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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."
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?
/., or water, /. or water...
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.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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
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.
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.
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!