Book reviews

^cAbd al‐Malik b. Habib. Kitāb al‐Ta'rij (La historia). Edición y estudio por Jorge Aguadé. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas & Instituto de Cooperación con el Mundo Arabe, 1991 (Fuentes Arabico‐Hispanas, 1). 163 + 224 pp. [Arabic title: Kltāb al‐Ta'tikh]

Kedar, Benjamin Z., ed. The Horns of Hattin. Jerusalem and London: Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, Israel Exploration Society and Variorum 1992. 368 pp., 12 plates; $74.75 (cloth).

Köprülü, Mehmed Fuad. The Seljuks of Anatolia: Their History and Culture According to Local Muslim Sources. Translated and edited by Gary Leiser. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1992. xi +101 pp., $22.00 (cloth).

Cameron, Averil and Conrad, Lawrence I., eds. The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East: Problems in the Literary Source Material (Papers in the First Workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam). Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992. xiv + 428pp., 12 plates; $29.25 (cloth).

Vereno, Ingolf. Studien zum ältesten alchemistischen Schrifttum. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1992 (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, 155). 414pp.

Tolan, John. Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1993. xv + 288pp., $34.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).

Lassner, Jacob. Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994. 281 pp., $19.95 (paper), $49.95 (cloth).

Menocal, María Rosa. Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994. xv + 295pp., $34.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).

Massignon, Louis. The Passion of al‐Hallāj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam. Translated and edited by Herbert Mason. Abridged edition, Bollingen Series XCVIII. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xxxi + 293pp.

Viguera Molins, Maria Jesús. El Islam en Aragón. Saragossa: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada, 1995 (Colección “Mariano de Pano y Ruata”, 9), 174 pp., 182 ills. in colour, maps, diagrams, charts etc No price stated.     

Analysis of the urban/rural broadband divide in Canada: Using GIS in planning terrestrial wireless deployment

Millions of Canadians residing in Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote communities do not have broadband Internet access. This situation has led to a national “broadband divide.” That is, the deployment of wireline broadband is very limited in Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote areas because of the significant expense of installation and maintenance of the wired infrastructure needed to reach dwellings in these locations.Terrestrial broadband wireless technology, on the other hand, does not entail the same kind of physical infrastructure. As a result, there are dramatic changes in how spatial considerations affect the provision of broadband Internet services (BIS) to areas beyond the urban zone. In particular, the spatial question is now focused on assessing the capacity for different technological solutions to reach profitable population bases, and brings to the forefront organizations that are developing non-line-of-sight (NLOS) technologies that would permit wireless Internet access over much greater distances than current solutions.We begin this paper by establishing the importance of broadband connectivity to Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote communities. This discussion comments on the role of the Government of Canada in the provision of broadband connectivity to residents of these communities, and outlines the current regulatory issues that govern wireless services and policy formulation.The second part of the paper illustrates the use of geographic information system (GIS) approaches in the study of wireless broadband planning and deployment. Case study findings suggest that GIS applications can make a significant contribution to the analysis of wireless deployment planning, to the understanding of the relationships between wireless signal sources and consumers, and to the spatial configuration of terrestrial wireless broadband networks. We conclude the paper by discussing how the GIS approach employed could be used to inform the public policy process with regard to increasing access to broadband Internet services in all regions of the country, and thereby providing the opportunity for all Canadians, regardless of location, to fully participate in the Information Society.