NASA's Apollo technology has changed history

Forty years after astronauts on NASA's Apollo 11 spacecraft first landed on the moon, many experts say the historic event altered the course of space exploration as well man's view of itself in the universe.



The Apollo missions also had another major affect on the world -- rapidly accelerating the pace of technology development. The work of NASA engineers at the time caused a dramatic shift in electronics and computing systems, scientists say.

questions for analytics vendors
10 questions to ask analytics vendors (before you buy)
Analytics purchase decisions are littered with opportunities for missteps. These 10 questions will help
READ NOW
Without the research and development that went into those space missions, top companies like Intel Corp. may not have been founded, and the population likely wouldn't be spending a big chunk of work and free time using laptops and Blackberries to post information on Facebook or Twitter.

"During the mid- to late-1960s, when Apollo was being designed and built, there was significant advancement," said Scott Hubbard, who worked at NASA for 20 years before joining the faculty at Stanford University, where he is a professor in the aeronautics and astronautics department. "Power consumption. Mass. Volume. Data rate. All the things that were important to making space flight feasible led to major changes in technology. A little told story is how much NASA, from the Cold War up through the late '80s or early '90s affected technology."

It's fairly well-known that technology developed by NASA scientists routinely makes its way into products developed in the robotics, computer hardware and software, nanotechnology, aeronautics, transportation and health care industries. While the story that Tang, the bright orange powdered beverage, was developed for astronauts is just a myth, many other advancements - think micro-electromechanical systems, supercomputers and microcomputers, software and microprocessors - were also created using technology developed by NASA over the past half century.

Hubbard noted that overall, $7 or $8 in goods and services are still produced for every $1 that the government invests in NASA.


But the string of Apollo missions alone -- which ran from the ill-fated, never-flown Apollo 1 mission in 1967 to Apollo 17, the last to land men on the moon, in 1972 - had a critical, and often overlooked impact on technology at a key time in the computer industry.

Daniel Lockney, the editor of Spinoff, NASA's annual publication that reports on the use of the agency's technologies in the private sector, said the advancements during the Apollo missions were staggering.

"There were remarkable discoveries in civil, electrical, aeronautical and engineering science, as well as rocketry and the development of core technologies that really pushed technology into the industry it is today," he said. "It was perhaps one of the greatest engineering and scientific feats of all time. It was huge. The engineering required to leave Earth and move to another heavenly body required the development of new technologies that before hadn't even been thought of. It has yet to be rivaled."

Lockney cited several technologies that can be directly linked engineering work done for the Apollo missions.

Software designed to manage a complex series of systems onboard the capsules is an ancestor to the software that today is used in retail credit card swipe devices, he said. And race car drivers and firefighters today use liquid-cooled garments based on on the devices created for Apollo astronauts to wear under their spacesuits. And the freeze-dried foods developed for Apollo astronauts to eat in space are used today in military field rations, known as MREs, and as part of survival gear.

WHAT READERS LIKE
10 Signs Layoffs Are Coming
Sen. Durbin calls Abbott Labs' IT layoffs 'harsh and insensitive’
New iPhone 6s Plus in box
First look: The new iPhone 6S Plus impresses
Credit card on fire
ACLU: Orwellian Citizen Score, China's credit score system, is a warning for...
And those technologies are just a drop in the bucket to importance of the development of the integrated circuit, and the emergence of Silicon Valley, which were very closely linked to the Apollo program.

The development of that integrated circuit, the forbearer to the microchip, basically is a miniaturized electronic circuit that did away with the manual assembly of separate transistors and capacitors. Revolutionizing electronics, integrated circuits are used in nearly all electronic equipment today.

While Robert Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel Corp. is credited with co-founding the microchip, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments demonstrated the first working integrated circuit that was built for the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA.

NASA, according to Lockney, set the parameters of what it needed out of the technology and then Kilby designed it. Kilby later won the Nobel Prize in Physics for for creating the technology.

"The co-investment between defense and civilian space was very real and hugely important," said Hubbard.

"With Apollo, they needed to cut down on weight and power consumption. Mass into space equals money," he said. "It has been and continues to be about $10,000 a pound to get to lower Earth orbit. They certainly don't want computers that take up basketball courts. They want something very powerful and very light that doesn't take massive power. That was one of the driving requirements that led to the development of the integrated circuit, where you put all the components on a chip rather than having a board stuffed with individual transistors and other circuit components."

He added that the microchip took the high-tech industry to a place of mass production and economies of scale.

"There was a major shift in electronics and computing and at least half credit goes to Apollo," said Hubbard. "Without it, you wouldn't have a laptop. You'd still have things like the Univac."

Dubai - a city of hi-tech contrasts

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is known for its opulent seven-star hotels, tall buildings and shopping centres symbolic of a society driven by aspiration.
As the country's centre of innovation, Dubai is leading the way in technological advances, including in motoring.



The city has a free flow tolling system so drivers are automatically charged at toll gates using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.
The RFID chip, linked to a prepaid toll account, rests in a windscreen and deducts the fee when a car passes under the sensor.

Visitors opting for public transport will find the modern and driverless Dubai Metro ahead of the times in comparison to most other countries.
Passengers in Gold Class can surf the net onboard via wi-fi, while the train itself is connected to the internet using Wimax technology.

Young innovation

The youth of Dubai has embraced consumer technology and attempts to innovate in this sector have started emerging.
One company has created a memory stick which paired with a computer can stream the PC's media files as if they were on the stick itself.
This means a movie can be played back wirelessly on a media device such as a PlayStation without the need to copy any files.

Ahmad Zahran, the founder of Infinitec, said Dubai has a long way to go before it becomes a fertile ground for technology entrepreneurs.
"Investors would still rather invest in real estate than they would in an IT company. The concept of R&D'ing something out of the Middle East is just not understood. The thinking is why not just buy it in from China and export it?" he said.


'Bling' handsets

International brands have adopted the city as the place to experiment with new designs aimed exclusively at the Arab market.

Mobile phone

Young people are adopting mobile phones with modern designs
"Well, there are different segments obviously. There is a very predominant segment which would go for what you would call 'bling' design," said Hamad Malik, regional marketing director at LG. "People here like golden colour mobiles, pink colour mobiles do very well."
The Blackberry in particular has found a cultural niche in what still is a conservative society where pre-marital liaisons between boys and girls are strongly discouraged.

Younger generations of Emiratis are turning in droves to the mobile phone's free instant messaging service which leaves no trace of conversations on the handset, unlike text messages.
Distinctive features such as built-in solar charging, compasses pointing in the direction of Mecca and reminders of prayer times, also give international phone brands leverage with an underserved local market.

Restricted voice

Despite enthusiasm in the smartphone market, the availability of broadband for domestic consumption is still rather limited with only two providers to choose from.
It costs a home £45 per month for speeds of up to 1mbps, and some of the content on the net has also been restricted.

Dubai has also made it illegal to use voice over internet phone (voip) call services such as Skype which could provide a cheaper alternative to costly international calls.
Raghu Venkatamaran, from telecoms provider Du, said the Skype business model would mean others would benefit at his company's expense.

"They are not investing in fibre, they are not investing in technology to carry calls," he said.
"They are not paying us a single penny for building our networks. We are a young operator and we spend a lot of money building up a nationwide telecom infrastructure".

Blacklisted sites

As a Muslim country, the UAE still has conservative values when compared to some other parts of the world.

Warning on restricted websites
The Dubai authorities have blocked some sites including social networks
The country's authorities have blocked access to some websites, including social networking destinations, but not online news.

However, an attempt to view photo-sharing site Flickr brings up a screen saying it is "content that is prohibited under the Internet Access Management Regulatory Policy" of the UAE.
Alexander McNabb, a Dubai-based tech blogger said: "Panoramio is unblocked and so are other photo sharing services like deviantART I believe because the technology is available to allow some selective blocking of what is pornographic full nudity content. But apparently that can't be done with Flickr".

The country's web filtering works on a blacklist of sites and individual pages with content considered inappropriate for the region.
Web filtering occasionally rejects criticism of Dubai's leadership - for instance if a blog contains a cartoon deemed insulting to the Sheikh.

Technology advances at Central Laser Facility

The Central Laser Facility in the UK houses five laser systems that are regularly accessed by scientists from academia and industry. With a total user community estimated at more than 600 scientists, the CLF provides more than 4400 individual user-access days per year, including 2700 for PhD students.



In the last five years, research conducted at the CLF has produced more than 500 peer-reviewed publications, often in extreme areas of sciences.

The CLF's five major laser facilities enable scientists to study computational plasma physics, experiment with micro-fabrication and laser microscopy, manipulate cells with laser tweezers, and perform other experiments.

Vulcan facility
The Vulcan facility, one of the most intense lasers in the world, has broken records on several occasions for producing the highest optical intensity ever on a target. It is based on versatile Nd:glass chirped-pulse-amplification technology delivering beams into two target areas.

In its petawatt mode, it generates 1 PW (500 J/500 fs) beam with a peak intensity of 1021 Wcm–2. The shots can be fired every 20 minutes. The temporal shape of the long pulse beams can be programmed, and frequency doubling crystals can be used to generate the second harmonic.

The Vulcan facility is used in fusion energy, electron- and ion-acceleration research, laboratory astrophysics and plasma physics research.

 
Vulcan petawatt laser.
Gemini complements Vulcan
The Gemini facility is a high-power laser based on Ti:sapphire chirped-pulse-amplification technology delivering a unique dual beam combination of 2 x 0.5 PW (30 fs, 15 J) on target at a rate of one shot every 20 seconds. It can deliver peak intensities greater than 1021 Wcm–2 with 10–11 amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) contrast.

The capabilities of the Gemini facility balance and complement those of Vulcan.

 
The Gemini facility.
Artemis beam lines
Artemis is a high-repetition-rate Ti:sapphire laser system providing a unique combination of ultrafast and XUV pulses for studies of ultrafast dynamics in atomic, molecular, and condensed- matter systems. Coherent XUV pulses are produced through high harmonic generation (HHG) and are synchronized to pump or probe pulses from the UV to the far infrared.

One XUV beam line provides widely tuneable femtosecond narrowband XUV pulses with near transform-limited energy resolution, enabling time- and angle-resolved photoemission measurements from condensed matter with XUV probe pulses. A second broadband XUV beamline is used for HHG spectroscopy, including measurements of attosecond dynamics in molecules.

 
The Artemis facility.
ULTRA used for dynamic processes
ULTRA is one of world’s most advanced systems for multi-dimensional time-resolved spectroscopy, offering a range of ultrafast vibrational techniques. It operates at 10 kHz with a multi-beam specification, synchronously and independently tuneable from the ultraviolet to the deep infrared, providing fs to ms time-resolved IR, ultrafast 2-dimensional infrared spectroscopy, ps to ms time-resolved 2D IR spectroscopy, and ps time-resolved resonance Raman spectroscopy.

ULTRA can operate on samples in the solution and solid phases and is used for the investigation of dynamic processes in areas ranging from fundamental chemistry to structural biology.

OCTOPUS imaging stations
The OCTOPUS comprises a collection of seven advanced imaging stations driven from a central laser hub with more than 20 specialized laser systems. Any number of these can be simultaneously directed to any of the stations for utmost experimental flexibility.

Advanced image processing algorithms are used to image real systems in real environments in real time, often well below the diffraction limit. Applications are mainly in the biomedical sciences, covering areas such as research into in-cell protein structure, cell signaling networks in health and disease, virus infection, and plant biology.

The end stations include multiphoton confocal, single-photon confocal, single molecule, single-molecule confocal, and super-resolution (PALM and STORM) imaging.

CLF tweezers for healthcare research

The CLF has developed several highly specialized optical traps, or “tweezers,” that are used for holding and manipulating objects such as bacteria, protein crystals, cells, or micron-sized beads.

Their applications include measuring pico-Newton forces within cells either through direct capture or by using laser-controlled nanoprobes in environmental and physical science research.

A new technique for microcrystal manipulation with laser tweezers, for instance, developed by researchers from the Diamond Light Source and the CLF was reported earlier this year and may save precious research days and resources and lead to faster breakthroughs in healthcare.

The novel laser-tweezer process helps to streamline the selection and placement of microscopic protein crystals for crystallographic analysis.

Preparing the crystals can often take a long time, but the new technique allows researchers to select and place the protein crystals on customized sample holders for crystallographic analysis on one of the structural biology beamlines at Diamond Light Source, the UK's national synchrotron science facility.

Studying protein crystals through X-ray crystallography enables researchers to understand the structure and function of a molecule.

Acceleration and ignition experiments
The Vulcan facility has been extensively used to investigate and develop the science underpinning advanced ignition routes towards achieving fusion energy. The achievements include the Fast Ignition concept, as proposed by Ryosuke Kodama and collaborators in 2001.

This technique requires much lower implosion velocities than conventional central hot-spot inertial fusion schemes such as that used at the USA’s National Ignition Facility.

The CLF has also initiated and led the European High Power Laser Energy Research (HiPER) initiative to translate the single-shot proof of principle of inertial confinement fusion into a program of inertial fusion civil energy research, where the process can be repeated many times a second to extract desirable power output at ~1 GW level.

Several breakthroughs in laser-driven plasma- based electron accelerators have also come from CLF, from the first evidence of wave breaking to the acceleration of mono-energetic electrons with energy > 1GeV on Gemini. With the advent of 10 PW lasers, bright mono-energetic electrons with energy >10 GeV promise to become a reality.

Laser-driven proton and ion acceleration experiments are now capable of delivering >50 MeV per nucleon. Work on developing new acceleration mechanisms exhibiting improved beam properties and better energy scaling is currently underway. Potential future applications include proton therapy for cancer treatment.

Intense X-ray sources
The high fields associated with the focused Vulcan and Gemini laser beams have enabled the exploration and evaluation of soft and hard X-ray production physics as sources of secondary radiation. High-harmonic production has been studied on both Vulcan and Gemini using targets ranging from low density gases to solids. A UK team led by Queen’s University of Belfast extended these bright sources into the keV region for the first time using the Vulcan laser.

At high laser intensities and relatively long pulse-duration pulses provided by the Vulcan PW laser facility, scientists reported in 2008 observing that up to 5% of the electron energy in the beam is converted directly into synchrotron X-rays and that the peak brightness of the X-ray beam is 1017 photons/s/mm2/mrad2/0.1% bandwidth witha critical energy of 25 keV, starting to approach the output parameters of second-generation synchrotron sources.

Medical and chemical research
OCTOPUS confocal and super-resolution stations provide information on the interaction of drug and probe molecules with cells and tissues, with applications in medical therapies and diagnostics. Photodynamic therapy is investigated using both ULTRA (chemistry underlying the process) and OCTOPUS (behavior of therapeutic agents in cells and tissues).

OCTOPUS stations are also in use developing techniques to understand, from a systems biology viewpoint, the function of drugs at the molecular level in diseases like cancer, osteoporosis, and neurological disorders. Researchers are also using OCTOPUS to study the structural dynamics of protein folding in Alzheimer’s and motor-neuron disease and to understand how DNA is damaged and repaired.

Researchers at the CLF also invented and support development of Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy (SORS), which could probe deep within tissues for noninvasive cancer and bone disease diagnosis.

Companies spin out from CLF
These CLF researchers, along with collaboration with UK industry, government agencies, hospitals, and the defense industry, have played a key role in the formation of about 12 spin out companies.

One company, Cobalt Light Systems, is developing unique products for analyzing chemical materials through translucent layers (bottles, bags, clothes, skin, etc.) using SORS.

 
Cobalt instruments use SORS technology.
Cobalt Light Systems has developed products and technologies for noninvasive screening of bottles for liquid explosives for aviation security, quality control of pharmaceutical products, and scanning of incoming raw materials noninvasively in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

The CLF’s most recent spinout, Scitech Precision, supplies micro-targets for high-power laser experiments developed originally at CLF’s target fabrication facilities.

IR research on chemical reactions and processes
The ULTRA infrared station is used to investigate chemical reactions in solution on the picosecond and femtosecond timescales. A success reported in 2011 was the elucidation of reactions of CN radicals; comparisons with the gas phase revealed subtle, yet important differences due to interactions with the solvent.

A novel technique for mapping energy transfers within molecules, giving an instantaneous snapshot of electron interactions and types of couplings, was developed on Artemis by Ian Mercer. The technique of angle-resolved coherent (ARC) wave-mixing uses broadband light from a hollow fiber source in a new twist on four-wave mixing.

ARC measurements of a photosynthetic protein from purple algae showed peaks due to energy transfer in and between different pigments in the protein. The work confirmed evidence of strong coherent coupling in the protein and revealed the time-ordering of transition energies.

OPCPA developed in UK
The CLF pioneered the technique of Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification (OPCPA) for the generation of extreme peak powers and intensities in excess of 1 PW. The concept gets around the issue of limited temporal compressibility of typically spectrally narrow high-power laser beams.

This opens a new route to very high peak-power laser systems (>100 PW). The concept was quickly adopted as the pre-amplifier of choice for high-energy petawatt laser systems around the world.

 aerial photo of Central Laser Facility
At CLF, OPCPA is used as the front end for the Vulcan Petawatt beam line and forms the basis of a project to upgrade the Vulcan High Power Laser facility to ~10-20 PW peak power, providing unique access to focused intensities of >1023 Wcm–2.

When completed, this will represent the most powerful and most intense laser in the world. It will be capable of investigating some of the new areas of extreme physics including high-energy density plasma physics promoted to a completely new and uncharted territory where the effects of QED in a plasma environment start to play a significant, if not a dominant, role.

Development of DiPOLE
Development of the next generation of efficient laser sources is key to realizing many of the conceptual applications developed on high-power lasers. Due to the inherent inefficiencies of the existing flashlamp-pumped laser technology, high-energy laser systems (>10 J) are broadly limited to pulse periods of tens of seconds.

In contrast, laser diodes offer high electrical efficiency, a low divergence output giving efficient pump radiation coupling, and an output spectrum which can be tuned to the absorption region of the laser medium. The resulting overall efficiency of such a source is typically greater than 10%, compared to 0.1% for traditional flashlamp-driven systems.

This opens up new opportunities combining high peak power with high average power. In this area, the CLF is developing a system, Diode Pumped Laser for Optical Experiments (DiPOLE) with architecture inherently scalable in single beams to energies beyond 1 kJ at repetition rates above 10 Hz. Such technology promises to open a host of new applications such as security screening of containers, healthcare imaging, and oncology.

How many pages are on the internet?

(CNN) -- It seems like an answerable question, right?
But no one really knows how many websites or individual Web pages make up this seemingly infinite digital universe that is the internet.



Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, has written that there are at least a trillion Web pages in existence, which means the internet's collective brain has more neurons than our actual gray matter that's stuffed between our ears.

"The Web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about 100 billion neurons," Kelly writes in his 2010 book "What Technology Wants."
"Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page on average links to 60 other pages. That adds up to a trillion 'synapses' between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number of links -- but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The global machine is."

Wild, huh?
Well, at long last, an answer may be coming.
A group called the World Wide Web Foundation -- appropriately founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who pretty much created the internet -- is on a quest to figure out, with some degree certainty, how big the internet really is.

With a $1 million grant from Google, the foundation plans to release the results of its online forensic search, called the World Wide Web Index, early next year, the foundation's CEO, Steve Bratt, said in a recent interview.

Here's how the foundation described the project in an e-mail to CNN:
"The Web Index will be the world's first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people and nations. It will cover a large number of developed and developing countries, allowing for comparisons of trends over time and benchmarking performance across countries."
Bratt stressed that it won't answer every question people have about the internet, but he hopes the index, which will be presented as a series of annual reports, will go a long way toward filling in some of the gaps.

"We want to be really careful about what will happen (as a result of the Web Index) because we just don't know," he said. "But this will be probably the best opportunity to quantify" the Web.
So, what kind of tools does one use to try to measure the internet? Certainly not yard sticks and rulers, right?

Bratt said the Web Foundation will conduct surveys of internet users, interview relevant people and try to gather data from internet service providers, national governments and search engines such as Google to come up with its findings.

In addition to looking at how big the Web is, the group wants to use data to tease out the role social media sites had in sparking revolution in the Middle East this year. And it wants to find out what kinds of websites people all over the world are looking at; what websites exist; and how internet trends differ from country to country and region to region.

The International Telecommunications Union digs into some similar questions, publishing reports on the number of internet users in various countries and how fast connections are around the world (South Korea is by far the fastest, in case you were wondering. The United States is super-slow in comparison).

Bratt said the Web Foundation's work will supplement, not replace, what the ITU does.
The foundation is starting work on the Web Index soon and is still seeking funding for the project, he said. The first of five annual reports will be available early next year, the group says.

Google Traffic Dominates the Internet

Like a giant gravity-bending star, Google has grown so massive it is starting to have a measurable effect on Internet traffic flows, an analysis of the company's activities has found.
The blog analysis by Arbor Network's Craig Labovitz follows on from his company's Atlas Observatory Report of last October which offered a fascinating insight into how the Internet is being moulded by a small and decreasing number of super-carriers, with Google at their head.



Arbor has now provided more detail on the astounding explosion of Google's Internet presence, which as of last summer it estimates as accounting for peak rates of 10 percent of all Internet inter-domain Internet traffic it sees travelling through its servers.

Between June 2007 and a year later, the average traffic percentage grew from around 1 percent to around 2.5 percent; by last summer the percentage was a minimum of 5 percent and growing.

The main reason was Google's acquisition of YouTube in 2007, which consumes huge volumes of video traffic, the application that almost on its own is driving capacity growth at the peer network level.

As significant as their sheer number is how all these Google-related packets move across the Internet. In mid-2007, Google used third-party "transit" (i.e other networks) for a large percentage of its Internet traffic. By this February, Arbor reckons that over 60 percent of Google's traffic was being channelled through direct interconnects that link its massive data centres to one another.

To put this in less technical terms, Google and the customers using its services are not so much using the Internet as Google's own private corner of it, a peered network wit

google searchhin a wider Internetwork.
Arbor's Labovitz reminds us that Google has apparently spent the last year installing Google Global Cache Servers (GGCs) in as many as half of all third-party consumer networks in the US and Europe, which extends the edge of its network into even more data centres.

"Unlike most global carriers, Google's backbone does not deliver traffic on behalf of millions of subscribers nor thousands of regional networks and large enterprises. Google's infrastructure supports, well, only Google," comments Labovitz.

Famous for its search, e-mail and YouTube video sharing, Google has quietly and relentlessly turned itself into the first super-carrier of the Internet era.

Fast Internet access becomes a legal right in Finland

(CNN) -- Finland has become the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right.



The move by Finland is aimed at bringing Web access to rural areas, where access has been limited.
The move by Finland is aimed at bringing Web access to rural areas, where access has been limited.

Starting in July, telecommunication companies in the northern European nation will be required to provide all 5.2 million citizens with Internet connection that runs at speeds of at least 1 megabit per second.

The one-megabit mandate, however, is simply an intermediary step, said Laura Vilkkonen, the legislative counselor for the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

The country is aiming for speeds that are 100 times faster -- 100 megabit per second -- for all by 2015.

"We think it's something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection," Vilkkonen said.

Finland is one of the most wired in the world; about 95 percent of the population have some sort of Internet access, she said. But the law is designed to bring the Web to rural areas, where geographic challenges have limited access until now.

"Universal service is every citizen's subjective right," Vilkkonen said.

Should fast Internet access be everyone's legal right?

It is a view shared by the United Nations, which is making a big push to deem Internet access a human right.

In June, France's highest court declared such access a human right. But Finland goes a step further by legally mandating speed.

On the other hand, the United States is the only industrialized nation without a national policy to promote high-speed broadband, according to a study released in August by the Communications Workers of America, the country's largest media union.

Forty-six percent of rural households do not subscribe to broadband, and usage varies based on income, the study found.

In February, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is expected to submit a national plan to Congress. The FCC says that expanding service will require subsidies and investment of as much as $350 billion -- much higher than the $7.2 billion President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package has set aside for the task.

3G network brings internet to Mount Everest climbers

Mount Everest climbers can now surf the internet and make video calls through a 3G network, Nepalese telecoms firm Ncell says.




The company has installed eight 3G base stations along the route to Everest base camp.
The wireless network could help thousands of tourists who visit Mount Everest every year, Ncell claims.

Climbers and trekkers in the Everest region have so far relied on satellite phones and a voice-only mobile network.
Ncell, which is owned by the Swedish company TeliaSonera, says its highest 3G base station is near Everest base camp at 5,200 metres (17,000 ft).
The coverage would reach the summit of the world's highest mountain, company head Pasi Koistinen, said.

He added that this had not been tested yet.
The 3G network will help climbers and trekkers stay in touch with their families and trip organisers, Mr Koistinen said.

It will also enable them to receive weather reports and safety information while they are climbing.
Around 3,000 people have climbed to the Everest summit since Edmund Hillary first conquered the peak in 1953 and used runners to carry messages from his expedition to the nearest telegraph office.
Less than one third of Nepal's population have access to telecommunication services.
TeliaSonera announced that it would invest more than $100m (£63m) in the next year to increase mobile coverage in the country.