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Will Cellular Swamp WiFi?
hhutkin writes "Sure, Wi-Fi is great for my home network. But what else can it do? After reading this article, I'm convinced that cellular is becoming more ubiquitous with wireless networking than wi-fi will ever be. Just look at all the devices that are coming on the market using cellular technology. I can send email and pics, browse the web, plus listen to MP3s all on one cellular device. It makes the notion of a hotspot almost meaningless." But 802.11x is high-bandwidth, and often unmetered ...
Okay,
maybe not quite but since last week I have GPRS on my T68i and via Bluetooth I connect it to my iBook. So guess where I was sitting on the weekend: In a park with a coffee having full access to the internet.
Sure it was slower than my home network, but for shell, email and webbrowsing it works like a charm.
The costs? $50 / month: UNMETERED.
I am convinced.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Those are three very distinct technologies with very different uses. I recap and then we all shuddup, ok?
Bluetooth: Designed for tiny personal networks, i.e. connect your cell phone with the earphones and your pda without cables.
WiFi: Wireless lan since it's a wireless lan you can't really roam around outside of area, which is pretty restricted, nuff said!
Cell phones: Well, cell phones, you get the picturu
I thank you
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Read on and be educated:
/ /shirky.com/writings/zapmail.html
http://shirky.com/writings/permanet.html
http:
-Shane
I love teh int4rw3b!!!!!111one1
Wi-Fi is for $1000 PCs, cellular is for $100 phones.
Wi-Fi is for broadband data, cellular is for voice and, at best, low bandwidth video on tiny screens.
Wi-Fi has a short radius and an IP address, cellular towers are ubiquitous and compatible with several voice networks.
How can these be said to compete? Sure, you can do a lot of PC-ish things on your dinky cell phone, but you can't do half the things a PC on Wi-Fi can over a cellular connection. The cost-per-megabyte is only half the issue. It'll be a long time before mobile phone networks can approach the bandwidth of wireless networking, and by the time they do Wi-Fi will have leapfrogged to a whole 'nother level.
There's a lot of growth in the buck-a-minute world of cell phone downloads and uploads. People are getting innovative, too -- I've seen blogs composed mostly of photos with some short text uploaded from people's phones, and my wife uses hers as an organizer, storing names, phone numbers, addresses and alarms. As more and more phones are sync-able with people's PCs, they'll become more popular as MP3 players as well as download tools.
So this is cool, although we all know there's a plateau out there somewhere and several phone companies will crash hard when they run off the edge of it. But so what? Wi-Fi won't lose marketshare to phone makers because it can do so much more (bandwidth, public hotspots) and so much less (limited radius, hub tied to a physical landline). There's overlap, but it's less than the article implies. Until cellular phones can do everything a laptop PC can do -- and with those tiny screens and thumb-only keyboards, that's not too likely -- there's plenty of room for both.
"$15/mo unlimited data.
... it's "SprintPCS Vision" data that's unlimited.
Did you want more than that?
Be sure from now on to check up on your facts
Actually I was just checking that particular fact
From their web site:
"Unlimited PCS Vision Access includes:
Unlimited Messaging, including text messages and email
Unlimited Web access"
So, email and proxied http traffic is not exactly the unlimited data that the Slashdot crowd is looking for.