Verizon Wireless Brings 4G Wireless to 39 US Cities By Year-End

The carrier now says it will reach 39 markets and 60 airports in the US with its fast LTE 4G coverage.

By Mark Sullivan, Oct 7, 2010 1:39 am

Verizon announced on Wednesday that it will launch 4G service in more cities than previously announced. The move falls in line with increasing competition among wireless providers to roll out faster service, and the quickly growing demand for fast data service among consumers. Verizon said it will launch the service in 39 US markets, including New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The LTE launch now includes 14 more cities than the 25 the company previously said it would launch with during 2010.
And the rollout into these markets will not be gradual, but aggressive. At launch, Verizon says, more than 75 percent of the populations of its LTE cities will have access to the service. See Verizon's press release for a list of new LTE markets and more details.
The LTE network will pump out download speeds of 5-12 megabits per second (mbps), and upload speeds of 2-5 mbps.
The LTE (Long-Term Evolution) 4G coverage, Verizon says, will be available to more than 110 million Americans by the end of this year. Verizon projects that the service will cover 200 million people by end of 2011, and will be as far reaching as its 3G network by the end of 2013.
Verizon’s rollout will rob Sprint of its early lead in the 4G arms race. Sprint has already launched its own WiMAX flavor of 4G in 50+ US cities through its partnership with Clearwire. The balance of power now shifts in Verizon’s--and LTE’s--favor. AT&T says it will begin lighting its own 4G LTE network in 2011.
The first Verizon devices to connect with the faster LTE network will be USB modems for laptops, the company says. Verizon Wireless COO Lowell McAdam says Verizon will show off new LTE smartphones and tablets at the 2011 CES conference in January, and that those new products will go on sale in the first half of next year.
Verizon says its upcoming devices will contain both 3G and 4G radios. Voice service will run over the existing 3G network, while Internet access, or data service, will run over the new LTE network.
The carrier is inviting rural and regional carriers to develop their own LTE networks, as well as offering LTE roaming agreements with rural carriers that build LTE networks.
Even with the new network capacity that will come with LTE, the days of all you can eat mobile data plans are coming to an end, McAdam says. “We think there’s a place for unlimited plans, but over time, even if we have a big pipe, our customers are going to need to shift to a model where you pay for what you use. Over time we will clearly be migrating to a tiered pricing model.”

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New Type of Liquid Crystal Promises to Improve Performance of Digital Displays

Science Daily (Oct. 5, 2010) — Chemists at Vanderbilt University have created a new class of liquid crystals with unique electrical properties that could improve the performance of digital displays used on everything from digital watches to flat panel televisions.

The achievement, which is the result of more than five years of effort, is described by Professor of Chemistry Piotr Kaszynski and graduate student Bryan Ringstrand in a pair of articles published online on Sept. 24 and Sept. 28 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.
"We have created liquid crystals with an unprecedented electric dipole, more than twice that of existing liquid crystals," says Kaszynski.
Electric dipoles are created in molecules by the separation of positive and negative charges. The stronger the charges and the greater the distance between them, the larger the electric dipole they produce.
In liquid crystals, the electric dipole is associated with the threshold voltage: the minimum voltage at which the liquid crystal operates. Higher dipoles allow lower threshold voltages. In addition, the dipole is a key factor in how fast liquid crystals can switch between bright and dark states. At a given voltage, liquid crystals with higher dipoles switch faster than those with lower dipoles.

Commercial potential

Vanderbilt has applied for a patent on the new class of materials. Some of the companies that manufacture liquid crystals for commercial applications have expressed interest and are currently evaluating it.
"Our liquid crystals have basic properties that make them suitable for practical applications, but they must be tested for durability, lifetime and similar characteristics before they can be used in commercial products," Kaszynski says.
If it passes commercial testing, the new class of liquid crystals will be added to the complex molecular mixtures that are used in liquid crystal displays. These blends combine different types of liquid crystals and other additives that are used to fine-tune their characteristics, including viscosity, temperature range, optical properties, electrical properties and chemical stability. There are dozens of different designs for liquid crystal displays and each requires a slightly different blend.

 Scientific significance

The newly discovered liquid crystals are not only important commercially but they are also important scientifically.
Since 1888 when they were discovered, scientists have discovered more than 100,000 natural and synthetic compounds that have a liquid crystal state. They have determined that one of the prerequisites for such a state is that the molecule must be shaped like either a rod or a disc. A second requirement is that it must contain both rigid and flexible parts. It takes a delicate balance of two opposing factors or forces to produce a material halfway between a crystal and a liquid. However, there is still a great deal about this unusual state that scientists do not yet understand.
For example, scientists are still trying to determine the effect that a liquid crystal's electric dipole has on the temperature at which it becomes an ordinary liquid. The current consensus has been that increasing the strength of the dipole typically raises this transition temperature. The way in which the new type of liquid crystals are synthesized allowed Kaszynski and Ringstrand to test this theory by creating pairs of liquid crystals with the same geometry but different electric dipoles and measuring their transition temperatures. They found that subtle structural differences have a much greater effect on the transition temperature than do variations in the strength of the electric dipole.

Unique "zwitterionic" structure

What distinguishes the new class of liquid crystals is its "zwitterionic" structure. Zwitterions are chemical compounds that have a total net electrical charge of zero but contain positively and negatively charged groups. The newly developed liquid crystals contain a zwitterion made up of a negatively charged inorganic portion and a positively charged organic portion. Kaszynski first got the idea of making zwitterionic liquid crystals nearly 17 years ago when he first arrived at Vanderbilt. However, a critical piece of chemistry required to do so was missing. It wasn't until 2002 when German chemists discovered the chemical procedure that made it possible for the Vanderbilt researchers to succeed in this effort.
The research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Inaugural Conference: Cell Phones in Afghanistan

Tech Change co-hosted its first public event entitled "Can You Help Me Now? Mobile Phones and Peace building in Afghanistan" with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the United Nations mandated University for Peace (UPEACE) on June 24th, 2010.  The event featured some of the leading minds in both the mobile technology arena and the Afghanistan public policy sector.  Panelists included Katrin Verclas from MobileActive.org, Patrick Meier from Ushahidi, Eric Gundersen from Development Seed, Ivan Segal from Global Voices, Merrick Schaefer from UNICEF Innovation, Vikram Singh, Senior Defense Advisor to Richard Holbrooke and many more. Read about the event in our blog post here and also on the Ashoka Peace Blog. Additional details and the video transcript can also be found on the USIP Website.