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Life on the Road with 3G
david_adams writes "Since I first evaluated Sprint's new Vision "3G" high speed wireless data service in September of last year, I've had the opportunity to travel around the country, using the service to keep in touch with the world, receive all my spam, er, email, and do my work. I've used the service in hotels, restaurants, parked cars, moving cars, picnic tables, and airports, in huge cities, and in desolate stretches of interstate highway. Here are my impressions after this long term test."
I've seen video phones being used here all the time... of course, cell phones have been big in Japan since... well the turn of the 18th century I think.... they all had mobile tin cans and very long lengths of string. Seriously, you'd wonder how they lived without it.
Anyways, advertising here is heavily promoting the use of 3G phones, the fear is despite the techno-addiction of most people here, there might not be enough people using it to be commercially viable. Some people ("gasp") get buy with JUST email on their phone and don't need to see crotch shots of their friend's pet dog sleeping!
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The author seems puzzled by the popularity of SMS in Europe, but it's just simple economics. With most plans I've come across in England in France, it's cheaper to send an SMS than to make a 1-minute call. Rates overall are also more expensive, so getting in the habit of sending an SMS rather than making a call lowers your bills.
The other advantage is that in noisy environments like buses, subways, crowded hallways, etc. you don't have to shout over the crowd to get the message across. This keeps your neighbors from strangling you and lets you say your message once rather than repeating it 3 times.
Have you seen my stapler?
Well he says that he can get 12-18Kb/s per second on GPRS. Well thats not bad but here in the UK its just not worth doing. We are billed on a per Kb cost. To download a 1MB can pay upto US$8. Also the latency sucks so SSH over GPRS isn't the most friendly expierence in the world.
However we have just had Three lauch which should provide real 3G services. Now that should be cool. I can't wait to have to make sure my hair is neat when I answer a video call
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I got a Treo 300 on Sprint, and absolutely love the Blazer browser on it. Yes, it's http, not WAP, which I agree rather sucks. The speed is a bit slow (I can confirm 12-18 kbits/sec, often half that), but always-on free (as in beer) net access is just dead cool. The screen is considerably larger and clearer than other phones, even other Palm phones.
A number of sites from Google to the BBC have text versions which render beautifully on the little screen and seem to be served up automatically when I go to www.google.com etc. Even standard HTML renders decently, as Blazer reworks the page to fit the 160-pixel width. LWN comes in nicely with the little image on top, Debian Planet is cool too -- though it's a bit annoying that these sites' left sidebars render before the text you really want.
There are only two problems. Some sites don't come in at all (e.g. Slashdot, or I would have written this on the phone). And even with maximum rebates (if you had Sprint before, you're disqualified from most), it will set you back at least 300 bucks -- quite pricey for a "phone"!
Forgot to mention Linux now supports hot-syncing to the Treo 300, though you need Greg K-H's latest kernel patch (visor driver v2.1, on kernel.org, should get into 2.4.21, may already be in 2.5), and a patched gnome-pilot. See the gnome-pilot and/or pilot-link list archives of the last couple of months for details.
Onward to supporting it as a USB net device!
Verizon does. They also supply the cables for their phones. However, like everything else from Verizon, this is pretty expensive. They have unlimited data for $99/month, and plans that aren't unlimited for less.
They are also testing what's known as 1xEV-DO, which is a version of CDMA that is optimized for data. There is a theoritical max rate of 2.4Mbps, with the goal of most subscribers to be recieving 300-500kbps. Networks are currently up and running in San Diego and Washington. I have no idea if they are selling this service or not...
Doh!
A little research would have showed that Sony Ericsson will be releasing the t608 for Sprint which is Bluetooth enabled. The t608 is perhaps the big brother of the t68i.
2 8
http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?id=2
Also, using a phone connected to a computer via a data cable is a violation of the Sprint Terms of Service. If you do it enough they will charge you. The Unlimited Vision plans are intended to be used via handset and not cables. Sprint has the wireless internet cards for a reason and if you use these cards you get fast speed compared to the data cable method. Right now Sprint is assumably letting data cable internet usage slide because not a lot of people do it, but if it becomes popular they will start cracking down and many people will see lots of charges on their bill from it.
You've been warned.
3 options. The free, the limited, and the expensive-but-oso-cool option.
Free: Plug in the USB cable and make sure you have the necessary drivers and the phone set to the right setting. Typically, you're limited to 14.4k but it only uses normal airtime with NO extra charges.
Limited: You can pick a plan with either limited airtime for data or limited usage (like 40mb a month for example).
Expensive but oso cool: $99.99 a month gets you unlimited, any time of day, bandwidth at constant ~140kbps at peak time and ~170-180+kbps at offpeak hours. I've heard great things about this if you plan on using this a lot.
You'll need a phone capable of doing this. Most newer phones support it. Check Ebay for a USB cable. It shouldn't cost you more than $11 especially if you check eforcity.com
For example, my Motorola T720 is recognized as a usb modem when I plug it into my computer. Since I don't pay for any of the plans I mentioned above, I get 14.4. Still good for checking email or browsing low-graphic sites.
The official info about this kind of stuff can be found here at Verizon.
For my uses, 3G is overpriced and overrated. OK - the transfer rates are pretty good (especially compared to GSM or 2.5G), but the latencies still suck making it unpleasant for remote administration.
From the point of view of people who want to have fun (play games), 3G sucks because of the latency.
There have been a few cool uses of 3G so it's not all lost - I live in the Isle of Man, and Manx Telecom's mobile arm (Pronto) are doing 3G trials. One use is a bus full of computers they drive around to various schools around the country. The bus is networked by a single 3G handset and according to the piece in the newspaper, has worked out pretty well as a mobile 'net cafe.
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I've had the service since early November, and I will be a sad, sad little boy if they ever deactivate it or change the pricing structure unfavorably. I principally use it with my laptop, and it's absolutely magnificent.
I have the Sanyo 4900 phone, fwiw, and it shows up to Linux as a USB modem using the standard acm.o driver. I get a pretty high latency, about 350ms ping to my gateway, but the bandwidth is around 20K/s (that's kiloBYTES) when I'm in a strong service area, averages around 12 if I'm moving around. Coverage is good, albeit not perfect. I drove from Atlanta to St Louis with a ping going the whole time, and lost less than 10 packets. There are a few dead zones in the rural area south of St Louis where my parents live, but not many (and we haven't found ANY cell phones that work in those areas, T-Mobile and Cingular all die in the same places)
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GSM/GPRS/EDGE has a huge advantage because it is already there, and cheap to upgrade. In reality you will probably get a dial-up quality service on GPRS - everywhere! I suspect the latency issues will go away as the standards guys work out some good solutions and it propogates through into the operator's kit.
The big question is 3G. Where will it be profitable, and where will it be needed. BTW, both CDMA2000 and UMTS (the European standard) are WCDMA technologies - it stands for Wideband Code Division Multiple Access). There will be a need for it in many built up areas because of capacity limitations in GSM (voice is still the killer app). China is one of the big markets for UMTS - they have their own flavour of it. It's a million quid to apint of warm beer that Qualcomm won't make any money of patent licensing in China!
Oh, and only 1 newtwork upgrade should be required, as GPRS has already been rolled out. You need a new radio end, but the core should all stay the same.
regards, treefrog
I am an RF Engineer working for a major wireless provider, and have worked with several of the technologies in use in the US.
The difference between CDMA 2000 3G service and GPRS 2.5G service is about as much as say, a McDonalds hamburger and one you cooked yourself on the grill. They may seem the same on paper, you may describe them as being similar, but the difference in practice is night and day.
GPRS is indeed a fairly simple update to a GSM system. As such, it inherits GSM's spectral inefficiency. All the new data systems (CDMA2000, UMTS/WCDMA, and GPRS) deliver data based on available resources. In other words, you get great throughput, but you must share with everyone else. If there are lots of people trying to use it, the service is slow for everyone. This is important, because you don't just share the spectrum with other data users, you share it with voice users as well. This is where the spectral inefficiency of GSM really hurts GPRS. A few (and I do mean few) voice calls reduce the throughput you can expericence from a respectable 60k down to just a few k. Try and find a cell site without even a few calls on it and you can see why this would be unpleasant.
CDMA2000 on the other hand is much more spectrally efficent. Yes, your data throughput will slow down as more users enter the cell (voice and data), but there is so much more capacity on the cell that the slowdowns are not as dramatic. You really can experience very nice web browsing and file downloading speeds. Latency is an issue, and will be for quite a while, as the RF scheduler (the algorithim and decides when and how much bandwidth to give you) requires a long time to make its decision. I've found that the service in a decent coverage area is far better then any dialup service.
Just my thoughts.
After reading about the unlimited PCS vision for only $10 over my regular plan I decided to try it. I typically spend 3-4 hours a day commuting to my job, to help that time pass faster I have already developed various techniques for getting work down such as preloading various websites, email, and code that I'm working on. Although some of the tools I develop can be run on my laptop running windows, others cannot and I hoped to be able to expand the range of stuff I can work on in transit.
I ordered a new phone, the sanyo 4900, that supported all the typical in-phone features such as email, messaging, and web browsing. It also has a USB for connecting a laptop etc. Since I already had an existing sprint pcs service most of the rebates weren't available, so I ended up paying full price for the new phone.
When I first got the phone I tried out some of the in-phone "3G" features, such as the built in browser, but found it very slow and clumsy. I typically would wait 30-60 seconds every time I tried loading a new page. Trying to type a url in using the keypad is extremely painful, and it seems many webpages just won't render in any usable way on such a tiny screen. I already have two email addresses, so I haven't made any real effort to use the sprint email.
The main way I now use the vision service is by connecting via USB to my laptop. This gives me a real web browser, and makes it possible to connect to my work via VPN.
Like the article says the latency is very high. Typically in the range of 500mS. Also the jitter (the variability in the latency) is very high as well, I often get latencies that vary from 200mS up to 1.2 S! This latency is most noticable if you try to use a terminal connection to login to a remote machine. Trying to type anything with a latency that high is downright painful. I have learned to keep an buffer in my head of what I have typed because I typically won't see it echoed back for 2-3 seconds after I type. For web browsing the latency is noticable, but usable.
Obviously writing code with such high latency is painful, fortunately there is another way. Trying to run a filesystem such as NFS is not really doable under these conditions, but ftp works fine. I typically work by loading source via ftp, editing, saving it back, and then using a (extremely slow) terminal to compile and execute with output redirected to a log file. I then load the log file (again with ftp) debug, edit code and repeat. Fortunately vim has built in ftp support so I can just load a file by saying ftp://hostname/dirpath/filename and then from then on it gets treated as a regular file.
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