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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 ...
But cellular == the phone company, which usually translates into expensive metering and obnoxious, slow telco beuracracy.
Telecoms bankrupted themselves to pay the gov't billions for the 3G spectrum, don't expect them to give it away for free or cheap.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Sure you can download ringtones easily and quickly over current cellular protocols like it says in the article but these mp3/PDA enabled cell phones that are coming out still require some kind of dock or hard connection to xfer information to them with any kind of decent speed. This is where WiFi will definitely come in handy for its speed.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
It all comes down to whether you'd rather pay 50c a minute to do it *right now* or wait a while and do it back at the office, or at starbucks or wherever. Yeah, if the cell companies start offering data traffic for free, you'd be an idiot not to subscribe, but I don't see it being free or even reasonably cheap anytime soon.
I think phones should have wifi capabilities, not for getting on a network but for sharing network connectivity. Having a phone that used 3g to get connectivity and used 802.X to broadcast a network "cloud" around the phone would be pretty sweet.
Who is your provider?
Life is too short to proofread.
WiFi is meant to cover a small area, like a house or an office, to link back to local resources. Celluar networks have nothing useful on them other than their connection back to the outside world.
Does anybody sane have a T3 that both starts and ends in their basement? There's no point, 100BaseT wires provide faster bandwidth on a cheaper wire in small-area situations. But you can't ask 100BaseT to go accross town, and that's what the T3 is useful for.
WiFi is for LAN use, cellular is for WAN use. Both have a place, and neither can fully replace the other.
Unfortunately, most of the world doesn't offer GPRS that cheap. Here in the UK you're looking at $6 a megabyte at least.
Bandwith counting can be built into WiFi services in several ways... just because WiFi itself doesn't offer it doesn't mean somebody can't put something just downstream of the access point to do the counting.
The question is, would you want to? While cell phones are the most convenient way to send a picture taken with the phone, it would still require some sort of docking station is order to send pics from my digital camera. And viewing pics and movies just isn't fun on a small screen.
Additionally, the "experience" of browsing the web is quite different on a cell phone than it is on laptop or desktop -- I've tried. Part of it is that most websites simply are unreadable on phones, part of it is that you know that you're paying by the kilobyte -- so much for opening tabs for every Slashdot story and Google result. Which brings up another point: To my knowledge, browsers aren't quite as good on phones. No tabs, and we no the Slashdot crowd loves their tabs ;-) Another part of the "experience" left out.
It makes the notion of a hotspot almost meaningless.
The one good thing about cell phone net access -- you can do it from anywhere that you have cell coverage. I definitely do enjoy that.
In the end, the best result, imho, would be cell phone web access from laptops, unmetered. Does this exist?
This is a really good point. Here in Canada, it's even more relavent. :) I live in a city of about 700k people, which happens to be the only major city in my province. The next closest major city is about 7 hours away.. and at around 350k people, it's not really "major". Now that i think about it, the closest big city is about 9 hours away, and it's not a Canadian city at all (Minneapolis).
That said, we've sure got a lot of fibre here. Our government has been pursuing an expansive and expensive project to network the entire country. I don't think WiFi will ever be part of the big picture here, largely due to the massive amounts of basically uninhabited country between our cities.
That's what you can do with Bluetooth today, and it doesn't drain your tiny cell phone battery in an hour like WiFi will... Stuff like what you just said is a major reason for Bluetooth to exist (and of course it has other uses).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone can put up their own wifi hub, but only verizon and its ilk can erect their own phone hub. Sure, I'd sooner pay $50 a month for a flat rate phone that I can carry with me than paying $30 a month for one I can't, but that's about as much a converged product as my POTS line with this old 56K modem. In fact, I'd sign up today... but guess what? I can't do that, either. Because I live in the country, and despite the fact there's a cell tower just a mile from here, you can't get flat rate cellular service with reasonably fast data transfer. POTS + dialup account = $50; And cellular can do 64kbps, which is far better than anyone around here can do on POTS. You'd think the cell companies would be lining up to exploit this as a means of financing the building out their infrastructure. You'd think that... but you'd be wrong.
Cellular is just wireless POTS. And it seems no matter where the technology COULD go, all the industry cares to think is on those terms. Sure they offer widgets and toys that will work on a tiny screen, and they offer (slow) internet access if you happen to live in a well built out service area where they can't sell enough minutes to utilize all the equipment they already have in place. But if you live outside one of these saturated "hubs" it's the same old story.
I founded two of the three wireless providers operating in the metro Omaha area (#53 in terms of market size) and I can assure you that cellular is going to stomp balls on unlicensed wireless services.
... its not an *if*, its a 'how soon'.
... yet ... but I am aware of several additional point to multipoint installs in that band that are going to compete with the service I built last year. The UNI-I band noise floor is going to reach the same ridiculous levels we see in ISM - it is just a matter of time.
... and with the instability of ISM obviously going to happen in UNI-I no one with the money to drive that sort of activitry is going to be silly enough to get involved.
... which they can already do for the tougher mobile market and they can not bury themselves in stupid anti-customer policies like the cable modem industry. People are going to pay for a network attachmen they can *use*, not a service for downloading Hello, Kitty skins for their cell phones.
What we've seen in the last six weeks in the ISM band here in Omaha is an indication of the future of the whole industry.
Someone, somewhere, which we can't locate, has put up something in the ISM band we can't identify which produces an observed signal strength at a range of ten plus miles that is equal to the signal strength observed *six feet* from a multipoint sector antenna amped to the legal maximum. This has been the final blow for service coming from the second highest location in the city. Crowding and poor practice on the highest point make it equally precarious. Unless you *own* the rights to the ISM band on the structure you're using as a central site, you *will* get screwed
The situation in the UNI-I band isn't that grim
You have to understand the economics of the thing to know why it isn't going to work - even if you don't have technical problems like we're seeing here the only place ISM band wireless is going to succeed is in rural areas.
Customers view wireless as a competitor to DSL and cable and that is a loser's game - if you aren't selling some additional service on your circuit you're pissing away money at the $40/mo mark. The money spot is above a T1 and below a DS3
All that needs to happen for G3 to succeed is for them to provide ISDN like speed to fixed installs
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
802.11 has be aroud for over 5 years It fills a need the lastest cool use does not change that. It is use in offices and factories do do work. To switch to a slow by the minute system will not fly. You can by a cellularmodem, but most people do not. That is the market at work. 802.11 will be around for a long time, cellular may affect some of its markets, but not all. If the question was will cellular replace Hot Spots, that is different.
Cell phones use licensed spectrum, controlled by companies.
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Spectrum is controlled and licensed by government agencies, in the the US, the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau of the FCC, Canada, Industry Canada, and the UK, the Radiocommunications Agency of the Department of Trade and Industry.
The licensing comes from a tradition of making spectrum organized to prevent interference.
Anyone who tries to use WiFi in a densely populated area, especially over a large area (e.g. linking various sites in the same city) can tell you, intereference can be a problem within the license-free (aka license-exempt) frequency ranges
until you connect to my WAP. Then you get to realize the horrors that is a shared 56k modem connection.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
We've all seen the marketing about how wired we'll be in the future, downloading video to watch our favorite TV show at the beach etc... . But I've never seen any predictions how much this is going cost the end user. The cell carriers are fighting for market share and not making too much now, deploying 3G is going to cost a LOT of money (huge piles). I think that they expect the usage will go up, but I'm paying something like $40 for 600 minutes (weekdays, free nights and weekends yada yada yada). Seems to me that if rates stay the same and my usage goes up by a factor of 2x or 3x then the bill is going to go up 2x, 3x or worse. Thats 600 minutes = 10hrs month, a phone call from a good friend can easily take an hour, so 10hrs/month can get used up pretty fast. Surfing the WWW can waste hours and hours (didn't get to bed till 3:20am because I had an idea that I wanted to research and lost track of time, following all the links on Google looking for the right info).
I have a suspision that 3G is going to be more than 2/2.5G cellular and its only really usefull if its always avialable so I would want to use a lot more minutes but I'm not that interested in signing up for a plan thats >$40, maybe a little more but I'd need a lot more than 600 minutes. I see 3G getting quite a few "early adopters" then quickly declining as people economize.
I believe you will see devices that do both. WiFi's advantage is bandwidth. 3g cellular's advantage is coverage. The casual travler can get away with WiFi in Hotels, airports etc. Serious road warriors will need both. So there you have it, Hi Bandwidth / Poor coverage vs Low Bandwidth / Good Coverage. On cost, WiFi wins hands down on cost, but cost is relative to business need.
"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it" Richard Feynman
This is the key to the issue.
Do you want to use the internet while driving? Not so much. Maybe only to get directions; the amount that cell phones provide on their basic (read: not very profitable) services.
Other than that, you want to use it in places you work, your home, and places you think/eat (such as restaurants). Considering the cost, it is not unlikely for restaraunts would put in 802.11b if they thought it would earn them customers, as it well might. As far as work and home, the same is true - it's often a cheap feature to add to an environment, and it's getting cheaper a lot faster than the other method.
It seems to me that "surfing" in it's usual sense is reserved for wi/fi alone.
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Plain and simple. If you are a "subscriber" to the telco's cell plan, you are governed by their rules of service and you become one of the herded consumers.
I view this move as a means of wresting control for content distribution and access out of the hands of individuals (access point owners) and into the hands of the mega-telcos. This move also makes it easier for General Ashcroft and the 245th lawyer brigade to monitor traffic and intercept whatever they want. It makes it easier for the phone providers to track your usage, thereby creating yet another product for them to sell to marketers. It delivers to them, the means to target advertising to your mobile device. In short, it puts the consumer back into the "cattle shute" of the big ISP's, where everything becomes an adult playpen, sanitized and appropriatly marketed.
Wi-Fi now, is by definition, run by the person who sets up the access point. This person controls whether it is open or encrypted. This person controls who may access it. This person is responsible for what content may or maynot be distributed through their access point. Having this power in the hands of the individual allows for cool things like "wireless communities" and free hotspots. Whatever the individual chooses. If you don't like it, you can set up your own for less than $150.
On the other hand, if the Cell providers can convince enough people to move to their networks, they can become the standard and can dictate terms of "acceptable use" which, without an viable alternative, become a means of "toll booth" and "restriction."
Ask yourself whether the telcos would allow you to set up a wireless server using their network. This can be done now with an access point and some simple gear...I've seen the handheld wireless webserver here on Slashdot before! Do you think the telco's would allow you to set one up for others to access with their phones?....Think again, we've also seen this week how MS and the phone providers are attempting to create new standards for data transmission between wireless devices...why would that be, when MP3's seem to work fine?...It's the same old practice of creating something propriatary to wrest control out of the hands of the consumer, and put it back into it's rightfull hands...the mega-corps.
It's not that I don't like alternatives, I like them a lot, we just need to keep technology open for people to use in any way they deem appropriate. Wi-FI has grown precisely because it put all the power in the hands of the user. We've seen some pretty weird stuff coming out of many of the users too, stuff that the manufacturers never dreamed of. Don't let the Telco's put that back in the bottle.
There are two simple points here, it seems to me...
1. Price
Sending a byte anywhere across my cable modem costs $0.000000019. Sending one across my GPRS cellphone here in Canada costs me 0.00025 per byte, which makes cellular technology 13,421 times more expensive! Yes, thirteen thousand TIMES more expensive. And 3G is not showing signs of being cheaper. The cell companies have billions in licenses to recover. The 13,421 times difference (that is an 1.3 million percent margin) seems like highway robbery to me.
2. "Getting it". The cell companies have shown no sign of getting anything. They appear to think we are still in the circuit switching age, And have you check cell gprs/wap "content"? One line new headliners updated about once every 48 hours, and cost $0.25 to read? Ther should realise they are thyere to connect us to whatever we want to connec to, not to interpret/provide.
No doubt this will all be solved in the end and we will all have long range wireless, but not until the old telecoms guys are all long retired.
Mike (an ex telecom guy myself, ask me about papertape for loading phone switches years after PCs were introduced!)
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
Cellular has such a massive coverage area and number of towers. Anyone who thinks WiFi is going to surpass Cellular doesn't have clue as to the infrastructure needed to support a mobile network. Sure, cellular companies are like slow moving telcos. You can't push oodles of bandwidth yet, but the sites and network infrastructure are there. 802.11 is no match for the billions of dollars invested in the 90s on cellular and the standards that have been developed.
The hype factor with WiFi is so much higher than cellular and people with Pringles cans get excited and think 802.11 is the answer to everything from national networks to world starvation. 802.11 was an indoor LAN protocol that got stretched beyond what it was intended to do. Sure, 802.16 addresses some of this, but still the frequency allocations and necessary regulatory protection to create a national mobile network with unlicensed technology just isn't there.
802.11 is better suited for hotspots, but remember when Cellular was only for use in vehicles ? Now people use it in place of their home landline phones. Hotspots are merely fads, cellular will stomp on 802.11 hotspots, just watch.
Cellular is a tortoise and WiFi is the hare in the mobile data race. Slow and steady wins this race...
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .