Slashdot Mirror
EvDO High-Speed Wireless vs. 802.11
willll writes "The Washington Post is running a story about EvDO (Evolution Data Only), a high-speed wireless technology. It can work anywhere that a mobile phone can work, one of its main advantages over WiFi. Companies such as Verizon and Lucent are looking into the technology." From the article, I'm not sure that EvDO can be directly compared to WiFi connections (and the article does not mention current long-range 802.11 ISPs), but it's still interesting.
This is a lot like CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data), which was supposed to work over existing AMPS networks. It had the same basic problems - you had to update the cell site to make it work, and the cell carriers had to set aside some bandwidth for it.
However, unlike when CDPD was first rolled out, there is now a demand for such services....
www.eFax.com are spammers
A New Wireless Web Link
Phone Firms Testing High-Speed Technology Called EvDO
Technicians test a technology known as EvDO that provides wireless data connections 10 times as fast as a regular modem. (Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
By Christopher Stern
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 23, 2003; Page E01
WHIPPANY, N.J.
Inside a white van decked out with computer screens on the back of each seat, two Lucent Technologies Inc. technicians eagerly put their company's new wireless data network through its paces.
As the van rolls around a parking lot, one techie taps at a keyboard, and the screens jump from one Web site to another. Even the pages full of connection-clogging photos and graphics pop up at a speed rivaling any desktop computer tethered to the Internet by a cable or a telephone line.
For a grand finale, one of the technicians tunes into CNBC via the Internet. A dial-up connection would produce herky-jerky pictures and tinny sounds, but here the financial news channel comes in loud and clear.
The technology, known as EvDO (Evolution Data Only), provides wireless data connections that are 10 times as fast as a regular modem. Proponents say EvDO offers huge advantages over WiFi, another wireless data technology that is popping up around the country in hotel lobbies and coffee shops, and that it may even be the long sought path around local telephone and cable companies' lock on the high-speed Internet market in most residential areas.
But after learning some hard lessons in the last few years, the U.S. wireless industry is skittish about investing heavily in anything that does not have immediate promise of improving its bottom line.
EvDO would require wireless companies to spend billions of dollars to buy additional spectrum and update every cell tower in their networks with new software. But the industry is still smarting from the failure of other once promising wireless technologies: In Europe, "3G" (third generation) technologies were supposed to transform the economy, turning cell phones into mini-entertainment centers, but reality failed to live up to the hype.
Despite the expense and concerns about market demand for EvDO, it is already gaining a toehold in other countries and even in some small U.S. cities. It has been widely rolled out in South Korea, and Monet Mobile Networks Inc., a company based in Kirkland, Wash., launched EvDO networks last October in seven midwestern markets, including Sioux City, Iowa, and Grand Forks, N.D.
In addition to being far faster than WiFi, EvDO can work over existing cell phone networks and deliver a connection anywhere there is a mobile phone signal. In contrast, WiFi users must be within 300 feet or so of a base station or "hot spot."
Verizon Wireless executives say they were impressed by EvDO in market tests using Lucent's technology in the Washington area. Nortel Networks Ltd. equipment is also being tested in San Diego.
Bill Stone, Verizon Wireless executive director of network planning, said EvDO may prove to be a breakthrough for the entire wireless industry. He likens EvDO's potential to energize the mobile communications business to the introduction of the cell phone in the 1980s and its subsequent surge in popularity in the 1990s, when mobile phones moved from analog to digital technology.
"This could jump-start the industry all over again," Stone said.
A takeoff of EvDO would not only provide Verizon with a new high-speed Internet service to market, but it would probably help struggling equipment suppliers such as Lucent and Nortel, which have already developed the software and hardware to get the network up and running. Nokia Corp., Motorola Inc. and other cell phone makers would benefit from the introduction of new products capable of high-speed Internet access.
A U.S. launch of EvDO would also be a boon to San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc., which controls many of the patents underlying the technology. The growing interest in EvDO adds to the momentum of Qualcomm's CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) standard that is now used by some of the largest wireless companies, including Verizon and Sprint Corp. Other companies are likely to migrate to CMDA in part because it uses spectrum more efficiently than rival wireless standards and opens the door to high-speed data technologies such as EvDO, according to Coleman Bazelon, a vice president at AnalysisGroup/Economics, a Boston-based research firm.
One of the biggest barriers to EvDO is that it requires wireless companies to set aside a slice of their valuable airwaves just to transmit data. Because mobile phone companies barely have enough room to handle their voice traffic, EvDO is likely to remain on the back burner until the firms can acquire more spectrum.
Some wireless industry analysts say that, notwithstanding the excitement about the technology, the scarcity of airwaves and ongoing tumult in the telecommunications industry makes the rollout of EvDO far from a sure thing. Jane Zweig, chief executive of Shosteck Group, a wireless industry consulting company, said there is no assurance that EvDO technology will ever be widely deployed in the United States. "To assume they will do all this" with EvDO "is a leap of faith," Zweig said.
Denny Strigl , chief executive of Verizon Wireless Inc., has cautioned that the company will go slow on the new technology. Still, company spokesman Andrea Linskey said EvDO is a natural extension of its current data offering, which provides access to the Internet at speeds comparable to a dial-up modem. Verizon agreed last month to buy a large slice of airwaves in 50 markets for $750 million, in part to make room for future services such as EvDO, Linskey said.
While EvDO would require huge investments by cash-strapped telecommunications companies, WiFi's popularity stems largely from the fact that it is an inexpensive and relatively simple technology to get into operation. For about $200, anyone can buy a WiFi network's basic components and, with some computer savvy and a lot of luck, have it running in less than an hour.
A consortium of telecommunications and technology companies that includes Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp. and AT&T Corp. is backing a WiFi company named Cometa Networks Inc., which plans to string together more than 20,000 WiFi "hot spots" into a nationwide wireless network.
Even with thousands of hot spots around the country, Cometa executives acknowledge that the company will not be able to offer blanket coverage. Instead, the goal is to provide a hot spot within a five-minute walk of any office in an urban area or five-minute drive in a suburban area, according to Steve Harris, vice president for corporate affairs at Cometa Networks. Boingo Wireless Inc., another firm putting together a national WiFi network, plans to have 5,000 hot spots running by the end of the year.
Critics and rivals say that creating a national network from tens of thousands of hot spots is more difficult and expensive than Cometa and others expect. And to create a truly national network that would have the reach of a cell-phone system would require more than 100,000 hot spots.
"To put together a national WiFi network is going to be extremely complicated and take a long time," said George M. Tronsrue III, chief executive of Monet.
Unlike Verizon Wireless, which probably would launch EvDO over its existing wireless network, Monet built a stand-alone wireless system in the seven markets where it operates. Monet's system bypasses the local phone network, commonly known as the local loop, offering high-speed connections in some places where wired high-speed service is unavailable. Competition in the high-speed Internet business has been stymied largely by the huge expense of building a wired connection to every house and building in a market.
"This technology allows you to have a broadband connection that unlocks the local loop," said Tronsrue, Monet's chief executive.
Monet launched in October and so far has about 1,000 customers, according to the company. Most of its subscribers are business customers that use the high-speed connection to download inventory lists and spreadsheets that would bog down when moving on a slower connection, although, like a cable broadband network, EvDO's access speeds do slow as more people sign on. That fits in with Lucent's prediction that EvDO will be popular with business travelers who often are now limited to the dial-up Internet service in hotel rooms or the pokey wireless networks currently offered by Verizon and Sprint.
Like Cometa, Tronsrue has big-name investors, including billionaire George Soros and Intel, and he is excited about the EvDO technology. But he has also learned that there are no sure things in technology. "Right now our main target is that at the end of 2003, we are still operating."
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
One of the nice thing about CDMA in general is that you can be moving at high way speeds and maintain a constant connection through what's called a "soft handoff", where you receive data from both towers as you transition from one to the other. There are sprint users who's actually surfs the web while in moving at highway speeds (as the pasenger, of course :)
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
In Europe, "3G" (third generation) technologies were supposed to transform the economy, turning cell phones into mini-entertainment centers, but reality failed to live up to the hype.
Its difficult to say that '3G' or UMTS to be exact has failed in Europe, as most have not yet launched due to the financial strife in the telecoms sector limiting investment into the new infrastructure. In fact Hutchinson's Three (UK's first UMTS network) will be going live soon
Granted this pressure has resulted in GPRS '2.5G' becoming more widely adopted, and this can provide many of the benefits of UMTS as far as the user is concerned such as reasonable speed mobile data access, whilst being a step upgrade to the GSM netwrok so cheaper to role out and not needing thousands of new masts (UMTS needs masts in different physical locations as it uses a different radio system - see later)
In this respect Europe is in a more fortunate than the US as GSM digital cellular networks have become the standard, so the upgrade to GPRS is a logical one.
The growing interest in EvDO adds to the momentum of Qualcomm's CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) standard that is now used by some of the largest wireless companies, including Verizon and Sprint Corp
This is a strange tack to take, given the dismisal of '3G' as a failure a few lines before.
In Europe the new standard chosen to replace GSM was UMTS, which is based on a CDMA radio sub system. This is a spread spectrum method which brings many benefits, but means you need new masts as the radio coverage is different.
In the US you have Qualcomm's CDMA 2000 system which will evolve into the W-CDMA standard
In practical aspect these are equivalent systems, at least as far as the radio engineering goes - the differences mainly being in how the networks are run and how data is transfered, the underlying carrier technology is very similar, and infact most of the equipment is the same, differing only in the management systems.
So in Europe the delayed roll out of UMTS can be seen really as a factor of the depressed state of the telecoms market, and the fact that the cheaper to roll out GSM based GPRS system gives you high speed data access.
In the US there is no easy upgrade from an existing network as GSM didn't make much of an inroad and the better range in fringe areas of analogue systems like TACS is more suitable to the larger country.
Realistically the only way for the major equipment providers to realise the return on investment of thier CDMA technology is to go after the one thing the alternatives don't do well, the domain of large scale wireless data access.
The 1xEV-DO forward link rate ranges from 38.4kb/s to about 2.4 Mb/s. The reverse link ranges from 9.6kb/s to 153.6 kb/s. Both rates change dynamically according to what the link can support. The overall capacity is greater than IS-95 because stronger error correction coding is used.
The Qualcomm website has quite a bit of detailed technical info. See http://www.qualcomm.com/cdma/1xEV/.
The Data Only (DO) version the article talks about needs its own carrier freq, so the providers must set aside valuable spectrum for data only services (read: expensive). Since none of them can seem to spare the money or the bandwidth at this point, I don't think anyone is eager to implement it, even though the equipment already exists to deploy it.
:)
What will be interesting will be the DV (Data-Voice) standard, which can carry both data (up to 5Mbps) and voice at the same time in the same spectrum used by current 1xRTT and Ev-DO channel. I believe SprintPCS has already decided to skip over DO and go straight to DV, sometime around 2005 when the base station equipment and handsets will become available. It might even happen sooner, if Qualcomm feels pressure from GSM/EDGE/WCDMA camp.
Let the wireless web wars begin
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
And even if some data is lost, that's ok, because it's only IP, and as we all know TCP/IP has been designed for highly lossy networks. All the loss will add to is the latency, and it is not really that important for plain IP traffic.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
Well, 1xEV-DO isn't faster than WiFi. It just works over a much larger area than WiFi does. They're more complementary than competitive.