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Mobile Broadband to Hit 42Mb/sec In 2009
Barence writes "Mobile broadband speeds could hit a blistering 42Mb/sec as early as next year, according to Ericsson's chief technology officer. The idea seems far-fetched given that even the fastest dongles currently hover at around 7.2Mb/sec, but the technology to smash that barrier is thought to be just around the corner. One of the methods is very similar to the MIMO technology already used in draft-N wireless routers, but Ericsson believes a combination of factors may even squeeze that figure to 80Mb/sec in the longer term."
....to guesstimate early next year. Aside from FCC approval do you really think most mobile broadband companies (well, AT&T and such) will hurry to implement this while citing issues with bandwidth and creating caps. Add that to RIAA influence and technology upgrades for carriers, it'll probably be at least 5-6 years before we see any consumer use of this technology.
How much will that cost??? If the the 7mb stuff is already "hovering around" $80/mo, logically the 40mb line will be around $400/mo?????
42 Mb/sec.... standing next to the tower.
Everywhere else, a tenth of that or less.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I hear a station wagon full of tapes gets pretty good bandwidth, too.
"Aside from FCC approval do you really think most mobile broadband companies (well, AT&T and such) will hurry to implement this while citing issues with bandwidth and creating caps."
Why would I expect them to confuse two different technologies?
"Add that to RIAA influence and technology upgrades for carriers, it'll probably be at least 5-6 years before we see any consumer use of this technology."
Nothing like the "I WANT IT NOW!" mentality to drive innovation.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
1. handheld wifi dish antenna (pringles can?)
2. Base station towers similar to home ham radio towers that go up 50FT but with 50 flat receivers that is joined in a circle.
Ground Microwave is used by all local news. Pretty cool. Distance might be a problem.
Can it be done?
This is what I'd like to call WNBSITU...
WNBSITU stands for Will Not Be Seen In The Us
Heck, normal broadband speeds here are abysmal as it is.
"Can it be done?"
Only if you ignore that a shared resource is in peril in a world of "me! me! me!".
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Wow. 40+MBps speeds on cell networks, and text messages will still be .20$ per.
Meh.
How bandwidth does each tower even have for the backhall?
Wireless is really the only hope we have for getting high speed broadband to all our country (7,686,850 sq km), and begrudgingly I must admit that our main carrier (Telstra) is actually doing a very good job.
7.2Mb is available EVERYWHERE, not just next to the tower, not near a big city. Sure, for some people in distant locations they may need a roof mount antennae, but its everywhere.
And they have on their roadmap 14Mb slated for next year, and 28mb for 2010. Now its just a roadmap, but so far they have met their promises with wireless, so I wont disregard them just yet.
DSLIP Web Design and Content Management Australia.
"Heck, normal broadband speeds here are abysmal as it is."
No. Dialup at 33.6 is abysmal. Broadband simply spoils you to the point were you forget what it was like "in the good old days".
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I bet when we reach 42Mb/s it will still be capped at 10gigs for about 2 years worth of consumer outcry, too.
I'm still waiting for my flying car, and I'd say that's a more realistic thing to be waiting for than low-cost, high bandwidth, uncapped internet in the United States.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In Australia, one operator (Telstra) went from 7.2 to 14Mbps. They announced that they would rapidly move to 21Mbps, so most hardware manufacturers didn't bother manufacturing 14Mbps chipsets. I for one hope that 21Mbps doesn't also get skipped in favour of 42Mbps.
More information about it is found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP_Long_Term_Evolution
The article doesn't mention a lot of facts and it also fails to mention that speeds upto 100 Mbit/s is the goal for LTE. So this will be the next step in broadband services over wireless mobile networks.
Mobile broadband speeds could hit a blistering 42Mb/sec
I guarantee there will be one of two contractual limitations:
1) "Unlimited" service forbids the downloading of any media files, use of any streaming applications, any online gaming purposes, any voip or video conference service, and has a cap of 100 megs per month which you'll reach in 2 seconds
-or-
2) "pay as you go data plan" only $150 for 100 megs per month which you'll also reach in two seconds.
Cell phone providers are a confuse-opoloy of crooks whom exist solely to screw over their contractually enslaved victims as much as possible before they switch to another provider, whom coincidentally also only exists to screw over their "customers". Nothing but pure distilled "marketing". I hope they all go out of business in the recession.
Other than that, yeah its great news.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Mobile Co. pricing on data connects makes no sense to me, at least here in the USA. I was checking prices at ATT, Verizon, Sprint, and T-mobile the other day.
AT&T Data plans are fairly typical (the other providers are basically the same, with the exception that none of the others offers a $20/mo 'tier'; Sprint only offers a $60/5GB tier, T-mobile offers unlimited bandwidth for $50/mo [which is the best value for data plans of all the carriers, but they have a ToS which prohibits you from doing a lot of things like P2P, hosting servers, etc on it], while Verizon offers $60/5GB and $40/50MB tiers).
From that page, you can see the following absolutely insane pricing structure:
$20/mo for a total of 10MB transfer for the whole month
$40/mo for a total of 50MB transfer for the whole month
$60/mo for a total of 5GB transfer for the whole month
Now, some interesting things to note is that somehow that phone company can afford to give you 100 TIMES more bandwidth when you go from $40/mo to $60/mo. What. the. hell? That'd be like a butcher offering you 1 lb. of steak for $10, or 100 lbs. of steak for $15. I understand the idea of 'the more you buy the more you save', but that is just freaking ridiculous. They are obviously price gouging any customer who wants to pay less than $60/mo, on a cost-per-MB basis.
It has always been my understanding that wireless networks are cheaper to build and operate than cable or telephone networks, so *why* are they charging so much? The simplest answer would be 'because they can'. In a free market, any provider of goods or services will charge as much as they can. *But*, one of the principles that they teach in High School economics classes is that price and profit form a curve. If you charge to little, you make less money, but if you charge too much, you also make less money. There is a 'sweet spot' where the price maximizes revenue.
Now, since I don't really know *anybody*, personally, who their mobile phone company to connect their laptop or desktop to the Internet, it tells me that, possibly, the mobile phone companies are seriously limiting their own growth in the ISP business. The only thing I can conclude is that the mobile phone companies, even though they have these high speed wireless data networks, can't actually handle the amount of bandwidth that they would need to compete with cable and landline telco companies.
Because, I imagine that if they offered 1 GB/mo for $20, 3GB/mo for $40, and 6GB/mo for $60, they'd have MANY more customers than they currently do, so I can only conclude that they don't want a lot of customers; they want a relatively small amount of customers, all paying $60/mo, or if paying less, getting *dramatically* less bandwidth, which keeps the majority of potential customers off of their network. I'd probably sign up for 1GB/mo for $20, but there's no way I'd ever pay $20 for 10MB.
Is there a site that shows an electromagnetic radiation map? Not that I think much of what we're walking through is any more dangerous than the Sun's rays, but I'd be curious as to where the most intense EM is on the planet.
Why? He's right. It's ridiculous that you can send an e-mail using a webmail interface on your phone for less than it costs to send a text message.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
The whole point about this technology is you can use IM protocols or email, therefore you do not need to use expensive text. In the UK, 3 allows you to use Skype over 3G.
What about latency and reliability?
I'm happy with 3.6 Mbit/s, or even lower, if I get a reliable connection with low latency.
Rock solid 512 kbit/s with 20 ms latency would be preferable to anything available in the mobile market right now.
Now we can get circumvented pop-ups and targeted advertising along with flash ad overlays chewing up that bandwidth waaaaayyyy faster and with higher cost, too.
Seriously, someone has to get the new hardware to support the firmware; hotspots are going to be cost supplemented by targeted advertising for a little while. Or perhaps it will become the norm....
I'm in a rural area of Colorado. DSL and Cable are not available, but the Sprint Broadband service is. However, as good as it works I would really like to have something better.
QWest is the phone company out here and they won't install DSL in my area because there are only 25 potential customers, they say they need 75 to make it worth it. Oh, and if they were to install it, they guess at most I would get would be 1.5Mb which is nearly what Sprint gives me.
As someone who works in the field of wireless cellular physical layer (MIMO, FEC, etc.) I would offer a bit of a reality check. As a rule of thumb in a wireless mobile environment with large cells even with MIMO, LDPC or Turbo coding, advanced QAM modulation, etc one should not expect spectral efficiency more than 4 bits/second/Hertz for an average user. And even this number is optimistic and assumes low mobility speeds and low interference.
For a 40MHz full-duplex channel (half the resources in uplink, half in downlink) one would optimistically expect 80Mbits/sec per cell downlink or uplink. This capacity will be shared amoung all the users served by the cell. If, as a user, you get 8Mbits/second sustained throughput, consider yourself lucky.
So they increase the speeds and let's say the US government does offer free wireless access to the Internet. Considering that, once again, they missed the boat and have already complained that the Internet will fail if they don't start capping bandwidth. So then will they ask for a bailout too? Probably.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
Why does the Ericsson chief technology officer say that he thinks they might be able to achieve something around 42Mb/sec? The technology is clear, with set data rates, assuming stellar signal quality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_HSPA
Although carriers will probably invest many more recourses in LTE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP_Long_Term_Evolution
I don't think we'll get speeds anywhere close to 42Mb/sec. I can't even get one Mb/Second on my wired home connection.
American cellular companies are notorious for being slow at releasing new broadband technology over their European and Japanese counterparts. I worked for AT&T Wireless in their data centers. Contrary to their commercials, 3G didn't take three years to complete, it was closer to eight years.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
Telstra demonstrated 21 Mbps at its investor day last month and committed to roll it out across Australia on its NextG network early 2009. The base station technology was Ericsson's own with prototype terminals from Sierra Wireless which used Qualcomm chipsets.
Telstra has promised the market to have 42 Mbps in 12 months time which presumably will involve enabling MIMO in conjunction with the 21 Mbps service they roll out early next year. They already have 14.4 Mbps nationwide across Australia. Their NextG network uses WCDMA and HSPA Evolved on the 850 MHz spectrum. I have a 7.2 Mbps terminal which given the coverage is great for "working from home" wherever that happens to be ;-)
If you use two bands (10Mhz) you get Multicarrier HSPA+, which peaks at 42Mbps. I'm sure you could stick more bands together and get even higher rates.
With HSPA+ getting 21+ Mbps in a single 5Mhz carrier, are folks really going to get that much improvement in areas with lots of users with WiMAX at 100Mbps in a 20Mhz carrier? There's only so much spectrum...
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
i'd love to see it where i live. Sure the cell companies have my by the tenders, but it's the only thing I can get living out in the country. I get between 800kb - 900kb. That's a far better speed than the 36kb i was getting 2 months ago dialing in to the office. The phone Companies are never going to finish the last mile for DSL, and now that I've been using a verizion modem, I can see why. They make more money on the cell modems than they do on DSL, and there is very little infrastructure to put in place. Why would they bother.
Now I just have to figure out how to sue them for the fact that with their throttling it's actually impossible for me to hit that 50GB limit I'm paying for each month.
We have 20Mbps 3G (and 5.8Mbps upstream) from Telstra here in Australia now.
With a 1GB monthly cap!!
That reminds me, what happened to ultra-wideband? Are there any new developments with it recently, or did it turn out to be completely vapor?
You know . . . I still live in an area where AT&T still hasn't rolled out 3G! I'm stuck in the 2.5G dark ages with EDGE. (Carbondale, IL) What is this 42MBps you speak of?
Wow. 40+MBps speeds on cell networks, and text messages will still be .20$ per.
I think there's a typo in your post, with the extra '.' before the number 20.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Shannon's limit states that you can't go faster than 1-7 bits/sec/Hz, but that applies to a single spatial stream. If you have 4 spatial streams with good multipath, then it is possible to go 4 times faster. This is why LTE 4xMIMO with a 20 MHz channel can go past 300 Mbps which is 15 bits/sec/Hz.
64kbps
I was expecting something better :-)
In the current configuration available with XOHM, Clearwire (DL/UL - 35/12), it is possible to achieve 46 Mbps using MIMO and 64 QAM 5/6 with 10 MHz bandwidth in 2.5/2.6 GHz operation.
But, this is the throughput at the Base Station. Good Wimax terminals can handle up to 35 Mbps (some claim 40 Mbps) in the downlink.
64 QAM 5/6 is already pushing the limits of wireless. It is possible to decode this modulation and coding only at very high signal to (noise+interference) rations. So, as someone pointed out earlier, it may not be possible for everyone in the coverage to get 64 QAM data. (Unless the Base station supports multi antenna/BeamForming techniques)
It is possible to increase the throughput by increasing the bandwidth. To increase further than 46-50 Mbps, we'll need new coding techniques or use more MIMO (currently only two antennas are used - Wimax supports 3 and 4 antenna schemes too)
I am not too conversant with LTE to comment about it.
This is all fine and dandy, BUT.....
What about the fact that 9 of 10 times, a cell tower is somewhere that even getting a T1 to is kind of hard.
Where my house is, we get our internet via WiFi (802.11B and A). A T1 circuit is > 1K dollars a month, and their is ONLY the telco to get it to.
Getting a 42 meg/sec link up here would be rediculous.
I've put up cellular towers before. Man, some of these places are damn near inaccessible in good weather. Of course, their is backhaul, and we all know that TCP/IP LOVES latency, as evidenced by how well satellite internet works.
So, basically, this will help people that generally already have access to broadband at high speeds. The people who actually NEED it, outlying areas, etc., won't get it simply because of that...... What do they call it? Oh yeah, LAST MILE. Just because your distributing broadband wirelessly doesn't mean the OC12 fairy is going to be dropping fiber on your mountaintop anytime soon.
(and I've also talked to my provider here, about backhauling to Los Angeles or Bakersfield to cheapen the cost of the circuits. That's actually our failover, and the latency is SO high (we are talking 60 mile links here) that it is only good for about nothing. Squid box is about the only thing they are interested in, and I think it would help TREMENDOUSLY).
--Toll_Free
How come nobody ever says what Mb/sec stands for? Bits or bytes?
Sprint and Verizon EVDO are both available in my area, but both have 5GB per month limits. They're the best broadband connection I can get. I get about 1.2 megabit, and 120ms latency. Much better than satellite.
5GB goes fast if you watch any streaming video such as GameTrailers.com or Hulu.com.
Verizon says their Mobile Broadband connections are oriented towards business travellers and streaming video isn't one of the things I should be doing much of. Well fine Verizon, then give me DSL or something. I'm two miles from a town. I'm not bitter or anything.
As many of the readers have pointed out, any wireless speed claim is irrelevant without specifying what spectrum is being used. Shame on Ericsson for making these headline-grabbing claims without clarifying how it will be achieved.
Two hours trying to connect.
1 minute connected at 48Mbps.
Disconnected again!
Average speed: 400Kbps.