Posted Mar 11th 2006 12:00PM by Michael Sciannamea Goodness, where did the time go? It's been another wacky week at , so to cut right to the chase, here are our top five stories over the last seven days. Sprint's New Unlimited Wireless Calling to Home or Office In what is a first for a U.
S. wireless carrier, Sprint has announced new add-on features that would give a customer access to calling their home landline phone or their office phone (or switchboard) in an unlimited fashion without using wireless minutes. So, you can be a chatty cathy with your wife or husband and not pull from your minute bucket .
These add-ons cost $5 and $8 month respectively for calling to home or office. Next month a test run of a citywide wireless network will take place in Moscow with plans to deploy up to 5,000 access nodes by Golden Telecom throughout the city soon after. According to the Prime-Tass news agency, service will feature competitively priced access rates for users.
(Wonder how many rubles it will cost a month to log on to the network...
) Wireless Movie Tickets in Real-Time -- What Took This So Long? Sprint Nextel has just announced the mobile availability of Fandango Wireless, where you can hop on your phone's web browser (or your wireless PDA's browser), purchase movie tickets, then have the virtual ticket pushed back to your handet with a bar code image that can be read by the scanners at movie foyers - gaining you no-line access. Concern Over Who Would Have Access in D.
C.'s Municipal Network Interesting piece in the Washington Post about the building of a citywide wireless network in Washington, D.C.
, but there is concern that by contracting the development work to a private company, that company would be allowed to decide which sections of the city to build the infrastructure in, as long as it provides free service to low-income residents. So, it could come to pass that even if a citywide network launches in D.C.
, there still could remain a digital divide between residents--in fact, it could become a digital chasm that may never be closed. Pay to Drive Using RFID, or Pay the Government Later? In a very unique twist of RFID use, it seems drivers in Sweden are just starting to use test RFID tags in their vehicles in order to pay for the privelege of driving on certain Sweish roads and highways.
Wait, paying to drive? Yes - true. In order to cut pollution and traffic congestion, the Swedish government hatched this idea to make citizens actually pay for driving - I guess as a decentive to just drive for the fun of it, but to ensure only those who needed to drive (for work, etc.
) would be driving.
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