AP - The Bush administration is making the last preparations for what it hopes will be a fresh start in troubled disarmament talks with North Korea, with an official saying Friday that the reclusive regime appears ready to provide overdue details about its nuclear past.

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District is negotiating with a startup for a Wi-Fi network that would provide fast Internet access to riders throughout its 104-mile regional rail system.

BART would not pay anything for the network, which would be paid for by rider subscriptions and advertising, according to Wi-Fi Rail, a company based near Sacramento, Calif., that says it has four patents pending on its Wi-Fi technology for predetermined paths such as railways and roads.

Municipal wireless networks have had a hard time financially, but public transit offers a daily captive audience that is growing as gasoline prices rise. Wi-Fi Rail estimates that within three years, as many as 20 percent of BART's 180,000 regular riders will subscribe to the service, according to Michael Cromar, chief financial officer of Wi-Fi Rail.

Wi-Fi Rail has been testing the system for about a year on a stretch of track in downtown San Francisco as well as on an outdoor test track. More than 9,000 people have signed up to use the system and have signed on more than 42,000 times, Cromar said.

Now BART and the company are in negotiations on the terms of a full deployment, in phases, which would take as much as two years. On Thursday, BART staff presented an update at a meeting of the transit system's board of directors.

Unlike other, established Wi-Fi providers, Wi-Fi Rail was willing to build the network, for an estimated $20 million, at no cost to BART, the agency said. Like Sprint Nextel, which operates cellular base stations along a busy stretch of track in San Francisco, Wi-Fi Rail will have to offer wholesale capacity to other service providers to resell, said BART spokesman Linton Johnson.

The transit agency will use the wireless bandwidth to set up its in-car security cameras for live viewing, and it plans to also put screens in cars that give service information to riders, he said. BART would also receive a licensing fee from Wi-Fi Rail.

Riders will be able to use the service free with commercials that pop up every few minutes or buy a monthly subscription, Cromar said. The monthly fee would be competitive with other hotspot services that are priced between about $20 and $30, according to Cromar. Daily and other types of subscriptions would also be offered. For that, subscribers would share between 15Mbps and 22Mbps -- both upstream and downstream -- with other riders in a car. Tests have shown no noticeable slowdown between one and eight riders on a car, he said earlier this year. In tests, the system worked on trains moving as fast as 65 miles per hour.

Riders will connect directly to a standard Cisco Systems access point on each car, which in turn will link up to the trackside network. Underground, that system will use deliberately unshielded coaxial cable, called "leaky coax," and outdoor sections of the track will be served using solar-powered parabolic antennas.

Neither side estimated how long negotiations for the full buildout would take. But once talks are concluded, the first phase of the network should be finished and paid commercial service launched in about four months, according to Cromar.

Facebook's major overhaul of its core member profile pages is a risky but necessary move for the world's second-largest online social network, according to several developers of popular applications for the site.

The move is risky because Facebook will alter the user interface significantly, which can clash against people's natural resistance to change and prompt them to complain.

In addition, for some developers, particularly those new to the platform, the new profile design may limit the visibility of their applications, affecting their ability to build a user base.

"The redesign seems an overall step forward, but it will definitely have speed bumps from an actual implementation standpoint," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, co-founder and CEO of Hungry Machine.

However, with the explosive growth in members and in applications on Facebook, the average member profile interface has become very cluttered, a situation that harms end-users and developers alike.

"Facebook is a social [networking] operating system, and the profile is your entry point and your desktop. The utility of that [desktop] interface becomes less and less useful to the end-user as it gets more and more cluttered," said Shervin Pishevar, co-founder and CEO of Social Gaming Network (SGN). Thus, taking a bold step to clean up the member profile interface is a logical and natural enhancement for Facebook to make, he said.

Facebook has been talking about its redesign for a while, but this week provided concrete details about its plans, which are aimed at retaining the layout's orderly and clean look, a differentiator from competitors like MySpace.

At the heart of the redesign is the redistribution of profile content into different tabs so that users can better organize components such as the activity feed, photos, personal information, and applications. In addition, the activity feed tab will feature a new authoring control panel for creating and posting content called the Publisher Box. Moreover, the profile will have at the top a new horizontal navigation line with drop-down menus for its core features.

"The three main goals we have for this are: to make the profiles simple and clean; to give users control; and to let them emphasize the most recent and relevant content. This is what we've come up with as the best way to accomplish those goals," said Facebook's Mark Slee, the product manager of the new design.

Of course, any user interface change of this magnitude entails dangers, especially when it will affect about 70 million end-users and thousands of application developers. Facebook has experienced backlash from changes in the past, such as the initial versions of its activity feed feature and Beacon advertising program, both of which were criticized for being too intrusive on people's privacy.

"It's a pretty significant redesign, so users will definitely have an adjustment period," O'Shaughnessy said. "People are generally opposed to change, so there'll be a pretty reasonable amount of consternation from users just because it's different."

This is why O'Shaughnessy has been surprised that Facebook is opting to roll out all the changes at once, as opposed to doing it more gradually, since the latter approach might lessen the impact on end-users. "It's always a risk to roll out a really big change all at once," he said.

Yet, Slee is confident that the change won't be traumatic for end-users, since Facebook has been actively communicating the changes and plans via a Facebook group. Facebook also plans to have a time during which end-users will be able to toggle back and forth between the old and new layout, before the change is finalized at some point in June, Slee said.

From the application developer perspective, the redesign will also have significant effects, O'Shaughnessy said. "The applications aren't present nearly as much as they were before," he said, alluding to the fact that the new design groups applications into a separate tab.

Although users will be able to create tabs for individual applications and the new top-level navigation includes a drop-down list of applications, "there's definitely the capability for apps to be less discoverable," O'Shaughnessy said. "For newer developers especially, that'll be really hard."

Not that O'Shaughnessy worries about being affected by this. Hungry Machine began launching its applications in mid-2007, shortly after Facebook opened its platform to external developers, and they have gained very good traction and popularity, and are generating a healthy revenue stream.

However, Facebook argues that the new design will be good for developers, not only because applications can get their own tabs, but because users will be able to add application controls to the Publisher Box. "All applications will be able to tie right into that. We think that's a huge opportunity for developers," Slee said.

Meanwhile, having an entire tab devoted to applications will let developers "build a rich and deep experience that can take advantage of more space than has ever been provided in the profile," Slee said, adding that Facebook is opening a "sandbox" for developers to get acquainted with the profile changes.

Boris Silver, co-founder and CEO of Sport Interactiva, a developer of sport-themed games, also believes that end-users are likely to recoil at first and that visibility for applications in general will be diminished, but believes the changes will ultimately be for the better, particularly for companies like his whose applications are firmly established on Facebook. "It'll give room to high-quality and useful applications that people value most to rise up," Silver said.

Pishevar holds a similar view, saying that the changes will benefit applications that are genuinely engaging and of high quality, and not those that try to succeed via in-your-face, aggressive self-promotion tactics, something Facebook has been trying to discourage among developers.

"The apps shouldn't be reliant on real estate on a profile page to thrive. There was tremendous benefits early on in the platform from having that real estate, but it also made it probably too easy to get users without actually investing real resources into making quality, highly engaging applications," Pishevar said.

Despite the possible bumps in the road, the developers interviewed agreed that, as far as the actual redesign is concerned, Facebook is hitting the right notes. "I'm pretty high on the design itself. It's smoother, more efficient, more clear," O'Shaughnessy said.

Groups calling for a more robust broadband policy in the U.S. say the county has fallen behind in several key statistics.

Many groups have expressed concern that the U.S. continues to fall behind other nations in broadband adoption. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked the U.S. 15th among its 30 member nations in broadband adoption per capita as of December.

Some commentators have questioned the OECD numbers, saying the organization's recent reports don't take factors such as population density and even weather into account.

Still, critics of the current U.S. broadband policy have pointed to other problems in addition to adoption: Many rural areas lack access to broadband, and there's little competition among broadband providers even in some suburban and urban areas.

In addition, U.S. broadband users have slower speeds and pay higher prices than consumers in several other countries.

The broadband speeds in the U.S., compared to the other industrialized countries in the OECD, are just as concerning as the lack of adoption, some critics say. The average download speed among consumer broadband services in the U.S. is 8.9Mbps, according to the OECD, slower than average speeds in 18 other OECD countries.

Japan's average download speed is more than 10 times faster, at 93.7Mbps, while France's is 44.2Mbps and South Korea's is 43.3Mbps. Average download speeds in Sweden, New Zealand, Italy, Portugal, Finland, and Australia are above 12Mbps, according to the OECD.

In addition, U.S. broadband customers pay more than customers in 17 other OECD nations, according to a report released this month by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a tech-focused think tank.

U.S. customers pay $2.83 per each megabit per second of service, on a monthly basis, for the lowest advertised price in the country; while Japanese customers pay $0.13. Customers in South Korea, Finland, France, and Sweden all pay less than $0.43 per megabit per second on a monthly basis, the report says.

In recent debates over whether the U.S. should have a more comprehensive broadband policy, one group claims significant success: Connected Nation.

Connected Nation, which started as a state program called ConnectKentucky, uses mostly state and some federal and private funding to stimulate broadband rollout. The nonprofit group says it has expanded broadband availability in Kentucky from 60 percent of households to 95 percent of households since January 2004.

The not-so-secret sauce: Connected Nation works with local communities to identify demand for broadband then takes that information to broadband providers.

Other states are now working to replicate the Kentucky program, and a handful of bills in the U.S. Congress focus on giving states more authority to implement similar programs.

Each state will need to create its own broadband plan, and even different communities within a state will have different needs, said Brian Mefford, Connected Nation's CEO. "We're not trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution," he said. "It's just common sense to acknowledge that eastern Kentucky is very different in a number of respects from western Montana."

Some other groups have called for federal tax breaks for broadband providers and other incentives, but Connected Nation hasn't focused on those types of government programs. "We've seen a bigger impact when we can work locally to identify pent-up demand," Mefford said. "The greater motivating factor is when a [broadband] company realizes that there's an untapped market."

Broadband providers such as Verizon and AT&T have worked with Connected Nation, and the model has found support from other groups, including the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a tech-focused think tank.

But Connected Nation has drawn its share of criticism as well. ConnectKentucky had close ties with BellSouth, now part of AT&T, and has lobbied for telecom deregulation and tax breaks for large telecom carriers, said Art Brodsky, communications director for Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group and frequent critic of large carriers.

ConnectKentucky also received funding from AT&T, Brodsky said.

"They're good at telling a story," Brodsky added. "But they're pushing an agenda that benefits carriers."

Mefford acknowledges that ConnectKentucky has worked closely with broadband providers, but the focus was on rolling out service, he said. "We did that for pragmatic reasons, if nothing else," he added.

While ConnectKentucky has relationships with large providers, it has worked with a range of providers, down to the "smallest wireless ISPs," Mefford said. In an effort to map broadband service across the state, ConnectKentucky worked with more than 80 ISPs, he said. Less than 1 percent of the group's funding came from AT&T, he added.

Brodsky raised several other questions about Connected Nation in a January blog posting.

One of his points: While Kentuckians may have more access to broadband, many aren't buying it. At the beginning of 2007, less than 33 percent of Kentucky postal addresses subscribed to broadband, ranking the state 46th in broadband penetration across the U.S., according to a report from the Leichtman Research Group.

In June 2007, about 53 percent of all U.S. households subscribed to broadband service, according to Leichtman.

Mefford acknowledged that the U.S. needs to focus more on driving broadband adoption. "We have to be just as intently focused on the demand side as on the supply side," Mefford said. "It's not a 'Field of Dreams' proposition. That demand side of the proposition is practically universally overlooked."

In research Connected Nation has done, many U.S. consumers don't see the value proposition for broadband, Mefford said. For example, in Tennessee, 30 percent of residents who don't subscribe to broadband service have children at home. "You can make a compelling case that, in fact, for their children remain competitive, they do need a computer at home that's broadband-enabled," he said.

In February, Connected Nation released a study saying a 7 percent increase in broadband adoption in the U.S. would have an annual economic impact of $134 billion, including wages and savings in commuting and health-care costs.

"We don't get any impact just because somebody runs a line or makes a wireless signal available," Mefford said. "There's no economic or social benefit that happens just because that investment is made. The impact occurs when people make the decision to adopt."

ITIF president Robert Atkinson suggested that there may be a government role for promoting broadband with consumers. The U.S. government should support digital literacy efforts, and it should focus more effort on improving e-government, telework, and e-learning programs, he said.

Several other countries have taken aggressive steps to drive broadband demand, Atkinson noted. Sweden has given tax breaks to employers that give computers to employees. South Korea has allowed residents to lease computers through the postal service and has given free computers to low-income residents, he said.

"Korea just said, 'We are going to have everyone digitally literate,'" Atkinson said.

But while groups such as the ITIF and Connected Nation have focused on delivering faster broadband to U.S. consumers, many don't want to pay for the extra speed, said independent telecom analyst Jeff Kagan.

"We are seeing all sorts of super-fast Internet connections for higher monthly fees," Kagan said recently. "Faster is better, but if you have to pay extra for a faster connection many customers would prefer a slower connection at a lower cost."

Most consumers don't need more than a 3Mbps connection even as broadband providers are rolling out connections up to 20Mbps, Kagan added. "There are times when faster is needed, like when you download a movie or other large file, but the vast majority of use is at a much slower speed and customers don't even realize it," he said. "There is no reason for the average customer to think they need the fastest connection and have to pay for it."

Ken Hubbard worries that broadband speeds in the U.S. aren't adequate for the next wave of Web content.

Hubbard, president of networking startup InteliCloud Technology, said he's generally not a fan of large government programs, but it may be time for the U.S. Congress to look at ways to encourage rollout of faster broadband services.

Internet users are demanding more video and high-bandwidth applications, and high-definition video is on the way, said Hubbard, whose company is set to release a network appliance it dubs "network in a box."

"The infrastructure is not strong enough to support the growth that needs to happen," he said. "[Broadband] has got to become ubiquitous."

Hubbard's concerns have been echoed by several groups in recent months. Groups calling for a wide-ranging U.S. broadband policy say the nation is falling behind others in key broadband statistics. One problem, however, is that the debate over broadband policy spills over into many issues, including concerns about a lack of competition and net neutrality.

In March 2004, President George Bush called for broadband to be universally available across the country by 2007 -- a goal that has not been reached. Bush's broadband policy also focuses on keeping Internet service free of taxes and deregulating broadband providers, initiatives that largely came from Congress or the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

The call for a stronger broadband policy is far from unanimous. Broadband providers say they're spending billions of dollars a year to expand and improve their networks. And an FCC decision to deregulate telecom-based broadband providers, allowing them to stop sharing parts of their networks with competitors, is only three years old, others say.

Critics of the FCC's deregulation approach say it has eliminated most competition. But deregulation is "really bearing fruit" and should be given more time to work, said Bret Swanson, senior fellow at the conservative think tank, the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF).

In many cases, the debate about broadband policy gets wrapped up in related debates about net neutrality and broadband traffic management, Swanson added. While several groups have called for the FCC or Congress to prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing some Internet traffic, these net neutrality rules could limit legitimate traffic management techniques, causing network congestion, he said.

Passing net neutrality rules could "halt what is a very positive solution right now," he said. "The way a so-called new broadband policy is talked about seems to not be a step forward."

Some advocates of a new broadband policy also talk about the need for more competition, but because of the cost of building networks, a significant increase in competitors isn't likely, Swanson added. The U.S. may be better served focusing on two large, robust networks with wireless and satellite service filling in the holes, he said.

"You're never going to have dozens or hundreds of broadband providers to your home," he added.

Advocates of a broader national policy say broadband brings huge economic benefits to the U.S. -- a 7 percent increase in broadband adoption would create 2.4 million new jobs and have an annual economic impact of $134 billion, according to a study released in February by Connected Nation, a nonprofit group focused on improving broadband adoption across the U.S.

Critics of current policies say the U.S. is behind several other countries in broadband adoption, and many rural areas have little or no access to broadband. In addition, U.S. broadband users pay more for broadband and have access to slower speeds than several other nations, they say.

U.S. broadband providers say they are rolling out faster broadband -- Verizon, AT&T, and Qwest are all moving forward with fiber-based deployments. But Hubbard, whose company will aim its first product at providers of Internet-based services, doesn't see it happening fast enough to keep up with demand.

"To me, [the broadband] industry has had a shot at it, and they haven't done anything with it," he said.

Critics say Bush's universal broadband goal was largely unsuccessful, with many rural areas still without service or with little competition. The California State Broadband Task Force, in a January report, found that about 4 percent of the state's households, or 1,975 communities, didn't have access to broadband. About 1.4 million California residents, more people than live in 11 other states, don't have broadband service, the report said.

The California report is one of several released in recent months calling for a more comprehensive broadband policy in the U.S. The California task force focused on several things the state could do to encourage broadband rollout, including issuing state bonds to finance broadband expansion, 10 percent or 20 percent tax breaks for providers building networks in rural areas, and lifting the spending cap on a rural telecommunications program already in place.

Educause, a group focused on the benefits of IT on higher education, took a broader approach when it issued its Blueprint for Big Broadband in January. Educause called for a $100 billion investment in broadband in the U.S., with the federal government, state governments, and private industry each paying for a third of the costs. The federal government would pay about $8 billion a year for four years under the Educause plan.

The goal is 100Mbps to 1Gbps of broadband speed available to each U.S. resident and business, said Wendy Wigen, an Educause policy analyst. Educause wants "deployment with a big D, so to speak," she said. "When [government sources] quote 95 percent access ... it is for DSL or cable modem, which we feel is not sufficient for the Internet demand that is just around the corner."

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have both talked about the importance of broadband, Wigen noted.

But Robert Atkinson, president of tech-focused think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), suggested that big government programs aren't likely to gain traction in the U.S. An ITIF report this month compared U.S. broadband policies to several other countries, and found that nations such as Japan and South Korea created mandates for broadband providers that would have little chance of approval in the U.S.

Japan required DSL providers to rent out their lines to competitors at low prices, a policy the U.S. has moved away from. South Korea basically required broadband providers to build out the networks nationwide, Atkinson said. Broadband providers in those countries are "in a different world," he said.

While environmental factors such as weather and population density can have a major effect on broadband adoption, government policies can also help with adoption and rollout, Atkinson said. Instead of major spending projects, which could face major opposition, the recent ITIF report called for the U.S. government to take several smaller steps to encourage broadband rollout.

The U.S. government should adopt more favorable tax policies, allowing broadband network operators to depreciate their investments in next-generation networks faster, the report said. The ITIF recommended that the government make more wireless spectrum available, expand and reform programs aimed at delivering telecom services to rural areas, fund state programs already working to expand broadband deployment, such as the Connected Nation program.

In addition, U.S. residents have to decide what they want: fast broadband or broadband competition, Atkinson said. Part of the problem with the debate about broadband in the U.S. is that many groups have conflicting goals, with many consumer groups pushing for more competition, he said.

More competition is "completely incompatible" with superfast speeds, he added. Building competing broadband networks is an inefficient way to get faster networks, Atkinson said.

"This is not the widget industry," he added. "Competition works well in the widget industry because the fixed costs are fairly low."

U.S. policies should instead focus on rollout and speed, Atkinson added. "The goal should be to get as much broadband to as many people as possible," he said.

Atkinson and Link Hoewing, assistant vice president of Internet and technology issues at Verizon, both see potential in the Connected Nation model, a program started in Kentucky that uses state and private funding to push broadband into areas that don't have it.

Several other states are trying to replicate the Kentucky model that has expanded broadband availability from 60 percent of households in the state to 95 percent of households since January 2004. Verizon and other providers are working with states to map unserved areas and expand coverage, Hoewing said.

In rural areas in other states, "we've got some work to do," he added.

Like the PFF's Swanson, Hoewing pointed to the current broadband policy: the FCC's deregulation approach. The more government-centric approach in countries like Japan and South Korea wouldn't work in the U.S., he said.

Competition in the U.S. between telecom and cable companies are driving up speeds and driving down costs, he said. Broadband speeds in the U.S. are already competitive with many other counties, he added. "It's pretty evident competition is there," he said.

But for InteliCloud's Hubbard, the U.S. broadband industry is moving too slow, and it's time for the government to take a more proactive approach.

"I think they will get there, but it may be another 10 years to get there," he said. "We need to charge our slow growth into fast growth."