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."

Comments

Can someone explain to me?

[kaosrain]

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?

Re:Can someone explain to me?

[moonbender]

It might be a "political" decision in some cases, but at least with ADSL it seems to be technically motivated. See the Wikipedia article on ADSL. (Note: Maybe the article is false, I probably wouldn't notice.) When ADSL was first introduced in a large scale, P2P file sharing wasn't much of an issue, anyway, distribution was pretty much exclusively client/server, so limiting it for "political" reasons wouldn't have made much sense.

Re:Can someone explain to me?

[DanteLysin]

When Time Warner first opened cable modem service, I had 5 mbps download and 1 mbps upload. It didn't last long before Time Warner lowered their upload speeds. The city I lived in was entirely fiber. The reason the uploads were capped were to prevent running businesses at home. Let's face it, at $40/month, cable modem service was the optimal choice for small business.

Now Time Warner offers the higher upload speeds as part of their bBusiness package". But the costs are also a lot higher. I'll still miss running an FTP server wit a 1 mbps upload in my studio apartment. Ahh, those were the days.

Re:Can someone explain to me?

[julesh]

Any connection has a finite amount of bandwidth that must be shared between both directions of transfer.

Most home users (or rather, those that don't run servers or filesharing, which was once most of them, I don't know about now) would rather have faster download speeds and slower upload. It just works better for web browsing, e-mail reading, and most other things the average user wants to do with their Internet connection.

This explains most of the asymmetries involved. The only one *not* explained is the fact that 56K modems only have a 28.8K upstream (which is not widely reported, but true), whereas there's actually equal bandwidth in each direction on phone lines -- what you use in one direction doesn't affect the availability in the other, AFAIK. So I don't know why 56K modems do this... perhaps to keep the hardware cheaper?

Re:Can someone explain to me?

[Myself]

In this case, it has to do with spectrum and equipment. It's easy for the tower to blast out a strong signal with tons of data, and each mobile to hear it. The only limit here is spectrum allocation.

In the reverse direction, the signal from the mobile is much more tightly power-limited, so if there's too much data per unit of energy, the tower can't hear it above the noise. The solution if you can't yell, is to speak slowly.

For wireline services, it's murkier. The noise budget of a DSLAM has a few things in common with the wireless situation, but in most cases, the upload could go much faster than they sell, and yes, it's a political decision rather than a technical one. With cable, the upload is a shared channel, so they're fairly conservative in what they allocate. They should allow more upload when the network is busy, but that would take effort on their part, and only help a few percent of the customer base.

Here's what's funny: The EV-DO tower equipment is served by T1 circuits, which are symmetric. I understand using T1s for the voice stuff, since it's delay-sensitive, but they could've saved a bundle by using DSL for the data. The equipment is capable of it too, just in a nonobvious way. I bet it was never even considered.

Re:Some of us...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us would be happy with a 400-700 kbps pipe in our home.

Yeah, you say now that you'd be happy with just that but if we give it to you then next thing you'll want running water.

Big Deal

[vought]

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?

Re:Big Deal

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Re:Some of us...

[8086ed]

/., or water, /. or water...

EV-DO works great!

[snub]

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.

Re:uplink - downlink

[salesgeek]

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.

No News Here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The reason RE: 56K

[CarrionBird]

It is related to the way in which they get 56K out of a POTS line (it wasn't supposed to be possible). The way I understand it, they send data digitally (PCM) to your modem. They can do this because the lines are all digital until they get close to your house. It only works one way, and only if enough of the path between your house and the ISP is digital.

Also, is it 28.8 upstream or 33.6?

From a former employee

[ChaosMt]

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.

Verizon and timetables

[VGR]

From the article:

Verizon says that the rollout has just begun, and that by the end of this year, half the American population will be EV-DOable.

For those not fluent in Verizon-speak, that means by 2015 half the American population will be EV-DOable.

Verizon EVDO compared to Covad DSL in n. Virginia

[expo1892]

Okay, here's an hour and a half of research into my bandwidth (on a Saturday morning):

• Verizon PC 5220 card, no booster antenna: 158 kbps
  • 7 trials
  • high 677, low 39
  • standard deviation 216 kbps
• Verizon PC 5220 card, with booster antenna: 485 kbps
  • 7 trials
  • high 772, low 51
  • standard deviation 292 kbps
• Covad DSL: 472 kpbs
  • 7 trials
  • high 607, low 381
  • standard deviation 74 kbps

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:

1. I researched and bought the EVDO plan at http://www.evdoinfo.com/.
2. Bandwidth was measured using "CNET.com - Internet Services - BandWidthMeter Results" ( http://reviews.cnet.com/Bandwidth_meter/7004-7254_ 7-0.html, 2005-06-25T07:40/P1H).
3. Calculation of standard deviation was done at http://invsee.asu.edu/srinivas/stdev.html.

(end notes)

Wife's in the shower. Time to go make French Toast now!

As a developer of this system

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Location, location, location!

[grumling]

Verizion has a history of making sure things work very well in Washington DC. I guess this is to convince the .gov that they are serving the public intrest. When I can get it in rural CO with the same speed you see (and remember, I pay more for my cell service due to a "High Cost Fund Surcharge"), I'll be impressed.

I just want to make a phone call in downtown Winterpark.

One user's experience

[eyegone]

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?