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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.
Cellular will win out, because it can be metered. Companies want to be able to charge per byte (or Kbyte). WiFi doesn't let you do that, and overall WiFi may be regulated to mostly home/SOHO use. While cellular becomes the mobile alternative!
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.
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.
I am no cellular or Wi-Fi expert, but it seems like security is something to consider when mulling over this question. My Wi-Fi network is secured by me, but the cellular network, being a public/private venture, seems to lack the ability for personal protection. Perhaps this is a good thing for my parents, as the cellular network would probably have some sort of built-in controls, but I like to control my own network. Any thoughts or secuirty tidbits that anyone can share would be appreciated.
Cellular access right now is like (early) dialup:
-slow transfers
-disconnects often
-high latency
-expensive
I have a brand new phone (it says 3G and GPS on the back) but if i use any of these features i get charged up the ass!
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.
You have to remember the geograpy of much of the world. In the US, WiFi will never take off outside of cities because of the incredible expense of giving total coverage. Here in the UK, or over in japan however, our population is close to ten times denser, making WiFi a much more attractive prospect. Japanese cell networks have far more transmitters than US networks because of the density of cellular activity, with transmitters often less than 100ft apart, so it's no great leap of the imagination to see those transmitters being supplimented or even replaced by WiFi.
This article reminds me of opposite day. Except for the last sentence.
You see; telecos (in Europe at least) are very, very nervous about 802.11. They paid, literally, billions of dollars for UMTS licenses. Some other poster mentioned a $50/month unlimited plan on GPRS, well, GPRS is really, really slow. UMTS is supposed to be 2 megabit/second, albeit shared with all users in a cell. UMTS cells will however be smaller than conventional GSM cells.
GPRS can be rolled out pretty much instantly using the existing GSM infrastructure. UMTS will need entirely new basestations to put into place. Why build a network with near-100% coverage, if handsets will drop to GSM if necessary? Well, the VERY expensive UMTS licenses require it.
Then comes along wifi.. Speeds of 3 or 10 Mbps. Today. No big network. Free spectrum. Yes, only at hot spots, but where else do you use your laptop? In the mall? In your car? Hardly bloody likely. Hotels, airports, maybe Starbucks. And they ALL have hot spots already! Using the net on a little phone or pda/subnotebook gizmo? You don't need megabits of speed, existing data or GPRS (2.5G) will do.
So 3G is a really big liability. The license is use it or lose it; don't build a network (again, imagine a billion crisp green bills vanishing in thin air) and your other invested billions will never yield any return on investment (a write-off).
mmO2 already took a write-off selling the Dutch O2 branded operator (which will now rebrand to it's *old* pre-O2 brand, telfort). The company was bought for 75 million Euros, and mmO2 wrote off the rest of the company's worth (the billions it put into the UMTS license, which never materialized any revenue so far). The new Telfort says it won't do anything with UMTS.
Show me a device that ordinary people will buy that accesses a service that ordinary people want to use that uses megabit per second speeds AND that can be used anywhere (so, pocketsized, not a big ass laptop). Show me that, and I might be able to get you a very nice consulting gig. There is no killer-app for 3G.
Go wi-fi!
(Though always remember, wi-fi is a commodity, you won't make insane profits (maybe none) and competitors or kiddies can simply jam your signal by using a big ass microwave or other disruptive ISM equipment in the same band..)
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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
Cellular networks are run by companies that most emphatically do not have your best interests at heart. These are the same companies that, to pick the most contemporaneous example, spent millions of your talk-time dollars fighting number portability.
But getting soaked on per-byte and per-minute rates isn't the real issue. The bigger issue is that the cellular networks are end-to-end controlled by the telcos. No service flows over their waves or wires without their approval. Nothing happens on "your" handset that they didn't explicitly pre-authorize -- the exact opposite of the Internet.
If you want to experiment with a new idea in networking, and you're on the Internet, just park a machine on the net with an open port, and try it out. You don't have to get anyone's permission.
On the other hand, if you want to try something out on the cellular network, you first have to get "permission" to write software to run on your own damn phone, then you have to get the Service Provider du Jour to agree to send you the bits you're interested in (for a nominal fee, of course, assuming they know what the hell you're talking about at all). For an example of this idiocy, check out the API for BREW (Basic Runtime Environment for Wireless). It's the only API I've ever seen that expressly has a political layer in its networking stack.
802.11b, OTOH, is just Ethernet-like frames over the air (typically used to carry Internet protocol, but can be used for any other Ethernet-y thing). No permission, no politics, no fellating the local telco to give you "permission" to experiment. Just squirt packets out the interface and see what happens. Yeah, it carries data, but where is it written it can't carry voice as well?
Cell phones are darned useful, but believe me, you do not want the cell phone providers to become the dominant force in wireless data transport. They will screw you.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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
What the article and poster are both missing is that cellular phones and WiFi networks have entirely different scopes of operation.
WiFi is intended for short-range use and provides large amounts of bandwidth (54Mbps) completely unmetered.
Cellular is intended for long-range use and provides small amounts of bandwidth which are typically (although not always) metered by the phone company.
It's the old adage: bandwidth, distance, cost. Pick any two.
Furthermore, while I don't see cellular overlapping in scope with WiFi, I see WiFi overlapping cellular in many areas. WiFi *can* be made long range with the proper equipment, and can replace some of the functionality of cellular.