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Samsung Shows Off 3.6Mbps Cellular
dsginter writes "At this week's CES, Samsung Electronics is showing off a 3.6Mbps cellular phone. The device uses High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) to acheive such speeds. "
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Imagine all the first posts I could get with speed that fast and mobile at the same time.
This is not useful untill/unless it is connected to a computer. With a connection to a laptop it would kick arse, but WiMAX or similar is probably more suited to that market. There is just no use for that much data on a phone.
With such a high bandwidth they'll need a ton of base stations to get decent coverage.
There's only so much spectrum to go around and as the speeds go up the base frequency has to go up (otherwise you get less channels) so all the line-of-sight effects will go up as well. (this will go on until we use lasers for communication like this).
some hot chick...
MP3 Search Engine
But after seeing the download rates of German, UK, and Swedish downloaders in one BitTorrent session, I think it's to buy three of these phones for each side of the ocean and hook the remotes to Bredbandsbolaget.
It'd be easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to find that kind of bandwidth from a local provider, even if you throw in the cost of a house in Sweden.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
maybe now we'll get a full-featured cell browser. I want lots of plugins built in.
...in real life, on a sunny day with a following wind, it should achieve about 2KB a second and cost about 2K$ a second. Where can I get one?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
This is pretty neat, but with cell phone companies charging for data by the kilobyte...
Cooool... Yet Another Obscure Abbreviation
Forget MP3s/min; that's only really useful for broadband connections. For mobile phones it should be Ringtones/min, although I'm not sure of the conversion factor. But just imagine having te ability to almost instantaneously download the most irritating and annoying rings possible -- brilliant! What will Samsung think of next!
Somebody call me when they invent a mobile phone with a built-in plasma cannon.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
In any case, all of this reminds me of the problems we (about ten students) had a decade or so back when we got lost on a field trip after our plane ran out of fuel somewhere in the Pacific ocean. We, fortunately, were close to a neighbouring island, and all swam to safety, but we immediately had problems. There was no problem with the notion of being rescued, we found garbage on one side of the island with evidence (old programmes and menus) that a cruise ship landed there once every month to allow passengers to tour. But in the mean time, we had to find food, build shelter, and do something to enable communication throughout the entire island.
The latter probably deserves some explanation. Early on we found that we had problems with people wandering off and being unreachable for extended periods of time. We were worried about the potential for accidents, with people stranded and nobody able to find them. What we all felt was necessary was a crude phone network. Opinion differed as to whether we should use copper, putting fixed line telephones around the island at convenient locations, or whether we should use something like a mobile phone system. In the end, I think most people were agreed the latter was preferable. We used a crude, power level controlled, frequency hopping TDMA over FSK signaling system (largely to save power) with a simple ADPCM codec throttled down to 16kbps (transmitted speech was bearable but hardly "toll quality". We went at that rate to save transistors and also help save power) This took a lot of work, and was quite a learning experience: only one person in the group had ever built a transistor before from raw sand, so you can imagine the problems we had building a full blown mobile phone. Some work though, some of which involved magnifying glasses (well, glasses) and sunlight, meant we were able to build some simple integrated circuits, including one that implemented 16 NAND gates.
In the end, eight of us worked on the mobile phone system, while one went out hunting for food and the other built a number of huts for shelter. The completed system was ready a few days before help finally arrived: it wasn't that impressive, battery life (the batteries weren't rechargable, we used limes with copper and iron cathodes/anodes) was about a day, less if you used the things, and despite seventeen well placed base stations around the island (which was, maybe, five miles wide - it took around three or four hours to walk around the entire thing), there were a number of coverage blackspots.
Anyway, I guess this relates to your point thusly: early on, we had a lot of arguments about what the cellphones should include. Many wanted us to power the things with full blown DSP CPUs rather than build discrete logic finite state machines to control the things. The argument that was with general purpose CPUs, we could also put games, calculators, and calanders on the things. It all came down to timings, with some people feeling we should be as basic as possible, so our phones could be online relatively quickly. In the end the group sided with the latter point of view. Clearly sometimes simpler is better. When you're building a communications system with limited resources, clearly trying to build an all-singing all-dancing cellphone system is stupid. I can't imagine how long it would have taken had we tried to implement, say, a CDMA based system.
As an aside I still have my phone somewhere. I'm very proud of the SIM card, which I built myself out of melted copper and pulp made out of crushed leaves and tree bark juice. The phone number, five-seven-two, is hardwired.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Just imagine what you can send in the way of text messages, photographs, audio content, etc.
The big hurdle for the phone companies is going to be working out how best to suck huge amounts of money out of the customer for this high-speed service. I'm sure we're all behind them in this effort...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar