can try out the new search engine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

An Australian video gamer has stolen thousands of dollars from a bank inside an online game and converted them into real-world money.

The bank heist happened in Eve Online, where players mine in-game resources to build colonies and space ships in a futuristic space-themed online world. The game has hundreds of thousands of players who pay for access to the world. An in-game economy, complete with its own currency known as interstellar kredits, has emerged to enable trading transactions within the game. Numerous banks have even sprung up.

The gamer, a 27-year old Australian, was an executive with EBank, one of the larger player-run banks within the game, with thousands of depositors. He used the online name of Ricdic.

"Basically this character was one of the people that [had] been running EBank for a while," Ned Coker of CCP, the real-world Icelandic company that developed the game, told Reuters News Agency. "He took a bunch of (virtual) money out of the bank, and traded it away for real money."

The player made off with about 200 billion interstellar credits, CCP says, and traded the currency to players who preferred to purchase credits (as opposed to earning them by accomplishing tasks in the game) for the equivalent of about $5,800 Canadian.

The heist represents about 8 per cent of the total deposits EBank holds, CCP says.

Cash used to pay medical expenses

In an interview with Reuters, Ricdic said an email from a black market website that traded online money for real cash popped up on his screen, prompting him to exchange the virtual cash for real money to cover a deposit on his house and expenses related to his son's medical problems.

"I saw that as an avenue that could be taken, and I decided to skim off the top, you could say, to overcome real-life (difficulties)," he told Reuters.

News of the theft quickly spread within the game, prompting runs on the bank where players withdrew their credits to safeguard them against the apparent security breach.

The Eve world is one where piracy, racketeering and ransom are permitted within the game, so ironically, had the player merely robbed the bank within the game he would have escaped punishment. But exchanging in-game credits for real-world currency breaks the rules of the game, so Ricdic has his account frozen by the game's developers.

'If I had to do it again, I probably would've chosen the same path.'- Eve Online player Ricdic

Asked if he regretted his action, Ricdic expressed remorse for letting down fellow EBank staffers, whom he considered friends.

"I'm not proud of it at all, that's why I didn't brag about it," he told Reuters. "But you know, if I had to do it again, I probably would've chosen the same path based on the same situation."

Shadowy financial transactions are nothing new to the online gaming world. Several websites have sprung up to facilitate trading of real-world dollars for online currencies in a variety of games, but the practice is fraught with peril due to anonymity and lack of accountability.

The practice is so prevalent that the Chinese Ministry of Commerce moved on Friday to ban the trade of real-world money for online currencies. It's been estimated that so-called "credit factories" - where Asia-based players accumulate in-game credits and sell them to users in the real economy - is worth more as much as $1-billion (U.S.) annually.

"Virtual currency ... will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services," the ministry said in a release.

In 2004, Indiana University professor Edward Castronova published the seminal work on online economies, in which he found that players in a game called EverQuest had an average "minimum wage" of $3.42 per hour, giving the world a per-capita gross domestic product greater than that of Russia, with a currency of greater value than the Japanese yen.

MONTREAL - Bell (TSX:BCE) and Telus (TSX:T) customers should have a greater choice of mobile phones, possibly Apple's iPhone, and better prices when the wireless companies roll out next-generation networks in early next year, analysts say.

The move will put both Bell and Telus in a better competitive situation against Rogers Wireless (TSX:RCI.B), analysts said Tuesday.

"Levelling the playing field is what this is all about," said analyst Nick Agostino of Research Capital Corporation.

"The benefit is definitely going to be for the consumer for a change."

Bell and Telus are building an HSPA network which is becoming the main platform for wireless carriers worldwide and is the same kind of network that Rogers has.

The networks are slated to be in place for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

Rogers has had the advantage because of its network, Agostino said.

"They have been able to get all of the latest and greatest devices first."

Rogers currently has the only network in Canada capable of running Apple's iPhone.

Rogers wouldn't comment Tuesday on the length of its agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone to Canadian consumers.

Agostino said with Rogers, Bell and Telus all having the same type of network that should lower prices for data plans that allow consumers to do such things as stream video and prices for the devices themselves. It could also lower contracts to two years from three for some mobile phones, he added.

It has been reported that the iPhone will be coming to Bell and Telus when their new networks are completed.

Telus spokesman Jim Johannsson wouldn't comment on the rumour, but said the new network opens up potentially more mobile phones for consumers when its up and running early next year.

"It's a faster network for consumers who have advanced smartphones or feature phones that have web browsing capabilities," he said.

Bell Mobility also wouldn't comment on whether it would be offering the iPhone in the future.

The new networks also put both Bell and Telus on the path to a more advanced and faster network called LTE, or Long-Term Evolution, that is also expected to eventually become the dominant global standard for wireless carriers.

IDC Canada analyst Kevin Restivo said if the iPhone is eventually sold by Bell and Telus, that would change the landscape for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (TSX:RIM).

"All of a sudden, RIM's got just a much stronger competitor on its hands when it comes to the consumer segment, in which RIM is already in a fierce battle," Restivo said from Toronto.

RIM and Apple were No. 1 and 2 respectively in North America for smartphone shipments, IDC says.

Restivo said if Bell and Telus eventually sell the iPhone, that's a big opportunity for their customers to upgrade to that touchscreen phone.

More than half of the wireless subscribers in Canada are on those two networks, he said of Bell and Telus.

"It gives those customers one more reason to stay," Restivo said.

Even if the iPhone doesn't come to Bell and Telus, there will be "another hot device," he said.

Rogers said Thursday that in the second half of 2008, it sold about 385,000 3G iPhones. Since the recent launch of the new iPhone 3GS, Rogers and Fido have sold "tens of thousands units," the carrier said.

Copyright © 2009 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved

Creating HTML Email is a tough gig.

By the time you add up all the relevant desktop clients and common webmail providers, you are talking about between 15-30 platforms you need to test for. Even if all those mail clients were friendly, modern and predictable net citizens, that would still be a big task.

They're not.

A few years ago - joy of joys - things got significantly harder when Microsoft chose to cripple the rendering-capabilities of their flagship mail product by replacing its HTML rendering engine with Word.

This is roughly equivalent to replacing your lawnmower with a sand wedge - you can try all day but it just doesn't cut it.

Although at the time, there was some speculation that the decision was motivated by security concerns, Microsoft have since made it clear that they were simply more interested in making the Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2007 experience better (read the Campaign Monitor guys' post for the nitty gritty).

This has to stop. Email is an open standard and we should be past the time when we NEED to continue to spruik this argument to Microsoft. Put simply, Word's horrid understanding of HTML is costing us all time and money while detracting from everyone's experience.

At this point in time, Microsoft appear to be intent on using the Word rendering engine in Outlook 2010 - but it's not too late. The app is still in early beta and Microsoft are asking for feedback.

So what do we do about it?

The most immediate impact you can have is getting down to http://fixoutlook.org/ and tweeting to let Microsoft know this is NOT cool.

If you've ever sobbed salty tears into your keyboard over another Outlook 2007 email fail, you won't need much convincing.

Tonight, Mark-Paul Gosselaar Zack Morris was a guest on the show!! Not only is he so ON for the reunion, he sang an old Zack Attack hit "Friends Forever" with The Roots. This was amazing. (Also, ANOTHER cast member signed on for the reunion during the segment. Watch to find out which one it is.)

http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/blogs/2009/06/zack-attacks-late-night-signs-on-for-the-reunion/

Thinking of calling mom to wish her a Happy Mother's Day today?  Network congestion is always a problem as it's one of the busiest calling days of the year.

SaskTel's Andy Tate explains, "Mother's Day is one of the busiest calling days of the year, every year.  It's busier then Father's Day, busier then Christmas Day and we do expect a high volume of long distance calls, in fact this is the tenth year in a row we project that we will have over one million call attempts on Mother's Day."

Tate has some advice before picking up the phone, "The best thing to do is to avoid the busiest times of the day, which are usually between 10am to 2pm and 7:30pm to 10pm.  Also make sure you dial the call yourself, instead of going through the operator if possible.  Check the phone number before you dial and also the time zone."

45 per cent of the calls are often made in Saskatchewan, 52 per cent go to other Canadian destinations and the other 3 per cent often go to the U.S. or overseas.