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Tetherless Wireless
TolkiEinstein writes "Here's an interesting tidbit from the NY Times on Verizon's new EV-DO network they've dubbed simply, BroadbandAccess Plan. A mere $80/mo. gets you wireless access over Verizon's 3G network at "giddy" speeds of 400-700 kbps. True, that's not exactly breakneck, compared to my 2800-3400 kbps desktop connection. But, the fact that it's hotspot-free (tetherless) wireless access from major metropolitan areas should count for something. One negative is slow upload speeds of around 100 kbps."
Why is it that the download:upload speed ratios are almost always at least 2:1, and usually 3 or 4? Is it solely to deter servers/filesharing?
Some of us would be happy with a 400-700 kbps pipe in our home. Ass.
This isn't news, EV-DO's been around for months.
For me, it's uplink speed that's important. I could upgrade my 512k connection to 2Mb/s, but the uplink would stay at 256k. The more that downlink outweighs uplink, the more it prevents home users from starting sites, and leaves the content of the web in the hands of the large companies with the outgoing bandwidth.
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Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
What benefits do I get with 3G over wireless/wifi access?
I rarely encounter a wifi hotspot that is that slow, and certainly the cost per month for a commercial wifi spot is not as bad; my neighborhood coffee shop near the Albertson's around Fair Oaks blvd (Sacramento) charges way less than that for much faster service.
At such high prices and low speeds I am not convinced that this 3G thing won't jump the shark.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I had 3-400kbps wireless access all over the Bay Area in 2001.
It was called Ricochet...and no, it didn't succeed, because they charged too much for the all-you-can eat plan. How much, you ask?
$80.00 per month.
Another reason Ricochet failed was the FUD spread by the cellcos. They told everyone who would listen that 3G access at 300-500kbps would be ready in 2002 at $25.00/month.
Guess that didn't happen, hunh?
Seen something like this before?
I use one of the older generation Sprint AirCards (until my contract expires) but one of my employees uses EV-DO. Recently we were doing an online presentation using a system similar to NetMeeting. He stopped along the side of the highway outside Washington DC and participated in the session at full speed. No one could discern any lag or tell that he wasn't on a tethered connection.
"Shredded cabbage and mayo go good together." Cole's Law
It's because the same companies you are buying your service from are also in the content distribution business. Your content is a THREAT!
> The more that downlink outweighs uplink,
Well, thats the physics of the system, not a corporate choice to keep the little man down.
>and leaves the content of the web in the hands
>of the large companies with the outgoing
>bandwidth.
Large companies? Or anyone who wants to rent a complete linux or windows server for $79 at a hosting facility with more bandwidth than your home connection, symmetrical or otherwise, could ever hope for.
the bullshit 20% actually delivered that the SPRINT CDMA2000 1XRTT ended up being (some 20-30kbps on a good day with the rare burst at 70kbps) AND if it were $40/month, I'd drop my broadband cabloe and go with the EVDO. As it is, I can live with those few times that a WiFi connex isn't available.bb
Sheesh, TFA is an ad for Verizon masquerading as news.
The real news will be to the folks who actually buy the service: speeds will eventually suck. People: cellular networks are shared so the bandwidth is only available so long as nobody else is using it. The only way Verizon et al can be profitable is to oversell the hell out of the thing. There's a wakeup call coming for those who think the high bandwidth will be there at any given point in the future.
You idiots, the entire cable modem system was set up for content delivery for all these years, repeaters, regenerators, all ONE way. It's a fucking miracle that upload works at all, even at a reduced rate.
Plus remember, the big expensive thing that all the cable modems are talking to at the head end -- that fucker could be powered with 33,000 watts of natural gas and have the very Balzac of Tron pushing its buttons. Whereas, your cable modem has no waveguides or beakers.
Big difference between upload and download limitations.
Also, is it 28.8 upstream or 33.6?
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Hey, thats _SMALL_ I'm sitting here, waithing for my adsl contract to expire, so that I can get my Personal fibre turned on(4/4 symetric, althogh they provide 10/10 & 50/25mb too).
Digging the ditch was a lot of work tho...
I'm not giving away any trade secrets here, but I did get to try this out for free and see what I thought. I was on the data side of things, so I don't have any perspectives from the cell network or sales side of the house.
The article (you did read it, didn't you?) says EVDO is on the 3G network and then cites 1xCDMA. Well, I wasn't under them impression that it was really richochet rising from the ashes. I know it is more than just bonding two cell sessions together like Cingular or like "National Access" and it's not using hot spots like T-mobile or others. I can't be sure, so I'll let others correct me.
What I can provide is real world sysadmin testing. First, non-PCs are not supported, but often they work better. A coworker got it to work under linux, but I don't know the details. They gave use the cheapest one, the aircard, and I slapped it in my powerbook, and I was on the net in less than 10 seconds - really. You wil NOT have this experience on windows. Much of the "speed" comes for all sorts of compression and caching tricks. On a PC, after three reboots, you'll be up and going. For web browsing on a PC, it's deceptively fast - Very acceptable. Slower on my mac (no client caching and compression), but faster than a modem.
However, what really counts to me is ssh anc scp sessions. The network optimization tricks do not handle encryption very well and the true speeds show themselves. It's still much better than modem or using my cell phone for emergency access. It will be laggy at times. This is where signal strength matters. In Orange county California, I every where I went had fair coverage. It was usually local objects that would be in the way of getting a good signal. For example, sitting in the cube around file cabinets or in colos surrounded by equipment would effect the signal.
If you're ever on-call, I'd say this is a must have just for the freedom of movement it gives you. Like I said, ssh and scp are laggy, but workable. X sessions and vnc aren't as snappy as you might dream about, but they are workable and better than the days on modems. A windows cohort of mine lives off this service. He gets emergency calls, and pulls out his laptop and gets to work. He hasn't had any problem in this area.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
The Internet is full. Go away.
It appears that this mobile service cost about 5x that of wired DSL. 400-700 kpbs is roughly comparable to currently available basic residential DSL where you can get 384 k-1.5 Mbps down / 128-384 kbps up for about $15/month.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Show your support for the Kutztown kids.
Millions and millions of people are outside of hard wired xDSL or cable access areas, let alone "wifi" coffee shop access points. There are no alternatives currently except very expensive laggy satellite service for anything resembling broadband. This service is for those areas. It's a humongous untapped market and they will probably do well with it would be my guess
Sure, this is cool if you live in one of the major metropolitan areas covered. I live less than 20 miles from NYC and EVDO isn't available here. So if you're in an area covered and you don't have access to real broadband, this is a win. Otherwise, I'd personally stick with the tried and true cablemodem or (gasp) DSL link. Also, EVDO!=3G. It's more like 2.75G.
Yeah, Ricochet only advertised 128k, what's with that? From every report I've found, it was almost never below 200k.
Ricochet's indoor penetration was also second to none. With the radios blasting out a full watt at 900MHz, it would go through anything, and with 5 poletops per square mile in covered areas, you were always right under one. The modems were able to "gearshift" between modulations on the fly, to work around interference or signal fade. From the blistering speed of 64QAM to the bulletproof penetration of 2FSK, your data would get there, no matter what.
What baffles me is that, with so much Ricochet hardware already out there, and the modems going for $5 on ebay, why hasn't YDI lit the rest of the network back up?
In the meantime, there's some effort underway to reverse-engineer what we can. Check out the Ricochet wiki if you can help.
I am the happy owner of a 20Mb-1Mb pipe (so for you US slashdotters, it's 2400kB/s-128kB/s pipe in metrics...) for 29.99euros/month.
I never was able to go faster than 1.4MB/s down (thats 11200 kbps), as few sources can provide such a fast stream, and from the fact that anything under 3 Mo is too short to even make a blimp on my netspeed applet...
Hey you know what, you want fast DSL at a nice price, come and move to old Europe...
Just don't stop at the UK caus'they took to the US system of bloatedoverpricedunderperforming DSL speeds.
No, try some countries like France, Sweden, etc...
Japan and Korea too...
You know, a civilized, developped country 8)
LOL 400-700 kbps pipe.
it's a standard dsl line from the 90s...
And the cost...
BTW, Ass yourself.
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I don't have to be a leech, war driving, looking for an open AP. In fact, I can be on the train or driving and it works great. If you're looking for cheap, duh - this isn't it. If freedom of movement is important and downtime is expensive, this is a must and it's very useable.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Ok, first is the hype of introducing a new buzz word. That's annoying and I too am sick of PR pretending to be news. But if you're complaining about this, you shouldn't be reading the technology news anyway. Most of it is rewrites of PR wire.
However, there is news here. They're announcing that there's anywhere you go wireless internet access at reasonable speeds for less than selling a lung. I've used it and it's pretty damn useful and cool. There's been and need and demand for this for a few years, and now it is finally a reality. It's not front-page, but it's news worthy.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Okay, here's an hour and a half of research into my bandwidth (on a Saturday morning):
The Verizon PC 5220 card is in a PowerBook. The Covad DSL is plugged into a Power Mac. The laptop performance was measured lying in bed, next to my sleeping wife.
Coverage is pretty good for me. My wife drove us from north Alexandria to Fair Oaks Mall out in Fairfax, I was surfing the web all the way.
Yeah, the slow upload won't let you run a server, but lots of companies provide webhosting, some for little money. Works for me.
Notes:
(end notes)
Wife's in the shower. Time to go make French Toast now!The carrier is *shared* - that "highspeed" connection will slow down to a crawl once enough users get onto the network unless VZW adds carriers. Each carrier is designed to handle around 48 active users.
I just want to make a phone call in downtown Winterpark.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
You can learn more about them here:
http://malfeasance.50megs.com/
$80/mo was plenty for Ricochet to turn a profit, if they'd had users. Unfortunately, the service was barely advertised, and never to the right market. In many of their covered areas, they had under 1000 customers when the service shut down.
Operating costs for a cellular network are absurdly high compared to Ricochet. First, they only needed one site every 10 square miles or so, compared to every 2-3 for most cell networks, and denser in the city. Second, the equipment at the site used a lot less power, took up less space, and wasn't picky about how high it was mounted on the tower. That made the rent very cheap compared to what a cellco pays. Third, Ricochet operated in the 900MHz and 2.4GHz ISM bands, so there were no spectrum licenses to buy. That's a chunk of change right there. (*note)
The fourth big difference is one that Metricom missed out on: The initial network deployment didn't need to be nearly as dense as they did it. Ricochet would've worked fine with 1/4th as many sites, while there weren't many customers on it. As usage increased, they could've filled in sites where the load was heavy, to cut the hopcount and reduce saturation. Metricom's starry-eyed vision included throngs of customers pounding the service with data, so they never planned for a light rollout.
*note: In some extremely dense areas (NYC, SF, DC), Ricochet had the option of using 2.3GHz WCS spectrum, for which they bought licenses in those areas. The WCS was used as downlink-only, from the WAP site to the poletops. Uplink, which carried less traffic due to usage patterns, still rode the ISM bands.
Parent poster, I'd really like you to explain the "essentially no additional operating costs" comment regarding cellular networks. Costs scale with user numbers? That's just the opposite of my understanding, that the site and the rent and the circuits are a fixed cost, no matter how many users are on the site. At some point a busy site will outgrow a single T1 and need more, but that's comparatively rare. The cost for one user per tower, or a dozen users per tower, is exactly the same.
...Just got a Treo 650, which provides level 10 EDGE, and I get roughly 144Kbit speeds...and for $20/month unlimited. Pssh for PalmOS just got an upgrade, which added Zlib compession. Now my Treo is (almost) as useful as my Powerbook when it comes to being on call.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Specifically my home is served by a T1 going over HDSL4 which gets longer range/distance but it consumes two pairs.
There is one other drawback, though.
Pinging www.slashdot.org [66.35.250.151] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=290ms TTL=45
Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=262ms TTL=45
Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=282ms TTL=45
Reply from 66.35.250.151: bytes=32 time=268ms TTL=45
Try that from your DSL connection. (I would, but I just moved to a new apartment a month ago and they still haven't set up the DSL.
I think Verizon's service is only a temporary solution until 802.16/802.20 WiMax rolls out nationally some time in 2006.
Unlike Verizon's service, WiMax is true broadband service that with a single antenna array could cover thousands of users up to line of sight. That means you only need a small number of antenna towers to cover a whole metropolitan area, and WiMax antennas placed along major highways and/or major passenger railroad corridors means high-speed Internet access from a moving vehicle or train.
Yep! In my last job, I did on-site computer service and this would have been VERY useful. Nothing like showing up to someone's house who simply tells you on the phone "My computer doesn't work right. I don't know much about it.", only to find they need about 5 or 6 device drivers that they lost the CD for, and they only have dial-up internet access. (The average Lexmark all-in-one printer driver download is over 200MB nowdays, don't forget!)
The wi-fi hot spots aren't always very reliable either. I've had at least twice now I really need to get some work done on the net, so I took my Powerbook in to the nearest Panera Bread and tried to get online - only to get a generic "Please try again later." type web page, or no connectivity at all.
Will I have to be close to a window for this to work? When I call V up to let them know that I only have one bar on my laptop ... will they tell me to walk outside and see if it gets better?
what an AD....sorry i meant, what a nerd
Mariah.
No company in their right mind still investes in G3 technology which is pretty much dead. 802.11g and 802.16(WiMAX) are far superior. Lately I see free WiFi neighborhood networks popping up everywhere and I am also runnning an open 802.11g node now. That's the real future of the internet.
How do the speeds in verizons 3g network compare to that of cingulars?. I know cingular has it because the sony t300 laptop has a 3g card from cingular built into it.
I work at a customer office, where they provide absolutely no network access, so some type of cellular data service is a must. I chose the Verizon service, because it was the only one that offered EV-DO at the time I signed up.
In my experience, the service does generally live up to its advertising. I get anywhere from 400-700 kbps download speeds in the Dallas metropolitan area.
I did have to turn off the web caching stuff. It appears to route all HTTP traffic to its compressing proxies, which makes all web servers that the proxies can't access (the ones on my employer's intranet) inaccessible.
I am also unable to access cnnfn.com (CNN's financial news site). Can't ping it; connections just time out. I can get to the rest of the CNN site just fine, and I don't have any problem getting to cnnfn.com when I connected through any other network -- weird.
The AirPrime PC 5220 card that Verizon uses appears to the OS as a OHCI-compatible USB controller with a single composite device attached. The two interfaces are simply USB serial devices; interface 0 acts like a modem (accepts standard AT commands), and interface 1 is apparently used for "diagnostic" information (signal strength, etc.).
It's possible to force the Linux generic USB serial driver to recognize the card by specifying the vendor and product ID's as module parameters. Even better, Greg Kroah-Hartman whipped out an "airprime" driver that automatically recognizes the card as soon as its inserted. I'm not sure what trees the driver has made it into yet, but it was in Fedora Core 4 test 3.
The big problem with this service, and apparently other cellular data services as well, is latency. Expect 300-700 ms ping times. It makes using SSH painful, X is completely unusable, and even web sites with lots of different elements can be slow to load. Anyone know why the latency is so bad with this service?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
250-300ms is pretty good for a wide-area wireless service, compared to 70ms for a typical terrestrial service like ADSL. The majority of that 250-300ms is inbound latency. Some applications have difficulty dealing with latency greater than 70ms RTT. Jitter is also a problem. 20ms jitter is pretty good, but when you have too many people on the same frequency, jitter goes up. That is why we are talking "data only" right now. Translation "data only" = E-mail, Instant Messaging, web surfing and one-way video conferencing. Try running voice over IP or file sharing on one of these services and you will get the idea.
I just got this service. It is as fast as advertised, but gives my Powerbook kernel panics w/ the Novatel v620 card they gave me. It is very strange, the kernel panics happen after browsing the web fine for several minutes. Apple does not yet have v620 drivers, so I downloaded a patch from evdoinfo that was supposed to make it work. That didn't work, but then I found 2 more drivers elsewhere that I installed. Both work, but cause kernel panics. I hope 10.4.2 has support for the v620.
Reminds me of Teh Scene, Episode 2. "I have a T-1 connection. That makes my penis bigger."
Not exactly breakneck, and not exactly "3G". And not exactly what they promised. Sprint and Verizon promised EV-DO would run at minimum 140Kbps to 1.5Mbps and up. And they're delivering triple that minimum, and half that maximum. But at least it's >3x128Kbps, which means three good MP3 audio streams (including 110Kbps VoIP), and >320Kbps, which is OK for video, especially on a mobile "phone" screen. So they've finally achieved adequacy for $80:mo.
It's not really 3G, which really starts at 1 or 1Mbps. But then, American "broadband" is a fraud, typically 30-50% the speed of foreign broadband. But at least it provides adequate speeds across an entire city/county/country footprint. The real watershed is multi-radio phones that can roam among the 3G umbrella in public, private WiFi hotspots, and personal Bluetooth near one's own devices, like a bookbag. Single signon and persistent connections that follow whichever connection invisibly to the user. Then the real promise of 3G will be kept: always-on mobile networking. The competition will drag down that ridiculous $80:mo price. And offer a really viable model for "local boost" hotspots, for everyone roaming through the area. Only when the network finally gets out of the way, disappears in simplicity and cheapness (like $5:mo) do the applications take the spotlight, which really means the other people with whom you're communicating.
--
make install -not war
Have had it for two days now. Got it working straight away on my Linux laptop (no driver voodoo, it just looks like a USB serial port). BUT- the coverage, at least in Seattle metro, is "thin". Get outside the downtown district (which is drowning in 802.11 hotspots, both free and paid) and you are in a world of hurt to get an EV-DO signal. If you are lucky you get the fallback sub-dialup speed in many cases. In my Bellevue (big upscale suburb between Seattle and The Land of Evil) home, forget it. No signal at all. (The 4 cell phones from two other providers work, no problem)
I would go into further detail, but the Verizon people were nice enough to give me a V620 card and a free month of service, and I've bitten their hand already....
So until the next techno-wave, it's a mixture of DSL at home (reliable 1.5/900 for about $45), hotspots, and in a pinch, slow GPRS via my cellphone & bluetooth [which always works for me worldwide].
I'll stick with my Blackberry and Cingular. For my usage the Blackberry is best (standing around waiting for flights knock out a few emails, etc.). Plus, I can hop of the plane in the UK and be online.
Try running voice over IP or file sharing on one of these services and you will get the idea.
So is this something specific to EV-DO, or is it built in to the cell phone network? I'd guess it must be something EV-DO specific, because I make phone calls all the time with my cell phone, and while it's not perfect, it is good enough.
I scored a little better, but I'm using the Google Accelerator with my dial-up.
I dont know why you folks are paying $80 a month. Just get a NationAccess plan on your cell phone for $5 and enjoy this service for free... sheesh...
HDSL is a newer delvey mechanism for t-1.
As a Verizon EVDO BroadbandAccess user, I have had no problems since the surrounding towers went live. I am averaging about 800kbps with top end at about 1400kbps. On the upstream im averaging about 240kbps-300kbps. I use the PC5220 Aircard with an external antenna. The only downfall is the latency, which has average pings of 100ms to yahoo, google, etc. But I live in the country, and cellular broadband is the only option, as cable and dsl are not available to me. I use about 10 pcs at any given time and for web browsing and vpn use it suits our needs.
And then there was E
And all I had to buy was a cable to connect my phone (blue tooth users don't even need that). Yeah the bandwidth isn't always stellar, but hey, unlimited internet for 20 a month anywhere in the USA?
Great deal for people who travel!
I have it in the Chicago area.
Once in a while I have some connectivity problems, but I have to say my expectations were exceeded on this product.
As a consultant, this thing pays for itself in 1 day of taking the train downtown and back.
As I write this I am sitting at a Borders, where I *used* to pay for the TMobile Hot Spot wifi, listening to streaming audio, connected to a corporate VPN and working away.
I am even thinking of switching my PocketPC on TMobile to Verizon to get the faster data access speeds on my PPC as well!
What about network latency. That is the thing that has kept me from using cell networks. You get decent speeds at 15-45k/s but with ping times around 2 seconds it really makes the connection perform more like sub dialup than isdn+.
at Reliant stadium. Was told the metal building might be affecting signal, but my PCS phone was working fine. Laggy as hell and even the top speed wasn't worth a damn.
I'd still take it if the company would get me one, but until then Verizon can keep it and keep trying to improve it.
Verizon has this deal with the Metro board (the org that runs the DC subway) for "exclusivity" rights since 1993 or so. The original 8 year deal was supposed to give Metro an $8 million emergency backup communications system. But they renewed the agreement for, like 16 years, for pretty much nothing compared to what other places like NYC's Port Authority gets for allowing telecoms to run cells in the Lincoln tunnel and such.
:P
So basically, if you live and work in DC and take the Metro, Verizon's the only cell service that would work in most of the underground stations.
This was on the Washington Post a week or so ago on their 4-part series grilling Metro... I'd dig up the link, but it's already too far back on their search engine
Also, somebody commented about latency and jitter. Aside from any issues about overloading the air channel and fixing it with queuing, measurements like that are often random and large because routers are not very good at responding to pings, especially when they're busy - ping responses tend to be handled by the CPU, while packet routing is actually done in ASIC cards, so the ping or traceroute time is often much much slower than the actual packet routing behaviour. What you need to do end-to-end timings.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If your broken intranet requires smaller packets already, try making them even smaller, e.g. drop to 1250 or something. (Sigh..)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A friend of mine lived in an area that didn't have DSL yet, but he could get the ~56kbps Metricom service, and was the only customer near his nearest Metricom lamppost, so he usually got pretty full bandwidth for his household of four people. Sure beat dialup.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's nice to get blazingly fast bandwidth to a handheld device, but unless it's got a hard disk bigger than 40GB and you're running BitTorrent, it's fundamentally really low usage for the wireless company. Many of the cellular companies that offer $20 "unlimited" service will not let you use that service to connect your phone/handheld to a PC, or let you use it with a cellular card in your PC, or at least won't let you do it without charging you $80-100. So that phone with a Bluetooth in it isn't allowed to use the Bluetooth to connect to your laptop..
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks