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Can Mobile Broadband Solve the UK Digital Divide?
MJackson writes "Lord Carter's interim Digital Britain report recently proposed a new Universal Service Obligation (USO), which would effectively make it mandatory for every household in the UK to have access to a broadband service capable of 2Mbps by 2012. Since then there has been much talk about Mobile Broadband (3G, 4G) services being used to bridge the UK Digital Divide, but is that realistic? The technology has all sorts of problems from slow speeds and high latency to blocking VoIP, MSN Instant Messaging and aggressive image compression ... not to mention connection stability."
Yes. All towns are wired and all new housing is mandated to be constructed with fiber optic cable within the walls. Naturally not all wires leading to the homes are fiber yet, but that process is constant and gradual with approximately 45% of Japan's inhabited areas wired with fiber and 100% wired for broadband (defined as minimum 30Mbps).
Your population density assertion has never been true in the UK where populations are mostly centered in cities and towns. And it has only been marginally true in the US where wiring to very remote areas for very few customers has been considered too cost inefficient.
3G as an alternative to domestic fixed broadband in remote areas doesn't have to support many people. You're forgetting that the UK is a densely populated area. I live in what is considered a rural area - the Cotswolds (postcards of thatched cottages etc) - and I can get 2.5Mbit/s ADSL.
The areas we're talking about are really, really remote like the Scottish highlands and the deepest parts of English and Welsh moorland.
You're talking about two or three households per tower, plus three hikers sending cameraphone pics, two businessmen on an expenses-paid grouse shoot checking their email and a bloke on a tractor arguing with his boss. It'll cope fine.
My problem with the proposal is the conflation of 3G with broadband. 3G is not remotely equivalent to broadband, and I speak as someone who uses 3.5G regularly on my netbook in a high-signal urban area (Cheltenham). 3G has massively high ping times, it's unusable for anything other than browsing static web pages, FTP and SSH/Telnet sessions. Attempting to run video, gaming, VOIP or J2ME content over 3G is utter, utter pants.
Never mind the bandwidth, feel the latency.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Dynamic power control; where the mobile and base station lower the transmission power to the minimum needed is a standard feature on all proper modern mobile networks and has been since the start of GSM. Putting in cells more densely automatically lowers the power requirement for almost all mobiles. For some CDMA based networks (IS-95) there is a problem with "cell breathing" in that heavy traffic may leave gaps in coverage, however modern CDMA networks (UMTS and on) support controlled inter-frequency handover and so having multiple network layers works well; one providing coverage and and another providing capacity and then keep only a few mobiles (fast moving or very unlucky location) in the coverage layer, moving all other ones to the capacity layer.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Be internet is doing a ADSL2+ 24mb/s for 17.50 GBP, which works out to 25 dollars a month... That's not too bad is it?
Virgin Broadband is doing a 50mb/s cable service for 35 GBP which is a lot more and probably not worth it because it's cable.
You can check availability at www.samknows.com for almost all ADSL LLU (and cable) providers in the UK. Almost all exchanges have ADSL equipment and most have ADSL2+.
BTW, 3G HSDPA coverage is very good in the UK in and is 80-90% of all areas, while 2G/GPRS coverage is near 100%.
Getting a HSDPA USB dongle is really cheap as well, some plans are as low as 5 GBP a month (1GB limit).
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I can't speak for T-Mobile, but on O2 if you replace the 'mobileweb' APN username with 'bypass', you can download images without the compression that's otherwise applied.
3G as an alternative to domestic fixed broadband in remote areas doesn't have to support many people. You're forgetting that the UK is a densely populated area. I live in what is considered a rural area - the Cotswolds (postcards of thatched cottages etc) - and I can get 2.5Mbit/s ADSL.
You in turn are forgetting that The Cotswolds are amongst Britain's most expensive and affluent areas (postcards of thatched cottages etc), and tend to get priority for such services due to the fact that the execs making the decisions live there. Try looking at a similarly rural area in a poorer part of the country, such as North Lincolnshire. My employer's head offices are on an industrial estate just outside Scunthorpe, and I've just checked the BT website for the location which says that not even 256k bps is available there. I'll say that again: an industrial estate in the commuter belt of a decent-sized town. Rather more than "You're talking about two or three households per tower, plus three hikers sending cameraphone pics, two businessmen on an expenses-paid grouse shoot checking their email and a bloke on a tractor arguing with his boss". "Digital divide" is right; the "haves" are not aware of the true extent of the "have nots".
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The T-Mobile connection manager allows you to disable image compression, it's two clicks away from the tray icon.
Stupid flounders!
Another issue is insane overage rates.
e.g. with 3 you can get broadband at £15 per moth for 15GB per month (which is more than most terrestrial broadband but tollerable IMO) but the overage rate is 10p per MB (which works out to £100 per GB which is IMO insanely expensive)
This means that any user of a mobile broadband contract has to be EXTREMELY carefull to keep an eye on thier usage.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Competition, I think. In part, at least. We have two major parallel cellular networks (Optus and Telstra), plus one medium sized one (Vodafone) and a small-but-fast-and-high-tech one (Three) that roams to Telstra's network when out of coverage.
3G broadband is getting big here. Hutchison is pushing it *hard* as a major alternative to ADSL/cable, and they're making progress. That means good quality, decent network capacity, and decent pricing.
It used to be horrifying here. Like 1c/kb (yes, kb) for GPRS *or* UMTS service. My mobile plan a mere year and a half ago would've cost $32,000/hour at maximum advertised HSDPA download rate. We've never had the other crap - filtering, blocking, image compression, etc - though, and the prices are plummeting as the carriers fight to pick up users.
Vodafone and Optus push it as a major faclity for smartphones, and also offer 3G modem+plan bundles. Three make mobile internet use a major selling point of their phones, including preinstalling Skype and selling "skype minutes" as part of their mobile plans. Not that you can't just use it or another VoIP service via your normal data allowance anyway. Even Telstra don't block or filter VoIP etc on their network.
The only issue we do really have here is SIM-locking. Most cellular modems and phones are sold SIM-locked to a particular carrier, and tend to carry an unlocking fee if you want it unlocked before your contract runs out. To me, that seems a bit dodgy ... just make the minimum spend / contract escape costs high enough so you do OK even if the user has an unused SIM sitting on their desk. Since the carriers *will* generally unlock the phones for a pretty reasonable fee within contract, and usually do it for free post-contract, it's just not that big an issue though.
Perhaps they're a small business who can't justify the higher costs and would be more than adequately served by a consumer product. Not all businesses in industrial parks are giants, in fact most of them aren't and paying through the nose for a service they don't need would be more than stupid.
I don't know why everyone ignores DSL. The telephone lines are already buried underground, and leading to every home, so upgrading everyone to high-speed is extremely easy and cheap. People's speeds could increase from 50k to 2000k, 40 times faster, literally overnight.
I have DSL too. And it is good. Provided you are fairly close to the exchange. I'm about 5 minutes walk from mine, and I get just under 7 if the 8 Meg that the ISP claims. But the further you go from the exchange, the lower the speed. DSL is fine for city or town use, but once you start going out to the sticks, the speed drops off.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.