Dear Friends and Industry Colleagues,

This is my weekly newsletter about Wireless Data and Radio Paging. You are receiving this message because you have either communicated with me in the past about a wireless topic, or your address was included in another e-mail that I received on the same subject. This is not a SPAM. If you have received this message in error, or you are not interested in these topics, please click here, then click on “send” and you will be promptly removed from the mailing list.

I am pleased to report that this issue is coming from my new office in Portsmouth, Virginia. Can you believe I set up the computer here before anything else? I now have a cable MODEM which appears to be even faster than the aDSL service that I had in Dallas. I hope you find this week's newsletter interesting. Thanks a lot for the referrals this week. You know who you are. Well, let's roll.....

SkyBitz Lands Growth Capital
SkyBitz said it landed $18 million in venture capital funding to finance the rollout of its new satellite-based mobile equipment tracking and monitoring service. Investors in the privately held start-up in Dulles, Va., were AIG Highstar Capital L.P. and Industrial Technology Ventures, according to a SkyBitz announcement. The SkyBitz Global Locating System provides a service that processes data from Global Positioning System satellites differently than most vehicle location services do. It uses satellite communications to transmit coordinates back to a data center.

Source: TTNews.com by Transport Topics.
This article appears in the Nov. 18 print edition of Transport Topics.
Subscription to their e-mail newsletter is free.

Congratulations to Matthew Schor, president and founder of SkyBitz. I have been following his company with great interest for several years. Good luck Matt.

KEEPING UP WITH WIRELESS NETWORKING
Confused with all the new wireless jargon? Here is an excerpt from an article that I thought you might find interesting.

Most people now use the 802.11b version of Wi-Fi that offers data rates of 11 megabits per second at a 2.4-GHz radio frequency. Products using a different faster standard, 802.11a, are just becoming available—and promise speeds of 54 Mbps.

Sounds great, but 802.11a products use the 5-GHz band, and therefore are not compatible with 802.11b. A third flavor in this alphabet soup is 802.11g, a format that won't be officially approved until May. This version also offers 54-Mbps speeds, but uses the 2.4-GHz band so it can play nice with 802.11b.

Both new wireless standards offer more advantages than simply speed.

For more information check out the source article: Future of Wi-Fi: Fast, Fast, Fast at WIRED NEWS.

A NOTE FROM ADVANTRA CONCERNING THEIR OEM TELEMETRY MODULE:
“By the way, our Barran module has now been approved by all the ReFLEX Carriers. Our Karli has now been FCC approved and Carrier certification will follow within ± 2 weeks. We have signed great contracts already and different high volume deals are in the process of being finalized. This is ab-so-lutly great news as you can imagine... We're of course preparing the necessary press releases but as your Newsletter is also an objective source for the market I was wondering if this is not something you should mention?”

They also have obtained IC (Industry Canada) approval for both units. More information is available on their web site: http://www.advantra.com

Soliciting Input to Prove Prior Art

By Jay Moskowitz, former founder of RTS Wireless

Put on your thinking caps

I am acting in the capacity of an expert witness for a patent dispute. The parties I am working with, are attempting to prove that there existed art in the public domain prior to the issue date of a certain patent thereby rendering that patent invalid. I am attempting to gather information to in fact prove that such prior art existed. Many of us "old timers" were involved in creating the first alphanumeric paging systems and might be able to assist in providing evidence of such prior art.

I am attempting to determine two critical dates. First, the earliest date when alphanumeric pagers were made aware outside of Motorola. Second, the earliest date that efforts began in implement the PET/iXO/TAP protocol into a paging terminal for the purposes of sending text messages to a pager.

I spoke with Mike Suchoff, formerly of iXO, who developed the protocol for their TC-200 product. The TC-200 has a 1983 copyright date on it, so certainly efforts to create a paging input device and protocol certainly began in 1982. Unfortunately, there is no written documentation available to actually show that the work began during ’82.

I am trying to show any prior art before May 16, 1983. The patent actually has to do with locating stock market price alerts and sending them to a remote telecommunications device, such as a remote printer, computer, telephone (with voice synthesis) or to a text pager. If anyone is aware of a product in the earliest days of alphanumeric paging (prior to mid-1983) that sent stock price or stock alert information to text pagers, please let me know.

I appreciate the "brain trust" we have reading this newsletter and I am certain your input will be able to prove that someone in our industry or using the products of our industry were already building stock market/radio paging products prior to the date of the patent in question.

Please get back to me as soon as possible at: jay@skymsg.com Please click here to respond directly.

The RTS Advantage™ Internet Gateway and TNPP Router
When the Internet was first becoming popular, I was managing Motorola's Latin America Paging Infrastructure group in Boynton Beach, Florida. One day I got the idea of sending TNPP paging traffic over the Internet. I called Jay Moskowitz at his office in New York and tried to talk him into incorporating this ability into his already successful RTS Advantage™ product. He didn't go for the idea right away, but I did end working for him as VP of Sales and Marketing. In those days we weren't real sure that it was OK to do purely commercial things over the Internet. Wow have things changed! Anyway, Jay finally agreed to include my “invention” in the Advantage™, which already handled about a million other protocols. ( I never exaggerate! )

I presented the idea of building an international paging network by using the Internet and the RTS Advantage™, to WebLink Wireless (then PageMart). They not only bought the product, but hired me to implement it as well. We built, what I think was the largest international paging network, covering 14 countries at its peak. The cool thing about it was that it allowed the opportunity for small paging carriers in other countries, to join a large international paging network without paying the high cost of dedicated commercial data circuits. Several other carriers, including PageNet, also used the Advantage™ for international networking. Of course almost all of the carriers used an RTS Advantage™ for some function in their domestic networks.

In case any of the paging carriers who are still using the RTS Advantage™ need technical support, you may contact: Chen Ko - Project Manager for Advantage™ products or John Petraglia - President, at:

Programming Concepts Inc.
640 Johnson Ave. - Suite 5
Bohemia, NY 11716 USA
Telephone: 631-563-3800

RTS Wireless was sold to Aether. Unfortunately, Aether later ceased operating the RTS Wireless division of their business. Aether officially handed over Advantage support to Programming Concepts. So they have official access to the RTS source code.

ADIÓS AMIGOS
Have a good weekend. Please send me anything newsworthy that you come across and I will include it in next week's newsletter.