Technology Update

While cell towers actually started being built in the late 1970’s, the boom in development did not really start until Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Instead of having two wireless providers in any one area, customers now found that there were up to eight companies with licenses from the FCC to provide Personal Communications Service (PCS) in their area.

Initially, each wireless provider built its own towers and rarely collocated (shared) on the other’s towers. This made for rapid development of communication sites and towers and a plethora of landowners with cell towers on their property. As you can imagine, many landowners had little to base the lease negotiations on and signed agreements that were substandard in comparison to today’s lease rates.

Today, with the advent of much information (or misinformation) on the internet, those same landowners are learning that the deal they signed might not be a good one. As the standard cell tower lease is a 25 year lease with termination rights only vested in the lessee (cellular carrier), the landowners often wonder if they can get out of the lease or renegotiate it.

The answer to this question is not an easy one and resides in the cell tower lease document. Fortunately for some landowners, the lease agreements signed in the early days after 1996 were not as advanced as those of today. Many lease agreements were only for 10 years and landowners with those types of agreements may now have the ability to reneogtiate for a better deal.

The key here is that the lease agreement must state that the landowner has the right to terminate as well as the lessee. If so, then that opens the opportunity to renegotiate. Many times, the wireless company that owns the tower will be in touch way before the lease expires to renegotiate.

If the lease does not give the landowner the right to terminate, then the chance of successful renegotiation declines. The only basis for renegotiation would be if the wireless company has breached the lease agreement by failing to pay or by violating another clause. It is important to note that most lease require that the landowner notify the lessee of a breach and they are given the opportunity to cure it. The most common reasons for breach in a cell tower lease include failure to pay rent, failure to get approval to sublet the site to another company, failure to get consent to an assignment of the tower, and failure to maintain the site location as required. If you believe that the tower owner has breached the lease, seek legal counsel and make sure to notify the tower owner promptly.

In the event that you decide that a lease can be renegotiated, it is best to hire a consultant or attorney with experience with in negotiating wireless leases and whom is familiar with what fair market rates are for communication tower and cell site leases. If you determine that the lease cannot be renegotiated, then just sit back and continue to receive your “mailbox money”.

Ken Schmidt is the owner of Steel in the Air, a cell tower consulting firm. Steel in the Air provides expert consultations on cell tower valuation, cell tower lease negotiations, lease renegotiations and lease buyouts. Ken has been quoted on cell towers in the NY Times and numerous other publications.

So, you’ve decided to fine-tune your PC by using a performance optimizer, but there are hundreds of products available on the market and to find a solution that fits your need can be daunting. In this article, I will explain what performance optimizers are and how they work while suggesting what you should look for when choosing such a utility.

What is a Performance Optimizer?
Performance optimizers are software utilities that allow you to ensure your PC is automatically optimized and its performance maximized. These tools should also allow you to keep your PC running at peak performance. When too many of your resources are being occupied unnecessarily or beyond certain levels that you have established, the software should warn you to take immediate action. Performance optimizers should automatically fine-tune all your resources: hardware (CPU and memory) and your system settings. This will help you enjoy a faster, cleaner and more stable environment that will greatly minimize slowdowns and crashes.

Performance optimizers automatically dig into your hardware and free up valuable resources, remove system hogs that slow your computer down or cause it to crash. By looking at how your CPU is processing the information for all the tasks or processes at hand, these utilities determine the best configuration so that you can make the most of your computer. These tools also look at whether the tasks at hand are accounted for by legitimate programs.

For example, some performance optimizers are able to recognize that the CPU is handling a process that is spyware and should enable you to automatically scan your system and remove such threats. When optimizing memory, performance optimizers look at how your computer is using RAM and how Windows is creating and operating page file (or virtual) memory. By optimizing RAM memory, these tools help your computer avoid creating virtual memory. Moreover, they can also minimize the size of your virtual memory file.

Many performance optimizers, like SpeedUpMyPC, also have warning messages so that if your memory usage reaches a critical level, you could take remedial action. In some cases, these nifty utilities allow you to assign more CPU resources to any particular application that you are running, e.g. a game or a DVD. Performance optimizers use similar logic when optimizing your system settings – for example, they look at orphaned start-up programs bidding you to remove them. They also look for residuals of uninstalled or incorrectly removed programs to make your PC cleaner, safer, and, ultimately, more stable.

What should you look out for when choosing a performance optimizer?
Ideally, the product will be robust and make efficiency gains in the way your CPU handles Windows and all your programs. You must also be able to monitor CPU, memory and hard drive usage to identify possible future bottlenecks and avoid annoying delays and crashes. The software must also optimize your RAM and page file memory while warning you should you be running out of resources. You should have an automatic way of making the most of your computer while minimizing the time it takes to boot. Registry files are also a source of slow-downs and crashes – you will have a faster PC by compacting your registry. Finally, the software must ensure that any harmful or unnecessary background processes such as spyware, adware, key-loggers and viruses do not slowdown your PC and jam its inner workings.

Many products on the market focus on a single aspect of your PC such as optimizing registry files or recovering memory. Although these are important functions and will enhance your computing experience, you will end up buying performance optimizers and using them in conjunction with the other products. My advice, at this stage, is to find a product that does most of the functions and then deepening your investment according to the problem you might have. Only when you feel that you cannot push your PC further should you consider upgrading hardware.

With all this background information, you do not need to google “speeding up my pc” or “performance optimizers”. I usually do three things when buying utilities: (a) find out how they work and what they are supposed to do; (b) see what my preferred tech forum newsletters have to say about them and their recommendations; and, finally (c) read the reviews on the recommended products.

Luckily, this system has worked wonders for me and I have rarely thrown away good money on the software I have in my library.

Kevin James Vella is the Public Relations Manager of Uniblue Systems Ltd (http://www.uniblue.com), a global software developer. Kevin’s passion for writing and ICT has seen him publishing several articles on personal technology, electronic commerce and online marketing.

So you’re sick and tired of AOL Instant Messenger. You’re looking for something fresh and new that will just work. Well Google feels the same way. On Wednesday August 24th they released their version of AIM, Google Talk.

Although Google Talk and AIM do basically the same thing, Google Talk is very different. For starters anyone can join AIM, in order to use Google Talk you need to have a Gmail account. AIM will also let you make a profile, Google Talk you can’t. However there are more features on Google Talk that are left out in AIM.

Google Talk’s main feature is being able to call friends that are on your list. Call means being able to talk through a microphone to them and they respond through theirs, much like the service Skype. There is a similar feature in the current version of AIM; however it’s not as easy to use.

Let’s say you’re talking to someone in the conversation window. You decide that this conversation would work a lot better over the phone. Well don’t get up and dial a number, simply plug in the microphone and headphones and guess what you’re connected, just like a phone. All you have to do is press the “Call” button in the window, you’ll hear a dial tone, and when the other user accepts you’re connected.

At the top of the window, when call is activated, you’ll see a volume meter for your friend and one for you. All it takes is a click of a button, how easy is that?

The other easy thing about Google Talk is the simplicity behind making a customized message. When you’re online you’ll have a small snippet under your name. You can customize that to whatever you want, that could be considered somewhat of a profile. You can also see peoples’ away messages right under their name. Making an away message is just as simple as changing the text under your name. Just go to the drop down list under your name in the window (not the friends list) and go to the “Custom Message” with the red circle next to it.

Google has also added a feature to make it easier to sign up for the service. When you select to add a friend you can insert an email address that isn’t a Gmail one. All it does is email the person letting them know about the service and offering a download link. This makes it really easy to convince your friends to make the switch.

Another feature that is greatly appreciated in Google Talk is the way it works directly with Gmail. You can add people on your contacts to the service within the Google Talk interface, plus it will notify you when a new email has been received. You can also go directly to your Gmail inbox via a link from the interface.

This next feature won’t mean much to the average user, but to some misfortunate geeks with low RAM it may. Google Talk consumes around 3MB of RAM. AOL Instant Messenger takes around 9MB. If you have a lot of other programs open and you can’t afford to waste RAM Google Talk will work great.

Google Talk is also much cleaner looking than AIM. There are no ads and no added crap like a stock ticker or news ticker. However the one thing that I’d like to see in Google Talk is notifications that tell you when someone logs on or off. This feature has been available in AIM for about 2 years.

There some other things that could be enhanced. In the settings menu I’d like to see a setting to customize how often it checks the Gmail mailbox, customize sounds, and more customization for notifications.

Staying on the topic of customization I’d like to see, in later versions, the option to add categories in your friends list. Something so you could put all your family under one list, friends under the others and so on.

Overall I wouldn’t rush out and download Google Talk quite yet. Right now I’d think that it would be more convenient to corporations so that employees can interact with each other. It won’t take down AIM, because AIM is just too popular, but it might steal some Yahoo! Messenger or MSN users.

This article was originally posted on http://www.p2btech.com

Although this is the full article, screen shots are avilable at http://www.p2btech.com/googletalk.html

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