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."

Comments

Yep

[binarylarry]

42 Mb/sec.... standing next to the tower.

Everywhere else, a tenth of that or less.

Re:Yep

[p0tat03]

Still beats 2 Mb/sec standing next to the tower and a tenth of that everywhere else.

And things will be the same.

[Creepy Crawler]

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 ba

[Joe The Dragon]

How bandwidth does each tower even have for the backhall?

Radio WNBSITU

[Ostracus]

"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".

Contractual Limits

[vlm]

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.

Who would pay?

[JSBiff]

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.

Re:Who would pay?

[Planesdragon]

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?

if you're going to compare this as the equivalent to a "wired network", then realize that even $60 is CHEAP.

For about $40 I get a broadband connection to my apartment. I can easily cover said apartment in WiFi, and if I go extreme maybe access my network anywhere in a one mile radius. It's certainly easier to "run" wiFi everywhere than try and run ethernet throughout said apartment.

HOWEVER, this is internet only in my apartment. For 150% of the price I can get my cell phone to give me internet that's not significantly slower... that I can use ANYWHERE I GO. To work, to a friend's apartment, to my car in on the highway, to ANOTHER CITY ENTIRELY. Anywhere.

You ever build a network that stretches from one city to the next? With access points all along the highway?

I bet it cost you a hell of a lot more than $60 a month.

Re:Who would pay?

[JSBiff]

"You ever build a network that stretches from one city to the next? With access points all along the highway?

I bet it cost you a hell of a lot more than $60 a month."

Wait. Did you just compare the cost for a single user to use a network to the cost to build an entire network for only 1 user?

If you want to make a comparison, you have to compare the costs of building a Co-ax or copper twisted-pair network (with fiber backbones) to every house and apartment in the city. If you can get Cable or DSL for $40/mo or less, and they have to run individual cables to every building in the city, versus setting up 4 or 6 or 10 Cell Towers, I bet it costs far *less* than $40/mo to build and operate the cellular-based network than it does to build and operate the co-ax or copper network.

Oh, by the way, the cellular companies aren't setting up Wi-Fi hotspots every 500 yards along the highways. They build 1 Cellular tower every what, 5 or 10 miles. So, with cellular technologies, to cover 100 square miles, you might need 5 towers (1 at each corner of the 10x10 mile square, and maybe 1 in the middle), whereas if you tried to use WiFi, you'd probably need hundreds or thousands of hotspots.

Again, going back to one of the points in my original post, the actual costs to run a wireless network are basically fixed, whether you have 10 users or 10k users. If the cell companies introduce 42MBit connections, but then try to charge people 200 bucks a month, very few users are going to pay 200/mo for Internet access. You might get some very rich people doing it as a form of conspicuous consumption, and you might get some business users who desperately need the capability and who can pass the costs along to their customers, but overall, you will have a fairly small user base.

I'd also like to point out that I never said $60/mo is too expensive for wireless internet (just that I'm surprised that wireless internet isn't *cheaper* than wired internet connections, because there is no line-installation and line-maintenance related costs). What I was saying about their pricing structure is that it's crazy how much the bandwidth cap jumps between the $40/mo and $60/mo tiers, which indicates to me that the cell networks must have some bandwidth issues, because a lot of people don't have $60/mo to pay for Internet access, no matter how convenient it is, and the extreme restrictions on the lower tiers seems to serve no other purpose than to discourage people from using their service. For some reason, they've chosen to keep the 'population' of their wireless networks low via their pricing scheme, so they must have pretty limited bandwidth.

Who cares about bandwidth?

[noname444]

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.