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2.5G Services Start Trial Run In Seattle
090h writes: "AT&T Wireless has started the tests of their GPRS 'always on' services in the Seattle area, according to this press release from Reuters on C|Net's News dot Com.
GPRS is the first system in the States to offer simultaneous and always-on voice & data services to a cell device. As well as speeds greater than 56 Kpbs. (much better than 19.2 we currently see on CDPD, but still a far cry from 3G and the ability to have multimedia content delivery.)" Pricey, though -- $50 covers just 1MB of data. When will unmetered low-earth satellite coverage get here instead?
This is all about money, and Cellular networks are expensive to build up and maintain (figure spectrum auctions in the billions, and upgrading their entire network every 3-5 years, and that is something the wireline folks don't have to do)
Mobile carriers are learning from their wireline brothers. The LEC's lost bigtime from not being able to cash in on all the transactions that went on over their infrastructure. Metered services will be the norm. QOS will also be a big factor, be prepared to pay much more for being more important traffic
Not allowing other portals allows the carriers not only to restrict the traffic, but also allows them to partner with other content and service providers, making for more money and complete control of the content.
Mobile networks, unlike wireline networks are private. No co-location and less government regulation. So they have far more leeway to do what they want.
Sorry folks but as long as the companies gotta keep shelling out the bux, you will too.
There have been at least 2 LEO satellite data systems proposed that I can remember off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more. The idea is that you don't have to track anything. They basically carpet-bomb the lower orbits with satellites (one system, Teledesic I think, would have a constellation of 900+ satellites) so that there is always at least 2 visible to the you. Then as one bird sets, you get handed off to one of the others.
Freenets and public Wi-Fi (802.11b) in general are not competition for GPRS:
- 802.11b provides up to 11 Mbps in theory (3-5 Mbps in practice, and less if the wireless LAN is connected to a T1 as is quite common), but very little coverage - even when there are thousands millions of Freenets, you will have trouble using a WLAN outside certain urban/suburban areas or from a moving vehicle. Roaming between WLANs is not so seamless, particularly if you are going to bill for access in some way. 802.11b is great for laptops, but the impact on battery life on PDAs is not too great (about 2 hours usage in some cases).
- GPRS provides 10 to 40 Kbps initially, with more capacity as phones and networks improve, but huge coverage (essentially the same as GSM networks, which cover most of the world). Most GSM operators will upgrade to GPRS, a lot have already done so in Europe, and GSM has about 70% of world-wide digital mobile phone subscribers. GPRS is mainly useful for phones (if you think WAP is any use, or maybe i-mode) or more likely PDAs, which have better screens and input. It is designed for extended battery life, not much shorter than GSM phones today.
If anything, WLAN is a competitor to 3G, which has similar data rates but is more expensive. However, those who can afford 3G may well be sold on 3G's better coverage and battery life by using WLANs - think of 3G as 'WLANs to go'.
If you want simultaneous voice and data, you need two transceivers in the phone, which is expensive and consumes battery power. These are known as Grade A GPRS terminals (phones).
What's more useful is a Grade B terminal - this lets you take a phone call but keep your packet data session open. Since GPRS is always-on, like cable/ADSL, you don't really lose anything through this process, as long as your application is able to survive the connection outage.
Grade C terminals are worth avoiding, as they require you to drop either the data session or the voice call.
T-Mobil launched GPRS in Germany in February this year, and Vodafone and Cellnet did the same more recently in the UK.
...
Good thing that Slashdot isn't US-centric though
'Insightful'?? Ricochet doesn't even do voice, let alone video - see http://www.metricom.com/ricochet_advantage/benefit s/enterprise/faqs.html#technology - the network is designed purely for data, which it's very good at.
Ricochet has great bandwidth but quite high latency (you have to send packets from poletop to poletop quite a few times before they hit the low-latency wireline part of the network), so it's not clear you can do VoIP at all.
And in any case Metricom, who are the only Ricochet carrier, are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy due to the lack of subscribers vs. their huge expansion plans. Their technology sounds very nice, particularly use of unlicensed spectrum, but it's expensive to roll out widely and their flat-rate charging model is unlikely to help.
Metering is just a way of paying for the roll-outs - even a GPRS roll-out is hugely expensive, and 3G is much more costly.
Unmetered access is a great idea, but Metricom is having troubles partly because its unmetered Ricochet service is not generating enough revenues to keep it expanding. Ricochet's per-month fees are also quite high, and it's interesting to speculate whether a lower fee and some metered charges would have worked better to get people onto the network initially.
Also, its not 50 bux for 1 meg, its 50 bux a month for 400 minutes and 1 meg gprs data included (Tethered). (which pocketnet service should be unlimited, but I havnt seen a price sheet at work yet, so dont quote me...)
I have been using my GPRS test phone tethered, just point my phones IR port to my laptop and dial the special PPP number and get connected. Its faster than CDPD, but im only bonding 1 channel. I cant wait till they use more for those DSL type speeds. :)
BTW, its totaly cool to see something you work with, I run the 2G(CDPD) and 2.5G(GPRS) PocketNet servers and Portal boxes. (Aka, Download ringtones and bitmaps to your phones, etc..)
The comments above are my own, and not of my employer.
PDA's, PCCard Wireless Modems, Streaming Audio, Video Phones, Instant Messageing, etc..
Currently I have an Omnisky using CDPD (over ATTWS) and it rocks, I can SSH into my boxes, and work remotely. (Saves your ass more than once..) I just upgraded to a Ipaq PocketPC and waiting on my GPRS modem. Someone even picked me up a keyboard (god love those expense cards) for it. Full size Qwerty, and an SSH client. :)
And if you want a keyboard for you cellphone, get a Ericsson Chatboard It works with the Erricsson CDPD ATTWS PocketNet phone, so you can browse the web or irc. (No SSH yet, but I can wish.)
Or just to enable you laptop for wireless, go get a CDPD PCMCIA card from Sierra Wireless
Point is, I just listed some consumer products, there are business uses, kiosks, hardware monitors, coke machines, police mobile computers, fire and rescue, etc... Really with HighSpeed Wireless and Internet access, there will be some killer applications that people havnt even thought about, or waited till the technolgy was available. Now wheres my streaming pr0n. :)
-- ... [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.
Orville Wright (1871 - 1948)
No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris
A typical LEO satellite is in view for 10 to 15 minutes before it disappears beneath the horizon. The time can be less for low elevation passes.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You say that it will be faster than 56k.
It's not entirely true.
GPRS works by allotting a number of timeslots in the GSM usual time allocation fabric to packet-switched communications in each cell (as in zone covered by one ground [base] station). The maximum number of timeslots that can be allocated in this fashion is (IIRC) 8 downstream and 2 upstream, for a whooping max 115200 bps downstream and 28800 upstream.
What's the catch? The "packet switching" part, of course. If in a cell N phones are active and using all the available bandwidth, then each of those will only get 1/N of 115200 bps.
Why then using GPRS at all then? Well, first it's always-on. Then it has an higher maximum througput than plain circuit-switched (one-slot-up-one-slot-down) phone, and third it's statistics. Circuit-switched lines are losing the battle against packet-switched because while the former give guarranteed-quality services, the latter offer better resource usage, especially in conditions of bursty traffic.
This said, those prices are INSANE. In Italy (where I am writing this from) the major phone providers are offering GPRS service for FREE for a couple of more months to launch it, and the service is already available in most of the country.
When will unmetered low-earth satellite coverage get here instead?
Teledesic is trying. Doesn't look like until 2005 though. They must have pushed it back because it used to say it would be available in 2003. I wonder how this is going to affect radio astronomy, the Iridium satellites already pose a big enough problem.
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Here in Poland, where we have GPRS running for some time now, the fastest available GPRS phone (the Motorola Timeport 260) can only do 40.2 kbps and the fastest "conventional GSM" (actually HSCSD) phone (Siemens S40) does 56 kbps.
(both numbers are download speeds, it's asymetric)
So just because the theoretical max for GPRS is 115.2 kbps it doesn't mean you will be getting it - check your phone first.
-jfedor
Never. There will never be unmetered low earth satellite coverage. Simply because the 8 people for whom it would be the most practical and cheap alternative would have to pay 3 billion dollars each per year in flat fees to keep it running.
Latency and ease of upgradability is stacked entirely in the favour of groundbased solutions. They will reach 99% of the potential customers. And the 1% left, well, they just cannot ever even dream of beginning to have a hope of cheaply obtaining satellite access, because there just arent enough potential customers to make it cheap. Most people simply will not accept always having a sorta sucky costly connection when they can have a fast cheap connection 50 weeks of the year and a modem connection the two weeks they are in the boondocks.
And for those who like living without a neighbour for 5 miles, well, suck it up and pay or use a modem or move.
Anyone actually subscribed to this?
We've had GPRS here in the UK for a while now and the Motorola GPRS phones we've got won't support simultaneous voice and data.
Indeed, looking at Motorola's own press release here they only claim to be able to switch between voice and data, not do both at the same time, which sounds more likely to me.
The GPRS standard does support simultaneous Voice + Data, but I don't think any of the handsets do yet.
So do you pronounce this "gee-pee-are-ess" or do you say jeepers! :)
$50 for 1Meg, or get a 802.11 device ..
I hope the ARRL or someone is lobbying to keep the 2Ghz bands open. It's not even that large of an allocation! Organized community wireless efforts have a real potential to put a great big ding in the profits of some of these commercial providers and users of bandwidth.
Remember, the RF spectrum is a public resource. The FCC in the US is supposed to act in the best interests of the public, and I think you could make a good case it's in the interests of the public to keep those bands open. The more 802.11 hardware out there, the harder it will be to stop, as well - so write your representatives (Congressmen, FCC Ombudsman, Member of Parliment, whatever).
I remember reading something about those bands being open by global agreement, too.. but I'm not sure.
..don't panic
We could just wait to send spam and surf porn 'til we get home.
Not that anybody cares, but I've got a DSL line at home and no cell phone. Somehow, I get by.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
LEO is the region where the shuttle and ISS are. It's 150-250 miles up, compared to geosynchronous communications satellites, which are 20000 miles away. So LEO should have 2 orders of magnitude lower latency. Not that I know whether timothy was talking out of his ass regarding LEO high bandwidth unmetered Internet access. In LEO you're moving at a pretty good clip, and typically traverse the full span of the sky in a minute or two. At any reasonably useful frequency, the beam pattern would be so narrow you'd end up spending all your money on equipment just to track the damn satellite. I've tracked the ISS across the sky with a telescope before, and it's a little hard to read email while doing it :P
Better be able to backcharge spammers. I ain't spending $50 for the privledge of having X10 popups or viagra e-mails in my wireless device.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Sorry to let my patriotism show so blatantly, but Microcell has been offering GPRS on their GSM network all across Canada since April 4, 2001.
Not only that, but they don't bend us over nearly as much: C$75 (~US$50) for 25MB (and $3/MB thereafter) on the cheapest GPRS plan.
--
They can afford to go that cheaply because there is a lot of redundancy in your text downloads, with every 5th word being "eh" and all.
Like Iridium? Never would be my guess. If you think cost of cellular data networks is prohibitive, don't even dream of using a swarm of low-orbit satellites. It is kind of intriguing why all those billionaires invest in an obviously flawed idea (Bill Gates et al). Perhaps they just don't know anything about economy? :-)
Thing is, with dozens of expensive relatively short-lived satellites launched dirt expensively, terminal devices that either need to use high energy transmitters and/or satellites having extra sensitive receivers... How could it be cheaper than using earth-based systems? The only (?) good thing is that in the middle of nowhere where it's not economical to build cellular networks, satellites may be your saviour. Unfortunately, 99% of time, cellnet is just fine (and depending on your usage pattern, 10-90% of time fixed line is fine)
If you don't need to move a lot you should use fixed wire stuff (in-house roaming with infra-red or short-distance wireless radio); practically unlimited bandwidth, low cost. If you need to move more, cellular networks are next in line; it's possible to get reasonable bandwidth, but operating costs are higher no matter what, so end user cost is as well (exception; if there's no ready decent infrastructure for fixed lines wireless might be competitive... like in Africa or some ass-kicked islamic country).
And if you just have to go in the middle of Sahara to browse porn, yeah, use Iridium. I'm sure this is enough to finance the multi-billion project on long-term.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
While GPRS is *capable* of supporting simultaneous voice and data calls, none of the handsets currently being built, and none of the networks currently rolling out GPRS, are doing this in the first wave. Just getting the data part of GPRS up and running on the networks has been an amazingly difficult thing for operators, base station providers, and handset vendors to get working.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Wow, $30 for an MP3? Forget that - I'm just going to go steal the CD the old-fashioned way.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Microcell Solutions in Canada is offering 56k GPRS service at much cheaper rates:
$75CDN for 25MB
$100CDN for 50MB
$150CDN for 100MB
But I'm sure this is the same thing with most new technologies (especially wireless ones); the prices start out high and drop from there!
Wait for the service to get cheap with large amounts of users before signing, if $50/MB is too much.
Yeah. And for the service to become more widespread. Like, Toronto area. And a static IP would be a nice feature, but not absolutely essential.
Then, I can move my webserver to the trunk of my 1970 Dodge Dart and get Slashdotted while I'm driving to work!
More technology = more dubious projects for me.
Here's a couple of stills from my Junkyard Wars application, if you like dubious projects.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
according to The Industry Standard. Too rich for my blood.
sulli
RTFJ.
Is it really that much more expensive for providers to sell unlimited service? I imagine these are 'turn it on, use it, turn it off' type applications. You couldn't continuously use it if you tried.
So is there any reason for the cap, other than that they can?
3G wireless networks have been slower than expected, and I expect this "2.5G" trial to be disappointing as well. High-bandwidth wireless is a tough problem to solve.
Perfect for PDAs though, you can synch a lot of email and web pages with a MB. And still a lot cheaper than being charged per minute, which is what's keeping me from doing it now.
READY.
#
>In LEO you're moving at a pretty good clip, and typically traverse the full span of the sky in a minute or two.
Not so fast!
LEO's sattelites (along with the space shuttle and ISS) revolves around the Earth about 16 times a day. That gives you around half an hour of usable time for one satellite.
Actually there are several plans of LEOs "constellations" of satellites, Globalstar for example, with between 200 and 800 birds. This systems can actually give you a good wireless T1.
BTW Iridium was a GEO system.
Nobox: Only simple products.
Microcell has had 2.5G GPRS running for at least a few weeks now. Expensive, yeah, but they're not going to go out of business at least.
http://www.fido.ca/NASApp/info/HomeFrame/Promotion 01.jsp?lang=en for the marketing junk.
MICROCELL FIRST TO DELIVER COMMERCIAL AVAILABILITY OF 2.5G WIRELESS DATA SERVICES ACROSS CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
And, of course, there's no need to mention that fact that this has been available in Japan and Europe for quite a while now. Is Slashdot the new vanguard boldly proclaiming America's technological backwardness to the world?
Simultaneous video and voice? Sounds alot like the Ricochet service to me. At least AT&T is charging for bandwidth, not time spent online. We all know how expensive cellular plans can be. Also, AT&T's potential network for such a system is huge. Hopefully this will lead to fast & reliable portable data communications for those junkies that absolutly have to have their Internet everwhere :)
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.