I'm not really a news writer; I have too many opinions and I don't always have an industry expert to quote to put my opinion across. News is reporting, not reportage - the writer should be even less in the way of the story than usual. But when I have an interesting story and really juicy quotes, I like writing it up. The story - Nortel creates an alliance to bid against mobile operators for UK WiMAX - is good because it's a service that understands that the most important word in 'mobile Internet' is not mobile. Make me pick between a toy service now and the real thing on my PC and I'll complain about your service and go home. And the quotes were great - I have lots more snark on the subject of wireless broadband than I could fit in the piece ;-)

Plus I was pleased that the story hardly got edited at all, and that was for euphony rather than structure. Go me!

If you keep an eye on my upcoming features I have just updated the list on www.marybranscombe.com - next stage is flipping it to a scraped list rather than a static div. What's the Web equivalent of dead tree media - dead bit div's?

Rumours of a ZunePhone are talking up the OFDM in the FCC filing as meaning Microsoft is going to do a WiMax device; while it would be nice, I'm not sure the chipsets, power consumption or the netowrks are there to make that a reality this year. Talking to Siemens, they expect the mobile WiMax services to hit the UK around 2008 and I;m not sure Sprint/Nextel will be much faster than that in the US.

And OFDM is a technique, not a standard. It's used in DSL, in some WiFi implementations - and in UWB. A wireless mesh - like the one Sonos ZonePlayers use to distribute music around your house - or a UWB connection between Zunes; those make more sense to me for social music.

Want to share tunes faster? Siemens has a class 1, 100 foot Bluetooth interface for pushing music over A2DP to five headsets at once...

Y'know what bugs me about blogs as sources? Blog A says they got it from site B, which says they got it from blog C, which might credit blog D. Blog E credits blog F - often not mentioning any of A-D. None of them have a link to the primary source - the FCC. I don't blame them - I can't find the application on the FCC site with both hands and a shovel. But this 'I'll mention what's cool that I saw' round robin makes it very hard to find out more. I linked to the blog where sbisson first saw this, which claims to have made (gasp) phone calls and checked stuff out; if they had an FCC link I'd really rate them...