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The Apple Broadcast Network
Hodejo1 writes "In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild. That makes a proprietary amalgam greater than what the TV networks had in 1959 and one that easily serves as a foundation for a pending broadcast network that will be delivered not through tall radio towers, but through small wireless hubs and the Internet. Call it the Apple Broadcast Network. iAd is how Apple plans to pay for it."
I told the firehose this link-bait was stupid, not sure why it did not listen. TFA article does not make any sense. There is no meat to it. It does not offer any information. The entire thing is pointless.
BTW there is nothing in the article that is not in the summary, so feel free to comment away without clicking. Not clicking is actually preferable in this case. I would dispute the point of the article, but since it makes no point, it is difficult to dispute. It is also, umm, pointless....
How do you get from "people own devices made by X" to "X has a network"? Dumbest. Story. Idea. Ever.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Cell phone networks have been slow to realize that they need to develop a high speed high bandwidth data only network and deploy it everywhere.
Laws of physics may be against them. If each handset consumes 10 Mbps (10^7 bps) (which is about half of what broadcast digital TV uses - 19+ Mbps) and if you have 10,000 (10^4) viewers in service area of each cell site then you need roughly (10^4 * 10^7) = 10^11 bps. If we assume s/n = 20 dB that requires 10^11 / 6.65 = 11.5 * 10^9 Hz, or about 12 GHz of bandwidth. That can't be done on a carrier that is around 2 GHz! Variations of multicasting could be used to reduce that number somewhat, but it's a lot in any case, even if you reduce the bit rate at the client. At best you could achieve some mediocre reliability of a small picture for a limited number of clients. You can't get to the target bit rate without going into millimeter wave, and that isn't going to work due to poor penetration of buildings. And the root cause of all that trouble is that indeed "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with magnetic tapes." Broadcast TV delivers an incredible amount of bits per second, even though each client gets exactly the same bits as any other client.
Using my rough calculations, with $100 bills, $900 million is about 1 cubic meter in volume. Apple makes about $8 billion in profit per year. 1 bucket (unit) is 0.01818 m^3. This is about 480 bucketloads of cash (roughly 80 tonnes). Really, at this scale they should be thinking of using barrels or truckloads to move their cash. Even a pipeline would be more feasible than buckets.