Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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