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Sprint Testing 2.4Mbs Wireless Cellphone
stuccoguy writes: "In a press release on Tuesday Sprint and Lucent announced the successfull testing of a 2.4Mbs wireless internet connection and plans to ship the technology by 2002.
ZDNet speculates that this technology will change everything.
Sprint will answer questions about the technology on a webcast this Friday."
Ahh, but this is about two things: PDAs and laptops.
PDA users will use it for meetings, instead of asking you if you are free for a lunch meeting friday I have my PDA find a time where we are both free to schedual a meeting, and when it says the first lunch where we are both free is a week from tuesday, we know we are both free, and if we accept it, then it is known that we will both be there.
Laptop users will use it for everything, more or less. Just today managers were asking why I wanted an ethernet interface for my laptop. (802.11 is the rule here, but not for customer sites) Give me a good cell phone connection and I will almost never need a wired connection. Of course all this assumes the cost is cheep enough, but I think sprint can come up with a good model if they try. (I suggest, $20 for a gigabyte of data transfered in peek times. You may use this suggestion without royalties to me)
Of course it wil be used once in a while on your cell phone, but not often as the screen is too small. Target at folks with only a cell phone and it will flop. Target PDAs and laptops and it will take off.
This sounds like a cool application, but not a ground-breaking one. It's like 802.11b without an access point, and hopefully it'll be more robust as well.
But... ho hum, I'm sure we'll have a whole different set of wireless protocols in two years. If Bluetooth survives, it'll be faster, and 802.11b will have to do something (better) to deal with interference from other concurrent wireless protocols.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
For some reason, the US has incredibly fragmented cellular standards - AMPS, D-AMPS, TDMA, CDMA and even GSM. I think it's the last major country to still be using analogue phones at all. This, along with the size of the US, is probably why there are still problems with coverage, because no one network operator can afford to cover the whole US, and the standards are too diverse to allow seamless roaming between networks.
The rest of the world (with a few exceptions) has standardised on GSM, and voice coverage and quality is generally excellent - the term 'cell phone quality' is meaningless in GSM countries because the voice quality is just as good as a fixed line. I use my phone in various European countries with no problems.
3G is going to take enormous investments, but the GSM world is going GPRS anyway, which gives you always-on packet mode at rates of 20 to 100 Kbps depending on user density in cells, and is a much simpler upgrade. So even if we are using GPRS for a few years before 3G, there will be packet mode services available to GSM phones. (GSM does exist in the US, e.g. Voicestream, but it's very patchy because it's in competition with so many other standards.)
I fear the only thing this will really change is how fast Sprint can drain your wallet. Sprint already charges $10/month for their "wireless web" access. They'll probably charge even more (on top of airtime) for access to high-speed data.
I have Sprint PCS, and I love it, but all the tack on charges for new services makes them less than appealing. Only a miniscule percentage of people will ever use these facilities because of the cost.
My dream is still to see my cell phone act as a wide area gateway for my PDA and laptop using Bluetooth short range wireless tech. However, if it costs $1/minute, it won't be worth it.
World Beach List, my latest project.
Every time someone announces a new higher speed for mobile devices I just sit back and sigh. Wireless devices don't really NEED a 2.4Mb wireless pipe hooked onto them. I'd easily go for less bandwidth at a much lower cost. I'm paying 35$ a month for my cell phone with internet capabilities. Instead of offering me a 2.4Mbps pipe how about offering a cheaper pipe at around say 64Kbps and then let me hook any wireless device I want up to the channel. I could use my phone or maybe plug in an adapter for use with my laptop. Stop promising some technology will "change everything" because everything changes regardless of what one company does. Its such a misnomer. Just give me a little bit of wireless bandwidth either for talking or hopping on the internet when I'm not at home.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So Sprint will advertise 2.4Mb connection speeds, and then oversell it. The end result will be a 9.6Kb connection, IF you're lucky. Remember that collisions and retransmits are really costly.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
*Sigh*
What exactly is a megabit-second? I've heard of megabits *per* second (Mbps; Mb/s), but never a megabit-second.
mb (millibits)
Mb (megabits)
mB (millibytes)
MB (megabytes)
mbps (millibits per second)
mBps (millibytes per second)
Mbps (megabits per second)
MBps (megabytes per second)
There is no such thing as 10MB ethernet, or 2.4 Mbs wireless ethernet. It could be a typo, but somehow I doubt it.
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Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Whoo hoo! 120 FPS on my crappy 200x100 cellphone screen! Quake Arena Mobile, here I come...
If this is going to be used for cell phones, what's the point? There are several flaws that need to be worked out of cell phones before we need faster connections. Screens need to be improved if you want to use all this bandwith. While phones are getting smaller now if we want to accomodate better screens we'll have to go with bigger cell phones. There is no way that i could watch a football game or whatever on my nokia 8290, the screen is just too small. And besides if you want to watch tv so badly why don't you just get a freakin portable tv? Everyone makes a big deal about cell phones and tv but the technology already exists if you're that addicted to tv. Next problem is if the bandwith is really there. Lets assume that everyone really likes this streaming video and so how many people are going to be using one cell tower? Data transmission would be a pain because you would have to have better data checking than in TCP/IP. Switching from cell tower to cell tower would have to have lots of error checking when streaming a video. What happens when i drive through a tunnel or something how will the error checking correct for that?The webcast presenting this technology will probably just have them dircetly connected to one cell tower, all by themselves. Lets say that we hook this magical cell phone up to a laptop we will still have problems. Before they installed cable they had to upgrade all the cables. Lines that connect from the central office to cell towers just aren't capable of squezing all this bandwith through. While 2.4mbs seems great in theory, just rember communism works in theory too.
Discover Magazine this month had an article entitled "Radio Flyer" about an inventor of a possibly similar technology. Does anyone know if this is related?
will wonders never cease
better change the headline.
Sprint uses a proprietary CDMA network. This will just be an addition to that. GSM (Global System for Mobile) is a much more capable and proven network, and its member companies are already working on their own technologies, like GPRS (General Packet Radio System) and HSCSD (High Speed Circuit-Switch Data), among other 3G technologies. GSM is not run by a single corporation, and instead it is an alliance of companies with a well defined specification. I hate to rant like this, but honestly, if it's not going to be part of GSM (the clear *standard*) then this is fairly meaningless news.
Just chiming in from Gainesville, Florida. Valleys on hilly roads and any type of overhead foliage/roof/etc totally destroys my "all-digital nationwide PCS signal built from the ground up".
Since these phones are capable of transmitting such a high data rate, part of this data could be used for high quality voice conversations. "Modern" phones (cellular or wired) filter out anything above about three or four kHz. This results in the caracteristic "telephone sound" you hear when someone calls in to a radio station. ALL phone conversations sound like that, but we're so used to hearing it that we don't notice it.
This phone could solve these problems. IIRC, real time CD-quality audio requires 0.7 Mbps. This would leave plenty of bandwidth left over for viewing (say) a shared presentation on a laptop plugged into the dataport on the phone.
The downside to this is that, if you're calling a regular cell phone or wired phone, you'll still have to put up with a low quality connection. However, if enough people start using the high quality voice feature (assuming Sprint offers this), it could be an incentive for other companies to start offering high quality audio connections.
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Home is where you hang your @.
Forget the phone. Imagine instead a router, like the DSL routers that a lot of people have already -- except instead of plugging into a DSL line, it has a cell receiver that can receive and transmit data wicked fast no matter how far you are from the CO.
This is still in the tech-demo phase, but if they roll it out, and it works, it'll be very tempting tech.
99% of the market isn't going to have it attached to a laptop. So the phone has to use the data immediately, as streaming A/V. So you can watch TV on your phone or listen to streamed MP3's. Cell phone battery life is already terrible, now we're going to want to use them at least as much as we use a radio or TV?
My prediction: short battery life is going to become increasingly annoying.
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I was really getting tired of lugging around all those cellphone wires!
Taco says 2.4Mbs
ZDNet says 4.2 MB per second
press release says 2.4 mbps
Now the press release is not that interesting because 2.4 milli bits per second is only one bit every 417 seconds
CmdrTaco's rendition is plausible and interesting
ZDNet is smoking crack if they think they can beat DSL with their cell phone.