Slashdot Mirror
Aussie Telcos Consider 3G For Last Mile
Mattygfunk writes "Whirlpool reports Aussie telco R&D labs are scrambling to transform 3G mobile networks into last mile solutions rivaling the best wired broadband networks, as telcos come to grips with lack of consumer interest in 3G mobile services and a likelihood of no payback on their multi-billion dollar investments in the spectrum."
The last mile has been a stumbling block for telcos for about two decades, now. Available silicon can easily handle fibre to the curb, but getting it in already existing buildings has been a problem.
The ISDN suffered from unknown physical plant characteristics - stubs, splitting pairs, and other analogue phone cruft seriously debilitated ISDN acceptance. ADSL leapfrogged the ISDN performance by learning from the mistakes in the ISDN development/deployment.
Hopefully, this repurposing of technology may be just the boost that an ailing telecommunucations industry needs. The hardware portion of the high-tech sector has suffered an abundance of losses after the dot-com meltdown.
This is progress?
If you look at the GSM coverage map of China you will see that it has a large coverage for country so large. From what I undestand the reason for this, which is along the lines of the last mile, is that China did not have any cabled phone network covering that area to start with. Since it was going to cost them as much to wire such a large area and that mobile phones were growing in popularity they decided to go the wireless approach.
The reason I bring the story up, is because once you are in a rural area it becomes increasingly more expensive to connect to homes. The problem is that you get less inhabitants per length of telephone cable, thus making it extremely more expensive short and long term. The long term cost is the inspection of such a coverage of phone lines. The wireless approach allows a much larger area to be covered, and it ends up being cheaper as there is there are less inspection points. It also provides the advantage that the phone company also gets money from visitors to the area and not just the inhabitants. Additionaly, for a farmer, this is great as it allows him/her to phone home when they are somewhere in the middle of their land. This sort of solution could be easily applied to other countries with the last 100 miles problem, not just the last mile.
The only question I ask myself, is whether there are any solutions for solar powered transmission towers?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The only 3G system I know about is the European UMTS system, whose air interface operates on WCDMA (the same technology as the American system, which I believe is imaginatively called WCDMA).
This system is particularly well known for being resistant to interference. The original CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access - the W stands for Wideband) system was originally developed by the American military to provide resistance to jamming.
The key characteristic of WCDMA is that each handset signal is spread across a wide chunk of the spectrum (around 1.9 GHz in UMTS), by applying a code which is chosen to render the signal orthogonal to those of the other handsets. Applying the code at the other end to retrieve the original narrow-band signal has the beneficial side-effect of spreading any narrow-band interference across the original broad area of the spectrum, thus reducing its intensity. To effectively jam the system would involve swamping the entire UMTS spectrum, which would take a massive amount of power.
As for red lights causing interference in the ~2GHz spectrum - well, that's just plain silly.
Amusing troll, though.
Since 3G seems to be offering higher speeds, will the telco(s) introduce the service at low prices, only to win customers, garner major share of the market, only to raise prices afterwards (price increase follows bandwidth increase; "gotta pay recoup the cost of 3G license")? How are they coping with potential interference issues? What *is* the range of 3G anyway?
Have EVDO, will travel.
At AU$0.20/Mb for anything over the base plan, data costs are what's keeping the internet expensive here. The current pricepoint is AU$80-90/month with a 3Gb cap. It doesn't matter what the delivery medium is used to deliver the data, that cost sets a lower limit for any pricing scheme.
Cable is severely restricted to the highest areas of population density in the south-east of the country, ADSL is available in a high percentage of exchanges(both metropolitan and regional), and satellite is used for those areas where copper doesn't reach and can afford it($$$$$).
A 3G infrastructure depends on a good underlying data network - which basically describes ADSL(plus ISDN, ATM, etc).
As far as I can see, the areas which have that infrastructure, but where 3G is the only solution are extremely limited. Add that to the very limited market of high-speed-mobile-data users, and you have a solution which has an extremely small number of users for a high development and setup/intrastructure cost.
I doubt it will be a competitive or affrodable "last mile" solution for the forseeable future, outside of a few PR "success stories".
It's obvious that doing the last mile wireless is going to be cheaper than via copper. What baffles me though, is why making calls on my mobile is so much more expensive than a landline when the implementation/maintenance of wireless networks is so much cheaper than copper or fibre. It costs far less to stick a mast up than to start digging the road up.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
not a teleco person, but let me answer still.
Afaik WCDMA cell can scale from 512 users at 8k/s to 2 users at 2mb/s. Sounds like too little? Well, the cell size for WCDMA is significantly smaller than on gsm, and as the voice calls will be mostly routed through the gsm network, the improvement should be pretty visible. But definetly no warezing channel.
What I'd like to know however, is the roundtrip time over different 3G technoligities. Even GPRS has adequate bandwith for browsing/mail/messaging, but the 1 second roundtrip time with The TCP 3-way handshake really kills the experience.
WCDMA is the non-qualcomm version of 3G, as qualcomm got too greedy with it's CDMA tecnology patents. Yet another case in to the "patent system needs to fixed" bucket. Someone else should write about how much users their CDMA2000 can handle. (The UMTS version, not the 1x version).
3G is just one step that provides extra wireless bandwidth. Next step would be roaming from high-speed WLAN networks to larger coverage 3G networks, and finally to The everywhere covering satellite network. The obstacles are mostly commercial, as everyone want's start billing everyone else for the roaming.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
A little company by the name of ArrayComm is currently testing a technology they call I-Burst here in Sydney. Basically, it (should) offer pervasive, roaming wireless internet access across every major city in the country, at 1Mbps per user.
What does this mean? Well, it means that if you've got I-Burst capable NIC's, you'll have a 1Mbps Internet connection at any point across all our major cities (as long as you're not moving too fast) on your laptop, PDA or even your phone (assuming there is phones to take advantage of the tech - doubtful perhaps).
This is beyond what any of the 3G's (W-CDMA, CDMA2000 etc) can offer. The only reason Australian telco's are pimping 3G is because they all spent small fortunes purchasing spectrum to run it on. Considering that these 3G solutions are a long way off, and that we should have a working commercial I-Burst service here in Oz sometime next year, 3G may just die a very quick death.
We conducted an in-depth breakdown of the technology behind I-Burst, including the special directional antennas that make it possible. You can check it out here if you're interested.
Janie took my gun...