An updated version of the IEEE WCET Candidate Handbook will be available on 1 December 2008. Request your PDF or print copy today to learn about what’s involved when preparing, applying and taking the certification exam. The 2009 version highlights application deadlines and testing window dates for both spring and fall 2009 examination periods. Information on testing center locations has been updated to provide a more current list and general procedures noted in the 2008 version have been streamlined in the 2009 version to simplify the experience for candidates. Return to Headlines



In order to sit for the Spring (March/April) 2009 WCET Certification examination, candidates must complete an application. The application period for the Spring (March/April) exam will be open from 1 December 2008 through 2 February 2009. Candidates who complete an application form by 31 December 2008 will be eligible to receive a 75-question online practice exam for free.

Learn More about the WCET Certification Program via Free Webinar and FAQs
A free one-hour long webinar is available to help candidates understand how the WCET certification program got its start and why the IEEE Communications Society committed itself to developing it along with IEEE and industry volunteers. The webinar also highlights the methodology used to develop the certification program as well as what the program offers as a whole. The questions posed during the webinar were captured and answered and make up the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) that are now available online. Candidates with questions about the WCET certification program are encouraged to send their queries to cert@comsoc.org.
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The newest member to join the IEEE WCET Certification Program Industry Advisory Board brings over 25 years of experience to help shape its future growth and development. Robert Fonow, is a Vice President at Trivon AG in Switzerland. “Most of my work in the telecommunications industry is in reconstruction and managing distressed operations in developing countries,” said Bob. From July 2006 to March 2008 he served as the United States Department of State Senior Telecommunications and IT Advisor to the government of Iraq, where he helped develop WiMAX and other wireless strategies for reconstruction.

When asked to comment on why he thinks WCET certification is so important, Bob went on to say that “engineering and operations education is uneven in many developing countries, especially in areas concerning newer wireless technologies. The WCET certification exam provides an international standard for education and performance. This designation will be especially valuable in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia and anywhere else education has been disrupted.”
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Working directly with volunteers from industry has been essential when developing and enhancing the WCET certification program. It is through this collaboration that the program continues to be developed to meet not only the needs of the practitioner, but that of their employer as well. Meet Arun Pande and Francis O’Brien – this month’s featured Industry Advisory Board (IAB) members to learn more about their perspectives on WCET certification.

According to Arun Pande, Head of the Innovation Lab at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. in Mumbai with over 25 years of experience in conducting research, technology development, deployment and management, “the wireless industry is expanding by leaps and bounds, both in developed and developing countries. Before we know it, accessing the Internet via a wireless channel will be common practice. With new standards, technology, products, applications and regulations, it has become necessary for practitioners to enhance their knowledge of wireless communications.”

Concurring with Pande that the current market environment warrants the need for continuing education, Fran O’Brien, Technology Director of the Wireless Standards and Intellectual Property Department at Alcatel-Lucent, said, “I was happy to be invited to join the IAB so that I could help enhance a certification program that meets the needs of the wireless industry.” O’Brien added that “as employers work to identify qualified wireless professionals to take on challenging assignments, at least now there’s a credential that can help make that search less daunting.”

Visit our “Community” on the WCET website to learn more about the volunteers involved in the development and enhancement of the WCET Certification Program.
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IEEE ComSoc is making the rounds to various wireless conferences and meetings around the world to offer free IEEE WCET practice exams to several lucky winners. Stop by the IEEE ComSoc booth to enter the drawings at:

GLOBECOM (IEEE Global Communications Conference)
30 November – 4 December 2008
New Orleans, Louisiana – USA
GLOBECOM Home Page

GSMA Mobile World Congress
16-19 February 2009
Barcelona, Spain
Mobile World Congress Home Page

IWCE (International Wireless Communications Expo)
18-20 March 2009
Las Vegas, Nevada - USA
IWCE Home Page

CTIA Wireless 2009
1-3 April 2009
Las Vegas, Nevada – USA
CTIA Home Page

IEEE Wireless Communications & Networking Conference (WCNC)
5-8 April 2009
Budapest, Hungary
WCNC Home Page

IEEE WCET Practice Exam Winners Announced
Stopping by the IEEE ComSoc booth and putting their business card in our fishbowl earned these lucky winners a free practice exam. Thanks for stopping by. All winners have been notified individually regarding their prize.

Bob Becnel, Boeing won a free practice exam during Sections Congress this past September in Quebec, Canada. Later that same month, Athanasios Kanatas, University of Piraeus, Greece won a free practice exam during PIMRC – the 19th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor & Mobile Radio Communications meeting held in Cannes, France. During WiMAX World Americas held in Chicago, Illinois, 30 September – 2 October, attendees Greg Boren, Fujitsu, Terrence Donohoe, R.M.I., and John Cureton, UHP Wireless all walked away winners.
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Silicon Valley Job Market Has Some Bright Spots
San Jose Mercury News (CA) (11/14/08) Harris, Scott Duke

Demand for engineers in Silicon Valley's smart phone and other wireless fields remains strong thanks to the push for technological advantage, according to executives. Cutting-edge talent is highly desired, and GlassDoor CEO Robert Hohman says his company has compiled data suggesting that top salaries are not declining. He and other executives say that companies can exploit the economic downturn to compete more effectively through recruitment drives, and some firms, such as Synaptics, are hunting for "passive candidates" who are not actively looking for jobs. "We see this as a competitive advantage — a great time to pick up top-tier talent," Synaptics executive Jim Harrington notes, adding that layoffs by other companies have made a richer base of second-tier talent available. Synaptics makes touch-pad interfaces for Google Android phones and other devices, and vies with Palm and Apple for engineers. The company is inviting groups of potential employees to meetings at its Santa Clara headquarters. Ruckus Wireless CEO Selina Lo says "black belt" engineers are still highly coveted.
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Has the IT Skills Crisis Turned a Corner?
silicon.com (11/19/08) Lomas, Natasha

The number of unfilled IT positions in the United Kingdom is dropping for the first time in years, according to silicon.com's 10th annual Skills Survey, a sign that the country's skills crisis may be abating. However, mobile skills are one area where the industry may be experiencing a true skills shortage, with 40 percent of respondents disagreeing or strongly disagreeing that it is easy to find workers with strong mobile device skills, even as mobility is becoming increasingly important in the corporate agenda. The percentage of respondents reporting unfilled IT positions had been rising every year, increasing from 14 percent in 2003 to 45 percent in 2007. However, only 40 percent of respondents said they have unfilled IT positions in this year's survey. The most recent survey also shows a small decline in the number of respondents who believe that there is a skills shortage in IT, supporting the belief that recruiting for IT is getting easier. The majority of respondents, 72 percent, believe that business and technical skills are equally important to success, and there is a widespread understanding that IT workers also must now have soft skills.
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Fighting Traffic Jams With Data
The Wall Street Journal (11/17/08) P. B5; Cheng, Roger

Drivers may soon be able to avoid traffic jams through the use of light-emitting diodes, smart phones, GPS systems, and mobile sensors. University researchers are developing systems that would enable cars to communicate with each other and relay critical information such as traffic speed, weather, and road conditions to other cars and drivers. Such information could be used to find faster routes or provide drivers with live traffic feeds on their cell phones. "The interest has gone red hot in the last year as the auto industry realizes this is a component of improving safety," says Boston University (BU) professor Thomas Little. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hari Balakrishnan is working on the CarTel project, which has been deployed on a fleet of taxis and limousines and uses mobile sensors to record real-time information on the location and speed of the vehicles and the condition of the roads. The sensors send data back to a central computer that calculates the traffic patterns and can predict the optimal route. As part of the CarTel project, Balakrishnan developed a method of connecting to a Wi-Fi network in 400 milliseconds, which is necessary for cars that pass by a network too quickly to connect using conventional methods. BU, the University of New Mexico, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute also are conducting similar research. The joint project is focused on delivering traffic and car information through flashing headlights, brake lights, and traffic signals. Little says that giving cars the ability to communicate with each other will be crucial for managing traffic and avoiding accidents.
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Broadcasters Urged to Participate in White Space Standards
TV Technology (10/28/08)

The IEEE Standards Working Group is developing standards for unlicensed device technology that could be used in the "white spaces" inside the digital broadcast spectrum. The IEEE Broadcast Technology Society wants its members to join the IEEE Standards Association and help review and comment on a draft standard, titled "Standard to enhance harmful interference protection for low power devices operating in TV Broadcast Bands." The use of the white space VHF and UHF broadcast spectrum for broadband data transmission could bring broadband data services to rural areas and other areas currently without broadband. The standards being developed by the IEEE Working Group cover wireless regional area networks (WRANs), and also calls for measures such as spectrum sensing, a database service, geo-location, and cognitive capabilities to reduce the possibility of interference between broadcast signals and unlicensed devices operating within the broadcast spectrum. The proposed standard describes the use of a radio beacon device to provide additional protection to protected devices, such as wireless microphones used in the production and transmission of broadcast programs, from interference caused by unlicensed devices intended for operation on unoccupied TV channels.
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The Network of Everything
ICT Results (11/15/08)

Making personal networks (PNs) capable of managing scores of devices requires the creation of a "network of everything" to connect the devices together, and the European Union-funded MAGNET Beyond project sought to create a model that enables users to easily establish their PNs with all their devices. "We have a user-centric approach with the overall objective to design, develop, demonstrate, and validate the concept of a flexible PN that supports resource-efficient, robust, ubiquitous personal services in a secure, heterogeneous networking environment for mobile users," says MAGNET Beyond technical manager Liljana Gavrilovska. The MAGNET Beyond model calls for self-organizing devices capable of assembling into geographically distributed secure networks of personal devices, and a platform for numerous personal applications and services to support various pursuits in a manner that is reliable and trustworthy, yet inconspicuous. The platform also will support permanent or temporary linkage between PNs. The project followed the guiding principles of ease of use, trustworthiness, ubiquity, and low cost, and Gavrilovska notes that the system requires no administrators and virtually zero training. "It will ensure security and protect privacy, and it will work everywhere, even without any additional infrastructure, but still be able to exploit any available resources, like Wi-Fi or cell phone networks, for example," she says. The system's architecture also is future-proofed and endowed with contextual awareness.
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UPC Leads a European Project to Create the Technology for Future Mobile Networks
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (11/07/08)

The European ROCKET project is working to improve future mobile networks by making it possible for mobile terminals and base stations to determine whether they can use frequency bands at their location, which would speed up information transmission. The other focus is to use very small and affordable relay terminals to increase the performance of wireless networks. The smaller relay terminals could be installed on traffic signals or street lights, and mobile telephones and notebook computers could act as relays and ultimately offer fewer instances of limited access. The wireless communications solutions would have the capacity to transmit at more than 100 Mbps and possibly have peak speeds of 1 Gbps. Pocket computers, notebooks, electronic organizers, and PDAs would benefit from the technology. The European Union Seventh Framework Program has contributed 3 million euros to ROCKET, and participants include Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Spain, the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, and Motorola Labs.
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Enterprises Embrace Draft 11n
Network World (11/12/08) Wexler, Joanie

Enterprises are increasingly more willing to install "Draft N" products before waiting for final IEEE standards ratification, concludes an annual wireless LAN survey, which polled several hundred companies involved in a WLAN implementation. Last year, two-thirds of those polled said they would wait for standards before deploying 802.11n, but this year only 41 percent said they would wait. Similarly, only 1 percent of last year's respondents said they had the bandwidth needs to commercial deploy 11n before standards, but 16 percent of 2008 respondents said they needed the bandwidth before a standard would be ratified. Also, 22 percent of recent respondents said they would deploy before finalized standards as part of a pilot program or in limited areas, compared to the 15 percent of respondents in 2007 who said they would deploy early. Overall, 38 percent said they would deploy Draft 11n in some product form, as opposed to only 16 percent in 2007. The rise in early deployment reflects the changing mobile capacity needs of enterprises, which report that adding mobile VoIP and collaborative applications to their Wi-Fi data capabilities are the major factors behind their 11n needs. The final 11n standard, which is expected in 2009's fourth quarter, will offer a large number of optional features that still need to be defined.
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The Next Generation Wireless Chips
University of Cologne (11/04/08) Kollner, Raphael

Europe's Integrated Circuit/Electromagnetic Simulation and design Technologies for Advanced Radio Systems-on-chip (ICESTARS) project will enable the development of low-cost wireless chips that can operate in a frequency range of up to 100GHz. "In the future, mobile devices will provide customers with services ranging from telephony and Internet to mobile TV and remote banking, anytime, anywhere," says University of Cologne professor Caren Tischendorf. "It is impossible to realize the necessary, extremely high data transfer rates within the frequency bands used today." ICESTARS project leader Marq Kole says that by the end of the project in 2010, project participants hope to have accelerated the chip development process in the extremely high frequency range with new methods and simulation tools. ICESTARS is funded by the European Commission and is led by NXP Semiconductors. German semiconductor company Qimonda will develop advanced analog simulation techniques for the project. Other partners include Finland-based software developer AWR-APLAC, which will focus on frequency-domain simulation algorithms, and Belgium's MAGWEL, which will focus on electromagnetic simulations. In addition to the University of Cologne, university partners include Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Germany's University of Wuppertal, and the University of Oulu in Finland. University partners will focus on modeling questions, algorithmic problems, and simulations issues that need to be solved for testing analog circuits with digital signal processing in the extremely high frequency range.
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3G Wireless Data: About to Break?
EDN Magazine (11/13/08) Thryft, Ann R.

Despite increased expectations of 3G wireless networks, generated by the release of the iPhone 3G and competing products, networks may not be ready to handle the increased data traffic generated by mobile devices. Although 4G standards offer improved latency and solutions for other cell-access network problems, other problems involving backhaul networks, head ends, and network cores may still exist. The definitions of 3G and 4G network technologies and services have merged over the past few years, largely because 3G network buildout, handset development, and data services were not approached simultaneously. Originally, 3G involved data services, including full-fledged Web browsing, video calls, data downloads, and uploads over high-speed Internet broadband links, but current 3G networks and services are unable to manage sustained data rates high enough to support 10 Mbps video and similar services. Meanwhile, an increasing number of air-interface standards have been released, particularly among shorter-range wireless protocols such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Fourth-generation mobile devices are expected to manage several air interfaces from numerous base stations and communicate with those stations simultaneously while processing multiple types of data and services in real time, an ability that was originally assigned to 3G. As data-centric services become increasingly popular, demands on the backhaul and network core will force carriers to shift away from the leased-line model and deploy optical or fiber technology directly to the base station for additional capacity. This change will reduce traffic in the core and improve latency, which is particularly important for social networking, gaming, and push-to-talk applications. The International Telecommunications Union is scheduled to formally define 4G networks and services in 2009. Many expect 4G air-interface technologies to operate on all IP networks, and support multiple-input/multiple-output operations.
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Virtual Prototypes Speed Wireless Development
EE Times (10/27/08) Neifert, Bill

Virtual prototypes are increasingly being used in the design of wireless devices to improve product quality and quicken the time to market. Virtual prototypes can be used to perform early architectural analysis for throughput and power tradeoffs, develop and debug software in advance, and optimize the throughput of designs that have already been built. Poor design architecture can happen in a variety of ways. The most visible is that an architecture fails to meet performance targets, but the more common failure is overdesign. This occurs when the worst-case conditions of multiple spreadsheet components are combined, including ones that would never occur in the real world. Overdesigned architectures can lead to unnecessary costs, such as using high-speed memory when lower-cost memory would suffice, or a processor running at an unnecessarily high speed and draining energy. Virtual prototypes remove guesswork from architectural design because designers can explore numerous design situations, and obtain a thorough understanding of the real-world impacts of various decisions and intellectual property use. Results from virtual prototypes can be studied on a cycle-by-cycle basis and correlated with various hardware and software components, and data collected from virtual prototypes can give designers the ability to confidently make large decisions. The key to virtual prototyping is creating accurate models. However, not every component in a virtual platform needs to be 100 percent accurate, as there are often components that only need to represent the traffic of the actual model without representing the component's true function.
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E-Community Experiment Examines the Promise of Being Connected
Penn State Live (10/28/08) DuBois, Charlie

Pennsylvania State University researchers are investigating the employment of networked wireless services in the creation of a mobile electronic community, using State College, Pa., as a case study. The experiment is led by Jack Carroll, head of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction, who, with professor Mary Beth Rosson, outlined several ways communities could be affected by such services. Applications include using technology to enhance community engagement and make residents more active participants in development planning; helping authorities evacuate citizens in the event of an emergency; and making local history and culture more interactive, using wirelessly available imagery, stories, and information about community sites. Wireless networks might give Internet services and applications a greater sense of immediacy rather than making users feel isolated, which is a common complaint about current desktop systems. A greater sense of immersion and connection can facilitate more timely action, and Carroll says that while the technological ingredients for a mobile e-community--smart phones, Wi-Fi, Web-based tools, and software--are already in place, the missing element is ubiquity. He predicts that a mobile e-community will emerge in the next two years as users reach critical mass. "The infrastructure will be there in two years; it's mostly there now," Carroll says.
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'Smart' Robotic Sensors Monitor Activity at Mount St. Helens
Columbian (WA) (10/27/08) Raftery, Isolde

U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Rick LaHusen, Washington State University Vancouver computer science professor WenZhan Song, a group of WSU Vancouver graduate students and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are working to create more robust wireless communication systems for Mount St. Helens, which returned to dormancy in July following three years of eruptions. Aided by a $1.63 million NASA grant, the researchers are designing a dozen smart sensors that talk to each other and link to a central information hub. NASA scientists are monitoring the research in the hopes of using the technology to explore Mars. "The sensors are always looking to see what the best route is in case an instrument has some kind of catastrophic event--ice, snow burial, or the ash might blow one way," LaHusen says. "They can relay data between themselves, making short hops that are more energy efficient." The sensors performed exactly as designed when they were recently deployed inside Mount St. Helens' moonlike crater. The sensors can detect movements, relaying information to the Johnston Ridge Observatory at the Mount St. Helens visitor center. The ad hoc network the sensors create could have applications in radio systems, which would make radios more reliable in emergency situations, or create wireless nodes that could detect where a network is broken to indicate, for example, the location of a mine collapse.
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National Taiwan University Invents World's Fastest System on a Chip
Taiwan News (11/04/08)

National Taiwan University researchers have combined RF front-end circuits and an antenna array to develop what they say is the world's fastest system on a chip. They say the chip has a transmission speed that is 100 times as fast as Wi-Fi and 350 times as fast as a 3.5G cell phone. The chip measures 0.5 millimeters, one-tenth the size of existing chips, and costs less than one-tenth that of the traditional communication module. The chip also consumes less power than other products. The researchers see a big market for the chip in portable communications products. The chip can be used to connect domestic audio-visual facilities and instantly transmit to TV screens at home, download high-quality movies to a cell phone in a couple of seconds, and quickly upload thousands of pictures from a digital camera to a computer. The chip can download a 4GB DVD film to a computer in 10 seconds, compared with 1.5 hours for ADSL, two hours for Wi-Fi, and 4.5 hours for Bluetooth.
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Cellphones Could Be Used to Build 'Audio Internet'
New Scientist (10/24/08) No. 2679, P. 22; Ananthaswamy, Anil

IBM India Research Laboratory researchers are attempting to bring the Internet to rural India by creating a "spoken Web" that taps mobile phones to get around such problems as illiteracy. "Conventional approaches have only looked at taking the existing Web and making it available on mobile devices," says Tapan Parikh of the University of California, Berkeley. "This is an opportunity for making an entirely new kind of Web." The spoken Web is conceived as a network of voice-based Web sites or VoiceSites, which can only be accessed by phone and require nothing from the user apart from the ability to speak and listen. Making VoiceSites easy to create was a critical component of the spoken Web, and users are guided through the process by VoiGen software that is accessible through a phone number. A number for the created VoiceSite that serves the same function as a URL is assigned, and anyone who calls the VoiceSite number receives a welcome message recorded by the VoiceSite owner and instructions for navigating the information. VoiGen creates links between VoiceSites by prompting the user at predetermined points to supply the phone number and a brief description of related sites, and transfers between sites are managed by IBM's hyperspeech transfer protocol. The use of complicated voice recognition software was deferred in favor of a small vocabulary and structured interaction to ensure that the system always recognizes the context of the spoken words.
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Boston University Partners in NSF Challenge to Create Next Generation Wireless Network Using Visible Light
Boston University (10/06/08) Rosenberg, Ronald; Seele, Michael

Boston University's (BU's) College of Engineering is using a National Science Foundation grant to develop the next generation of wireless communications technology based on visible light instead of radio waves. BU researchers expect to incorporate data communications capabilities into low-power light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to create smart lighting that would be both faster and more secure than current network technology. "Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio, and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires," says BU engineering professor Thomas Little. "This could be done with a LED-based communications network that also provides light--all over existing power lines with low power consumption, high reliability, and no electromagnetic interference." BU researchers will focus on developing the solid state optical technology that will serve as the network's backbone. Little says indoor optical wireless communications systems could use white LED lighting inside a room, similar to the TV remote control, to provide Internet connections to computers, personal digital assistants, TV and radio reception, telephone connections, and thermostat temperature control. A wireless device within sight of an enabled LED could send and receive data through the air, initially at speeds around 1 to 10 megabits per second, with each LED serving as an access point to the network. The ability to rapidly turn LED lights on and off, faster than the human eye can detect, is key to the technology. Flickering light in patterns enables data transmission without any noticeable change in room lighting.
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Cell Phones Linked to Track Real-Time Traffic
PC Magazine (11/10/08) Hachman, Mark

The Mobile Millennium trial, a real-time wireless traffic network for San Francisco, launched this month and will link together GSM-based cell phones equipped with special software. The pilot project, which hopes to have 10,000 participants by April, will be a real-world test of the technology used in the Mobile Century trial last February, which like the new trial was a partnership of Nokia, the University of California, Berkeley, the California Department of Transportation, Navteq, Safetrip-21, and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). The Web site 511.org already provides real-time traffic information in the region based on data from FastTrak transponders, which are used for paying bridge tolls. The cell phone-based method will be less expensive and will not be limited to major freeway infrastructure. Organizers say the Mobile Millennium project will focus at first on commuters who drive between the Bay Area and the Lake Tahoe ski area, with the first phase limited to highways while later phases will add arterial routes. The software used for Mobile Millennium is called Virtual Trip Lines, which organizers called "a data sampling paradigm that anonymizes the GPS-based position information and aggregates it into a single data stream." This data is combined with other traffic data and then broadcast back to the phones and the Internet. A customized urban-focused version of the system, which models traffic in lower Manhattan, also is under development.
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