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2.4 Megabit Cellular Modem
lew writes: "Ars has a review of a cellular modem that provides 2.4 megabits / second downsteam and 153 kilobits / second upsteam... and it works! Check it out" How much for unmetered service on such a system? :)
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What that article doesn't mention, and what people usually don't know when discussing 3G mobile is that the data rates quoted are PER CELL not PER USER (unless only one user per cell is active at a given moment).
This is the big lie of 3G mobile. In cities, it will never support the data rates they keep talking about because of the duty cycle: the number of users per cell at any one moment.
That's the optimal, best-case, never-gonna-see-it-in-real-life (unless you're testing the system before it's released to the public) speed. In real life use you'll be sharing with everyone else on the cell, just like a neighborhood of cable modems.
From the article: Which brings us to the next point: that 2.4 Mbps is shared among all users on a cell sector, just like cable bandwidth is shared by everyone in a neighborhood. What's a sector, then? Cell sites are generally divided into three sectors that each cover different parts of the surrounding area, so each site can have up to 7.2 Mbps of bandwidth to play with.
And FWIW, latency: Round trip times were in the 110-120 ms range on average, with the minimum I recorded coming in a bit under 80 ms.
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As much as rolling this out will cost, it's still going to be less than rolling out high speed land lines. In places where local conditions (terrain, politics, the whims of Time Warner) make DSL or cable unavailable, this may be the way brodband finally comes to the consumer market in big numbers.
The most compelling reason to suspect this may happen is that you can do an incremental buildout. Put up a few cell towers in an area and sell service. As enough people sign up to demand more bandwidth, you can add towers. You can't do that with land lines.
Nope, no sig
That assumes that the flat-rate amount multiplied by the number of customers would have to equal what the long distance companies currently earn.
The parent post was correct. Things are expensive because LD is still (comparatively) expensive.
LD used to be expensive because the COSTS were high to provide it. Laying the lines, relatively low number of users, etc. Now, telephones are virtually everywhere. Local calls are unmetered, but long distance is still relatively expensive mostly because people got used to paying for it. They value the service monetarily because they are used to paying for it.
LD no longer is as expensive as it used to be to provide. In fact, technically, it can be provided almost free. Most of the actual telecomm costs are in "the last mile" (read: the local telephone service that you already pay a monthly bill for).
Believe me, in 10, maybe 15 or 20 years max, there will be no "long distance charge" per-minute nor per-call and the companies providing them will either be much smaller and paid some monthly amount by local providers paying for international connectivity (like ISP access to the backbone).
Why? Because the price we pay for long distance is a perceived cost based on habit, not based on the actual real value or cost of the service. The price is, thus, unnaturally high. It may take time, but the free market will ensure that an unnaturally high price comes down. And it will.
While VoIP seems to have lost it's dazzle (with the dot com boom), I think VoIP is really what's going to eventually lead to free long distance. VoIP is in its infancy. When there is more infrastructure VoIP will be able to charge less than long distance companies. To compete, the long distance companies themselves will have to resort to VoIP. And, at some point, the local telephone company will end up simply being the local POP for the VoIP network... and the long distance companies will no longer exist.
That's my guess, anyway.