[MLB-WIRELESS] [mo:life] 013 : Q&A with Andrew Garton of Toy Satellite

[TSwireless]

A blast from the recent past and some further discussion on a
long-standing project for the SmithStreet precinct. If any one is
interested in participating in the broader project, please contact us
via <wireless at toysatellite.org>.


[MOLIFE]


May 30, 2005

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TABLE OF CONTENTS - 013  (May 30, 2005)
compiled by John Pace and Sam de Silva, mo:life

1. Mobile Phone Industry Tries to Clean Up Its Act
2. Carriers Dally on Wi-Fi Phones 
3. Wireless standards 'a complete mess': Experts
4. 3G or not 3G
5. iPods 'fuelling street robbery'
6. Melbourne Event - mo:life monthly - 7 June 2005
7. Q&A with Andrew Garton from Toy Satellite


AGGREGATE - keeping track of what's out there

1. Mobile Phone Industry Tries to Clean Up Its Act
Two U.S.-based mobile industry groups are trying to rein in a Wild West market for cell-phone downloads, publishing a set of "best practices" for selling content such as ringtones, daily messages, and screen backgrounds.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121009,00.asp
27 May 2005

2. Carriers Dally on Wi-Fi Phones 
A new generation of handsets will allow people to make ultra-low-cost calls using their cellular handsets over wireless broadband networks.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,67638,00.html
27 May 2005

3. Wireless standards 'a complete mess': Experts
Industry groups backing competing wireless standards have admitted that they must start cooperating more for users' sake.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/0,2000061791,39193787,00.htm
27 May 2005

4. 3G or not 3G
You may have thought the debate over the safety of mobile phones and towers was long over but community activists around the world have been inflamed by the arrival of the latest wireless technology which they claim is unsafe.
http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/feature_stories/article_1792.asp
29 May 2005

5. iPods 'fuelling street robbery'
The popularity of iPods and hi-tech mobile phones has fuelled a sharp rise in street robbery in London, the Met Police Commissioner has said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4583327.stm
26 May 2005

6. Event - MO:LIFE MONTHY

mo:life monthly is the perfect forum for content creators, web developers, info-tech professionals, film makers and artists to come together and sketch out the possibilities of  "the new small screen".

When: Tuesday, June 7, 2005 - 6:30pm
Where: E2E4 - 170 Abbotsford St North Melbourne 
http://www.spinach7.com/molife/monthly/


7. Question and Answers - mo:life talks to Andrew Garton

Andrew Garton is a new media producer/composer and an IT consultant to the community cultural development community. His areas of inquiry have ranged from computer mediated improvisation to content delivery methodologies for experimental sound works via wireless ICT services. 

Check out his personal site at http://www.toysatellite.org/agarton/

mo:life:
You travel and work in many parts of the world. Can you give a summary of some interesting wireless and mobile projects in parts of Asia?

Andrew Garton:
Here's a small sampler of projects active in the region. There are many more emergent projects and well established ones in the Pacific, but perhaps these are best left for another time.

The first wireless network we witnessed in action was at Sookmyung University, Seoul, 1999. Students were sitting at the pond on the grounds of the University with laptops and their lunch. Three years later most of these laptops were replaced with mobile phones. Although wireless and mobile telephony is pretty much common-place in Korea, few artists have made use of them in their own practice. However, Art Center Nabi (http://www.nabi.or.kr/) is engaged in several projects to stimulate awareness of these tools within cultural practice. They are initiating a number of forums and symposia on mobile and locative devices to stimulate interest in these tools  within new media arts practice in South Korea.

In Indonesia Dr Onno Purbo provides workshops teaching young people how to set up and administer wireless services for their communities. 

The Acacia Web Times says of Onno:   “Purbo has gone over the heads of the government direct to the Indonesian people, whom he is empowering with low-cost, build-it-yourself neighbourhood  networks that bypass the telcos and deliver Internet and telephone services at a fraction of the cost of doing so conventionally.”

Onno has authored over 40 books which can be downloaded from his website free of charge. He was the first person to write about computers and the internet in Indonesian. Those that have followed have been his students.  

In rural Sylhet, Bangladesh, small businesses have assisted in the establishment of a freely accessible wireless network for secondary schools. The more significant project is an UNDP funded initiative in association with the Bangladesh Agriculture University in Mymensingh. The network will initially provide wireless connectivity to universities throughout Bangladesh, it will provide low-cost net connections to hospitals, schools and non-profit groups in rural areas where internet access is either extremely difficult or non-existent.

mo:life:
Do you think mobile and wireless technologies will be able to escape the grips of a highly commercially motivated industry? With the WWW, anyone can set up a website - but it's a bit more difficult to create content for mobile platforms. Do you see bandwidth prices dropping, or will the telcos become the gatekeepers and 'toll operators' for mobile content?

Andrew:
More and more practical applications for mobile devices are being developed by artists and cultural development organisations. How they translate to the Australian landscape remains to be seen, but in countries where mobile phone charges are far cheaper, integration between telcos and civil society initiatives have far greater chance of survival let alone consumer interest in these products. Organisations such as the UK based Proboscis (http://proboscis.org.uk/) are integrating social needs with local government support by way of community based authoring applications available to wireless devices and mobile telephony. Toy Satellite has attempted to find support for such initiatives in Australia, but it seems early days yet.

With regards to content for mobile platforms, I feel we will see many more open source applications available to developers, but we are reliant on support from telecommunication providers to either subsidise or reduce charges to make it more and more possible to provide a richer and more diverse range of content for consumers. Hence the ongoing support for wireless that provides services that do not require access to “the grid” which is costly, particularly for projects that have no cost recovery aspect to them.

mo:life:
Last year, you were trying to initiate a project called Smith Street Wireless. Can you give a run down on this project? What were your objectives and where is it at today?

Andrew Garton:
Smith Street Wireless grew out of a prototype wireless streaming network within a 3 kilometre radius of the Remy Lane/Queens Parade Precinc,t, Fitzroy North, Melbourne, Australia. It provided royalty free ambient music, 24 hours a day, for a period of six months.

The project identified interest in an alternative means of distributing local music, local content and convenient access to these resources. TS Wireless did not provide free, nor fee-for-service access to the internet. It was a stand-alone content specific service that would be syndicated across the emerging Melbourne Wireless network.

Early 2004 Toy Satellite proposed the establishment of Smith Street Wireless. It was to be a freely accessible, community owned network to be developed in consultation with residents, traders groups, cultural development organisations, artists and the Yarra City Council.

Its original objectives were to:

* provide access to local and independent music;
* access to scheduled documentary style, radiophonic works either commissioned or available from community radio station archives;
* technical infrastructure for projects that make use of, for example, WiFi networking protocols and open source web server applications;
* a communications medium for communities that collaborate with like initiatives in the area (eg. SmithStreet.org, community radio);
* the provision of WiFi accessible hotspots for free access to the Internet from any location within a reasonable proximity of the network;
* formulation of a WiFi content specific networking model that can be replicated within other communities;
* ensure sustainability of the network, including maintenance, support and ongoing development.

Smith Street Wireless is currently on hold pending the outcome of a survey we are conducting within the precinct towards the development of the community weblog, SmithStreet.org. A second survey would determine the interest, extent of local participation and commitment towards the establishment of a wireless network for the precinct. 

mo:life:
You seem to have a commitment to provide accessible communications facilities on the local level. The cost of broadband connections have dropped dramatically. Won't it be easier for households to simply get an ADSL account?  What are the benefits of providing communities or streets with wireless connectivity? And surely, everyone will soon have a super powerful mobile phone...

As our wireless projects are content specific, in that we provide access to a server with content that will not be available elsewhere, including scheduling tools and song lists the viability for such a service became redundant with access to cheaper broadband providers. However, the convenience factor of access to the internet from the precinct increasingly became the main objective. The few local businesses we had discussed the project with were largely interested in internet access. This would require a strong business model to ensure recoupment of both establishment and maintenance costs as access would be provided freely to anyone from café goers to shop keepers and residents.

I agree that feature rich mobiles are becoming more available in this country, but I'm not sure everyone can afford to use the broad spectrum of services available (I certainy can't), particularly as individuals are less capable of creating content for these services unless MMS gateways are readily available and affordable to bridge these tools with websites.

As such, the our wireless project is on hold until it can be determined that such as service is desired and that a financial model to sustain it can be developed. Until such a time, our efforts are focused on the community weblog, http://SmithStreet.org.

In a broader context, wireless networks have currency where low cost networking is required. Perhaps less so in Australia, but countries like Africa, Bangladesh and Indonesia rely on widespread implementation of wireless services to gain access to the internet in areas of these countries where telcos have little to no reach.

mo:life:
Can you describe some of the more creative projects you've been involved with that utilise wireless and mobile technologies?

Andrew Garton:
TS Wireless, launched July 2002, was our first wireless project. It investigated the extent to which streaming media may be incorporated into wireless networking models as well as other cultural practises that support the efforts of local artists. 

The project identified:

* Wireless bandwidth limitations; 
* Regulatory issues;
* Ability for users to program streams; 
* Possibilities for scheduled streams amongst other free2air hosts at international locations; 
* Interest in self-managed audio stream (social indicators); 
* Interest in external programming and commissioning of new works; 
* Copyright and royalty issues (e.g. APRA/AMCOS - do they encourage or discourage innovation in public access to new forms of music making such as generative compositions); 
* Use as tool within cultural context (i.e. complimenting exhibitions and other related events); 
* Requirements for the addition of video;
* Possible collaborative framework with wireless activities supporting remote (e.g. rural, island) communities networking (e.g. Bangladesh, Canary Islands, Philippines).

The project assisted in the early formulation of wireless projects with the Association for Progressive Communications (www.apc.org) which have seen a series of training workshops conducted in Africa. In addition, these projects are seeing the development of training and support materials that will be available under an appropriate Creative Commons licence from http://www.itrainonline.org

Since December 2000 we have been focused on the use of locative devices such as GPS receivers in the creation of works such as Memory Effect (a generative composition for 10 PCs), D3, a public authoring kiosk produced for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and one of our current projects, Synesthesia Urbania.

Synesthesia Urbania is a collaborative audio/visual public performance integrating mobile and locative devices, a multilingual multimedia online workspace (moblog), collective copyright licensing and a custom 3D performance engine. Participants from Myung-Dong (Seoul, Korea) and Smith Street (Melbourne, Australia) will provide audio and video clips, text and GPS data that will be utilised in the creation of visual components and an electroacoustic soundscape that will be performed with Australian and Korean artists at Art Center Nabi, November 2005. 

mo:life:
Where do you see wireless and mobile technologies heading. Can you give us your version of the mobile/wireless future for the next 2 to 5 years?

Andrew Garton:
I'll keep this very brief.

There is likely to be far greater convergence of these technologies for social service needs. This can be demonstrated by the work of groups such as Proboscis and the Association for Progressive Communications, and are largely determined by services that encourage the public to engage with content gathering in areas such as local knowledge, particularly that which assists the more marginalised in our communities.

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