Thursday 29 January 2009

LTE Femtocells Killer App: Wireless HDD

Just read this article:

Security appears to be all washed up, as USB sticks with sensitive data are being left regularly in pockets when workers take their clothes to be cleaned at laundrettes.

According to a survey from Credant Technologies, who claims that 9,000 USB sticks have been forgotten and left in pockets of clothes taken to dry cleaners. These figures were obtained from phone interviews with 500 dry cleaners across the UK, who found an average of two USB keys per year. Extrapolating this to the 4,500 dry cleaners in the UK leads to the 9,000 figure.

Data sticks are most frequently found in city centres and commuter areas with one proprietor in the City of London finding 80 memory sticks in 2008 alone.

Back in the LTE world summit last year, one of the things I mentioned was, that once LTE Femtocells are available we may be able to create innovative and groundbreaking applications to run on it. I was aware of some people suggesting that the broadband providers may throttle the backhaul traffic on the Femto but I was assured by one person from Sweden (or Finland ... cant recall for sure) that in the Nordics there is already upto 100Mbps speeds available and most of the people use P2P networks thereby consistently loading the ISP's. He did not think that there will be a problem.

One of the applications I suggested was a wireless Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or maybe a better term would be mobile USB (MUSB). The following slides are extracted from my presentation as I am being a bit lazy (and busy) to put them here.




As always, I am happy to receive feedback, comments, criticisms, etc, etc.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

why wont you use wifi for this???

Zahid Ghadialy said...

There is absolutely no reason why we cant do this on a WiFi but there are couple of main reasons why this would be better using mobile technology:

1. The mobile protocols security is I would say far better than WiFi security. Also since we would need to use a SIM, an extra layer of security using IMSI and IMEI can be added.

2. In case we need to access some data while we are not at home and say some public place, WiFi coverage could be a problem. With cellular coverage you can always fallback on macro cell if required. Agreed that we wont be able to tranfer lots of data and at high speeds but we would still be able to access it.