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Is 3G Irrelevant?
An anonymous reader writes "Network Magazine asks 'Are We Better Off Without 3G?' in which the author notes that many networkers are giving up on 3G as a data services alternative due to high deployment costs and slower speeds vs. Wi-Fi. Given these issues, are we likely to see carriers like Nextel bypassing 3G for 4G technologies such as OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) by Flarion Technologies?"
All new technology is irrelevant until it is taken up by the public.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
As a daily user of Nextel's services, I think they should be concentrating on improving the reliability of their service before they even think of what technology they are going to move to next.
Most people have no desire to pay for another upgrade to their voice service. This is a lesson that must be learned, and re-learned. Customers don't want convergence unless it is cheaper than the sum of the parts. Joe Average is fully prepared to pay $40 each for 3 products and services that give him exactly what he wants, but is unwilling to pay more than $80 for one product and service that provides the total package.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Ok, first of all, wi-fi is great and all but it's range is very limited, and the lack of regulation means that no one can 'own' any piece of spectrum. The range is so small that it would only have a chance of working in dense city places, while cell phone towers can handle miles of land. If anything Wi-fi will augment standard 3g connections when available.
And second of all, what the hell is OFDM? I've never heard of it. Why link to the company page and not a page that actually explains what it is? And anyway, FDMA/TDMA/CDMA are not 'g' technologies, but rather the underlying technology behind them. A new modulation technique (if it turns out to be useful) would take a long time to roll out. CDMA took four or five years before it became all that wide spread.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The US never was in large parts.
It was almost like a trip back in time when I moved from Europe to the US. Why?
A lot of the appliances etc. etc. are technology wise WAY behind the stuff you can buy in europe standard.
TV's same thing. 16:9 (Pal PLUS) is pretty much standard and you can get TVs for a decent price (HDTV? Yeah right).
Mobile phone? Things like "SMS" that are not touted as the "next big thing" in the US is something I had almost 10 years ago in Europe.
Reality is that a lot of high tech companies are in the US, maybe even do their research here, but ironically enough it's mostly foreign places who profit from it.
Sure, high-tech is available in the US (and sure, if it exists SOMEWHERE and can be bought you can most likely buy it in the US as well) but for the average Joe that isn't the case.
What does 3G have to do with Wi-Fi? 3G is a phone standard. You get 3G stuff anywhere you can use your phone. Wi-Fi is a wireless LAN standard. You need a pringles can to use it from two doors down the street. They're completely different technologies, designed for two completely different things, how can one make the other irrelevant?
-JDF
Chief among these are:
- Packet-switched operation. To transmit data (except SMS messages) it's necessary to open an end to end virtual circuit. So you can't trickly information back and forward to the phone all the time, at a very low bandwidth (and consequently very low cost). And there's no multicast, so software download to each phone has to be done one at a time.
- Location-specific services. "Where am i?", "Where is the nearest gas station?", or that DoCoMo fave "beep me when a single girl my age who also likes ninja manga is nearby".
These don't need 3G's bandwidth, but the 2G network can't really deliver either. If the phone companies had been conservative and added the above, they'd be in clover. That's not just 20-20 hindsight - DoCoMo in Japan did both, and they're making enough money to actually pay for the 3G network they're building - and simultaneously getting their consumer base onboard with the idea of getting games, media, etc. on their phone.## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
the next phone i buy will be purchased for one of the following two reasons, and they're the only ones :
1. it's smaller and more comfortable to carry in my pocket, without being microscopic.
2. lets me plug in my laptop and use the cellular network for data transmission at a reasonable speed for as long as i want, up to my alotment of minutes. a friend of mine has a phone that he can connect and use this way, but it's mercilessly slow and substantially limited in terms of how much use he can make of it.
i suppose it's possibel that public WiFi access will become common in the city, so i guess that'd reduce the need, but i'm not holding my breath.
who wants a damn video phone is my question? i don't quite see how this adds value to my life. then again, i only just bought my first cell phone 9 months ago, so maybe 6 years from now i'll think 2.5G/3G is pretty cool, when everyone else is picking up their holoCell-9000's or something.
OFDM? Dude, it's out there already. Check out the specs for 802.11g. It's not rocket science and similar signal processing has been used for a long time in other environments.
Couldn't agree with you more. I have a SonyEricsson P800 running GPRS, and I can use it to check stock prices and sports scores, and, at a pinch, to send email. But in reality, I don't need to use it that much.
If I need to contact someone when I am out in a car, then I can call them. Almost any situation when I am going to do something that I normally do on a computer (eg. edit/read documents or spreadsheets) I am going to want to sit down and do it, whether I do it on my phone, or on my laptop. And any phone that is small enough to be portable is going to be too small to be useful for anything that needs a decent sized screen and a keyboard. Is it so important to be able to send an email from the bus stop? More importantly, you aren't going to be compiling a megabyte sized spreadsheet or document in the brief intervals when you are completely unable to sit down and take out your laptop, or get to an internet cafe.
These limits mean that I don't need that much bandwidth - if you haven't got that much screen to fill, then fewer pixels are required, which means fewer bytes. I've been at conferences with mobile operators, and the only use that these guys can claim for 3G is video, and increasing the amount of bandwidth so they can have more 2G users on their network at one time. I remember having similar conversations with them about WAP - they were hard pressed to come up with an application that I could imagine myself, or a mass market, using. All they came up with for WAP was betting, and for 3G, it's sports highlights. My experience is that if you really care about a sports event, you are going to organise yourself so that you are near a TV while it's on. There is a high-end, limited niche, that will buy 3G to watch video while mobile, but you can't base a billion dollar investment on this segment.
My guess is that operators will roll out 3G networks, but they will be mainly used to increase bandwidth for 2G applications. No one wants video phones in the fixed wire world (except for high end users, who videoconference), and my guess is that they will not want them in the wireless one either. Some people will pay for sports video and similar, and there will be some revenue from this, like for pay-per-view sports. The problem for 3G is that it took so long in coming, that 2G had time to catch up.
About six months ago, I cancelled my two cell phones and decided to "rough it" for a while, saving money in the meantime. I haven't looked back. I never get rings in the middle of the night asking me to come in to work, never get the spousal unit 'checking up on me' periodically throughout the day and ruining my concentration, and I no longer have to answer tech support calls for my entire family whenever they can't get Windows to print a frickin' greeting card.
So, yes, 3G is irrelevant, unless you're tied to your cell phone like a dog to its master. <grin>
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
...is it just me or does it seem like WiFi is going to replace everything??
... different goals. 3G is the next step in mobile phone communications. Much like 2.5G (GPRS) was the next step after dialup gsm data connections. Ofcourse, having the 3G standard hyped as "Watch streaming DVD movies on your phone" or the likes doesn't help it much.
:) )
:D
It's weird. First, people complain about bluetooth, saying:
"Hey, Bluetooth is slower and doesn't have the range of WiFi, it won't have a future."
*duh* Bluetooth is a replacement for IRDA and cables. Which means that it has an entirely different set of goals than WiFi, thus, it supplements WiFi and should not be considered an alternative to WiFi. Works great for connecting my PDA to the internet using GPRS, or when I use the BT headset. Playing a game against a friend over bluetooth during a boring meeting is also nice (and doesn't look as strange as when you use IRDA and need to point the damn thing against eachother)
And now:
"3G is to slow/troublesome/expensive, lets use WiFi instead, its faster/easier/cheap"
Again, *duh*
Yes, I've tried it in real life (Malmoe/Sweden, using 3's phones & networks) and it works. Okay, so I might get a better image if I had a laptop + webcam + WiFi, but then, it isn't really that mobile, now is it? (Imagine making a call with that thing whilst riding a bicycle or something
Besides, if you compare the powerusage, you'll soon find that you probably wouldn't want a "wifi-phone".
To conclude this post, WiFi is great, but so is 3G and Bluetooth. They are all different technologies, designed to fit different goals. I for one would love having a PCMCIA card that did WiFi, 3G, BT and GPRS. This way, nomatter what, I could always, somehow, get online.
Anyway, this is my take on it... Bash away
802.11 has some support for handoffs between APs, but not on a large scale, and not if it's occuring often.
It's also not designed to handle rapidly moving stations. Once you start going faster than walking speed, multipath fading and doppler shifts make things fun. Dealing with users traveling at 55 MPH is one of the biggest challenges of cellular network designers, and it just gets to be more and more fun as the bandwidth increases.
This isn't targeted at stationary users. It's targeted at people on the go. (Not drivers, mind you, but carpool passengers and people on buses and trains, etc.)
It might also prove useful for police work - Police departments have a use for high-speed mobile data. (I believe that the biggest customer of the Ricochet remnants in Denver is one of the local police departments. I know that there's a metropolitan wireless network somewhere that is used heavily by the local police.) It could (in theory) provide an off-the-shelf communications solution for a low-cost civilian Predator equivalent, which law enforcement entities would kill for. All of the advantages of a police helicopter without the exorbitant expenses...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"Everyone is already acclimated to flat rate charging for internet
That's not stopping ISPs modifying their service so that they provide a bandwidth quota and excess charges for those that go over it. I suspect in ten years time, unlimited bandwidth will have been relegated to history.
The mobile phone service providers are frantically adding extra features to their phones and networks to prevent cell phones from becoming a commodity. Companies don't want to compete on the prize because that cuts right into the margins. So they try to compete on value. If they stopped adding those features to your phone, cell phones could be treated like land line phones where it looks like the only reason to switch providers is to enjoy lower prices. When have you switched your home phone because somebody else offered a new/better feature not related to pricing?
"Light is faster than sound." - "Is that why people tend to look bright until you hear them speak?"
I mean, honestly, think about you're cellphone user in bumfsck, Iowa. They don't need to be able to connect to the internet with their cellphone, they don't need access to their email 24/7, they just need voice. So, why set up an infrastructure that they don't need? GSM covers what is needed. I live in Waco, Texas, I use GSM, and I get great signal all the time. When I drive to Dallas, Austin, San Anton, it works amazingly well. This is all that a techie needs: cities, and the roads between them. Anything more would be a waste of resources.
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...beyond wireless email/messaging and web browsing.
So far we don't really have any applications. The overwhelming majority of mobile users have decided that the primary purpose of their devices, telephony, is perfectly adequate.
A remaining minority is content to get email or other text messages, but they're early adopters, pioneers and gadget freaks who buy anything and their aren't enough of them to make change-the-world money off of.
An even smaller minority have developed proprietary applications, but they've been doing that over more expensive technologies forver, this just lets them do it with greater freedom. They're not a growth medium, though, since they're generally large businesses that negotiate deep discounts and optimize for minimum usage anyway.
Right now there's just not a compelling application for wireless data at the price at which it is available.
A wireless technology with sustainable node throughputs in excess of 10 megabits and ranges equivilent to cellular and all-you-can-eat pricing would be compelling, but the application wouldn't be mobile as much as last-mile fixed, mobile data would just be a side benefit.
I don't even care about high bandwidth, wireless broadband, 3G, 4G, 6G, whatever.
If I could get a modem speed connection to my laptop for a reasonable price (i.e. $30/month for 10-20 hours/month of web browsing) I'd buy it. More than that I just couldn't justify unless I had a business need for it.
That technological development was seriously outpacing consumer need?
I admit a lot of these things are interesting, but just not practical. For instance, downloadable java games. I know atleast 25 people with cell phones... none of them play games on it. Why would you? Can't wait until you get home to your PC/PS2/XBox?
Sending pictures is pretty cool, but again it's very rare that I need to send someone a photo RIGHT NOW! I'll just get my digital camera, snap a photo, and e-mail it.
The only application on Cell phones I use besides actually talking is text messaging... that's rare, and definetly not 3G...
I work in network design at the University of Kansas and our programming group here has been working on a usage-based charging model for some time now. This is the charging model of the future, not just for cellular, but for in home solutions as well. We were prompted to move to this model of charging after realizing that the percentage of traffic from P2P and other entertainment applications was much higher than that of academic applications. They are still going to get extremely inexpensive access to the network, but the people who use a majority of the traffic will be the ones funding the additional bandwidth necessary.
cars are better equipped in the US (more comfy, bigger, cheaper gas helps of course)
Don't even get me started on American cars. All of the ones I have driven (including a few "sports" coupes) corner like a space hopper. In the major car survey in the US last year the top ten had no cars made by US manufacturers. Even the top truck was Japanese. Depends what you want from a car though - I don't want to pootle along in an over stuffed armchair, I want to drive along twisties at high speed and feel confident that my car can stay on the road or stop quickly if I have to.
That said a lot of the domestic stuff in the US is great, but not usually due to being more high tech, just bigger. I loved having a fridge that a family could live in and having a pool.
Btw, if you go to very upscale homes in the US they will come with German of Italian ranges.