Quality of Experience (QoE)

As a reader of this blog you are doubtless familiar with the concept of the Quality of Service (QoS) of a telecommunications service, by which we mean meeting defined levels of a set of measureable network parameters, such as availability, delay, delay variability, and information loss. The precise set of parameters depends on the service type; for example Bit Error Rate (BER) and Errored Seconds

What is time ?

There is an anecdote about a foreigner visiting London asking a man on the street “what is time?” and receiving the answer “I’m sorry, but I am not a philosopher”.

I don’t want to discuss here the philosophical or physical questions of what time is, but rather what we mean by time in telecommunications applications. In particular, we frequently hear the terms “UTC”, “GPS time”, “NTP time”, and “

iPhone Storms

A few years ago RAD’s president Zohar Zisapel asked me to accompany him to a meeting with another Israeli company concerning possible cooperation on an important issue. On our way I asked him what this important issue was. He replied the iPhone problem and I immediately understood.



He informed me that he had been in the US the previous week, and although he carried a Blackberry and not an

Jobs and Ritchie

October 2011 marked the passing away of two men well-known in the computation and communications industries. One was Steve Jobs. In his honor Apple, Microsoft, and Disneyland all flew their flags at half-staff. October 16, 2011, was declared "Steve Jobs Day" in California. President Obama gave a eulogy calling Jobs “among the greatest of American innovators … a visionary”.

The other was Dennis

The meaning of Apple's '647 patent

On December 19th the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) issued its final determination on Apple's claims against HTC of Taiwan, finding that HTC violated Section 337 of the Tariff Act by selling Android phones containing a technology that infringed a patent held by Apple. Section 337 enables the ITC to block importation into the US of foreign products that unfairly compete with domestic

Moving to FTB!

Today I am freezing my Blogger account and moving my blog to Freethought Blogs, a prominent all-atheist venture. This move will help me earn an income doing what I do, and give my work a higher profile so it will do more good. To make my life manageable I won't be posting here anymore, nor accepting any new comments on posts archived here, but I will keep this account open in order to keep its

On exa, zetta, and beyond

Anyone who lives in metric system countries knows what "kilo" means. A kilogram is 1000 grams, a kilometer is 1000 meters. Of course frequencies are measured in kiloHertz and in the computer world we have kilobits and kilobytes (although we are never quite sure if that is 1000 or 1024!).Most people even know that "mega" means a million. Power stations output megawatts of electricity, FM radios