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The New Wireless Wars
An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek has a story on the coming wireless wars. It's a look at how the upcoming government auction of wireless spectrum will open the door to a new crop of competitors. The new players, from Google and Microsoft to Intel and Craig McCaw's Clearwire, will compete in new wireless voice services and in wireless broadband. Look out Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint-Nextel."
OMGz!!! Choices for the consumer! But will prices or real product selection improve? Ha. I'll still be using my cell as a dial-up modem for at least 5 more years.
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
Personally I'd not be surprised to see a lot of telcos trying very hard to find a way to buy up whatever bandwidth they can, by proxy or sponsored small company.
If they do, then's the time to cry "Foul" and sic the ombudsmen on them. Could end up another California Red Car Line if you don't (buy up and blow up -- Jim Fisk of Fisk Tires bought the Red Car Line -- go figure).
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Wow, more pay per megabyte, pay per message, pay per minute radio services - I can hardly wait. Or maybe they'll have unlimited-as-long-as-you-don't-use-it service for $80/month.
How about allocating some spectrum in this crucial range - low enough in frequency to go through walls and remain reliable in the rain, but high enough to transmit useful amounts of information - to unlicensed wireless networking? Looking at the multi-billion dollar industry that's developed around squeezing every last bit of bandwidth out of the 2.4GHz band, one could argue that unlicensed sprectrum is actually more valuable to the nation's economy than more cellular bandwidth.
Because certainly Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint/Nextel won't be buying any of these new frequencies ;)
Beauty is just a light switch away.
The problem with this, of course, is that it cost an incredible amount of money to put up wireless APs to cover any good size piece of land...and because you want to get the most amount of users per AP, it only makes sense to deploy your network in heavily populated areas, which is exactly the kinds of areas that already have cable and DSL available. Just take what it cost Google just to do SF -- 15 million-plus -- and it doesn't take long to figure that even Google isn't going to cover much ground before going broke.
And the people who really, really want this type of service, in rural areas, are going to get the shaft yet again.
But Google wants to pay the bills -- at least in part -- with advertising. It only makes sense to put that AP right where the most amount of eyes will hit it. I can't fault them for that.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
802.16 will work in all of the frequencies that are up for grabs. When one antenna can give a 25 mile radius, the AP problem gets a lot smaller. Add to that the fact that Intel is going to start shipping WiMax chips, Centrino style, sometime in 2007, you've got yourself a market.
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
In my experience over the past 20 years, auctioning spectrum typically results in expensive spectrum you can't afford to actually use because the purchaser paid too much for it and the consequence pricing is prohibitive. Maybe a lottery....but please.....no more auctions.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Pervasive, inexpensive wireless + VoIP = R.I.P. reliable service
Basically, if you're all using the same frequency space (802.11*), then the overall random noise from the distant nodes - those far enough away that collision avoidance can't work, because you can't recieve their distinct signal, overrides local ones.
An example - consider a plane with a distribution of transmitters. Inside a certain radius, you can beat this a bit by doing the collision avoidance thing, but as you go outwards the signal from the nodes drops off by 1/r^2, but r more nodes appear, meaning that the contribution of each radius from the transmitter is not 1/r^2, but 1/r. Add all these up, and it sums to infinite noise
This can get better if the terrain, or atmosphere absorbs the frequency in question.
One way to stop this happening is to have several non-interfering networks overlaid.
For example, a wi-max network that carries 'long-haul' traffic off the 802.11* network.
Another problem with the 'grid' topology is that if the hops are 100m across, and you want to get to a major node that connects to the rest of the network 1Km away, the nodes that are right next to the big access point are each carrying the traffic of dozens of nearby nodes, for which they are the best route to the net.
Not to mention that it's not going to be this nice, because geography means that in nearly all areas you're not going to get a nice spread of traffic between nodes.
This is not a routing efficiency problem. It's a fundamental problem about the number of hops you need to connect through to get to the 'proper' internet. If the average connection takes 20 hops to get to the net, then at best, you're looking at each node having 5% of it's sticker bandwidth.