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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."
Likely they want to have a markup to sell the more symmetrical upload speed to business accounts.
No tecnhical reasons other than to maximize profits.
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
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.
It also mitigates damage due to zombie PCs and protects the backbone connection from massive saturation due to user stupidity, p2p file sharing and other taskes.
-- $G
All "the Man" conspiracy theories aside, most customers have a decidedly asymmetric user profile: A few big outgoing mails and photo uploads every now and then, and a lot of websurfing and downloading all the time. A symmetric connection is a waste of resources. You and I may have different user profiles, but ISP offers are for the majority of users, not for the relatively small percentage of people who know what to do with upstream bandwidth.
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
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.
And even $80.00 a month wasn't enough for Ricochet to be able to do it at a profit. The cell phone companies are in a much better position here. They could handle one or two users per cell phone tower with essentially no additional operating costs. As the number of users ramps up, so will their operating costs, but they still don't have anywhere near the costs of Ricochet, because they've already built and need to maintain all the towers.
The difference between Ricochet and the phone companies is that the phone companies can afford to run the service for decades before reaching the critical mass that would be required for a standalone wifi company to be profitable. Ricochet would have been successful eventually, if they had the capital to take a loss over the many years it takes to build a critical mass. But they didn't have that much capital to begin with (even the phone companies and railroads couldn't do it without government help), and when the dot com bubble burst so did Ricochet's hope of getting enough additional funding to reach profitability.
Wireless internet access, at least without P2P mesh networking, is a natural monopoly, and Verizon is a monopoly.
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.
"Carrier" refers to RF. The increasing the backhaul capacity is good but not really required - since the RF channel is bandwidth limited to 2.4Mbps, there's no point putting more than 2 T1 lines per carrier. Carrier (aka spectrum) costs money in license fees; much more expensive than running an extra T1 to the BTS.