Slashdot Mirror
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. "
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I'm much less worried about the peak bandwidth than the latency, especially on wireless. Plus, beyond a certain point, what good does the excess bandwidth do? I've got much better devices than my phone for viewing/playing/streaming large files anyways.
Fight psychopharmacological mccarthyism. http://www.norml.org/
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.
The article says the phone has a download speed of 10 MP3s per minute. At least LOC is a relatively fixed amount, this is just ridiculous.
3.6Mbps is actually a little low for the protocol that they're using .. it's supposed to be able to do 8 - 10 Mbps. No mention of why it's not up to scratch in the article though..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA
http://twitter.com/onion2k
...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.
Seriously, until the carriers have some more reasonable data plans available, all this speed is useless. There is currently no way to get an "unlimited" data plan without a Blackberry with Rogers, and check out this BS added to their "unlimited" blackberry plan:
***Rogers Wireless reserves the right to limit usage and charge $7 per additional MB for excessive usage over 25 MB of data per month.
So, "unlimited" == 25 MB now? WTF?
The only carrier I know of in North America with an true "unlimited" data plan is T-Mobile. I don't know how these companies expect a wireless revolution to take place when they are gouging the prices like this.
I would gladly pay $35 / month for unlimited wirless data + only 100 anytime minutes. Unlimited talk time is useless to me - I want mobile data access dammit!
Cooool... Yet Another Obscure Abbreviation
...does it make clear phone calls?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I use Samsung's t809 with T-Mobile's EDGE to get about 150kbps (on the WAP browser as well as via Bluetooth tether to my laptop or PDA). 150kbps is more than enough on the road, and I actually find myself using it at home (even though I have a massive broadband pipe). The latency is very low, web browsing is very snappy, and most of my posts to slashdot come from that combo.
7mbps is useless for a wireless connection, and I think it can be debated to being useless for even a landline connection. It is my opinon that what we need is snappier (lower latency) connections, not huge pipes.
The big concern about 7mbps is battery life, too. My previous PDA phone (HP iPAQ h6315) had WiFi and Bluetooth and the WiFi connection killed the battery life. My current phone with my PDA using just Bluetooth offers me hours and hours of high speed-ish access without the battery hit.
The other killer is upload speed. From what I can tell, FCC safety regulations prevent more than a few upload/transmission channels for cell phone users -- we may not be able to get much past the maximums we have now. I get about a 44kbps upload speed, which is fine for most portable processes. In order to double this speed, we'd need a higher transmit power, which could be dangerous (or maybe it's an unfounded danger, I'm not sure).
Either way, I'd rather see manufacturers spending money on better user interfaces, better power management and reducing the need to lock features out of the phones released. My t809 is an awesome phone, but it still has enough locked and proprietary features as to make it less useful, especially for the power users. I'd happily stay at 100kbps-150kbps and get a few more features on the interface than get 7mbps and lose a few.
What's the upload speed? I've been wanting a portable web server on my cell phone so that people could ask me, "Is that a blog in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
With that kind of bandwidth the authorities could finally have real time streaming video off everybody's phone camera!
We'd finally be safe from the menace from our pockets!
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
"Not useful" is some pretty strong language. You're just not being imaginative.
- Streaming high resolution video and high-quality audio to a cellphone might not seem useful on a tiny little LCD with a crappy speaker, but what about to a phone that has an external "eye-projector" thingamajig and a nice headphone jack? You could watch HDTV on your mobile, reveling in the privacy of the eye screen.
- Streaming similar audio/video FROM the cellphone, LIVE, to remote locations. Can you say "instant news feed"? I knew you could. (And you thought the guy with the pics from the explosive decompression on the airplane was cool?!)
- Replacing expensive, proprietary mobile equipment (visual-overlay eyewear, biometrics) with a reasonably-priced, off-the-shelf cellphone.
And come on, don't you think that one of the primary intended uses IS to connect to a laptop? Sheesh, they let you post any old thing on Slashdot these days, don't they?
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.