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IEEE Vet: Carriers Capping LTE Services To Avoid Fixed-line Cannibalization
alphadogg writes "Roberto Saracco isn't buying carriers' claims that they need to put data caps on their LTE services due to excessive traffic causing massive engineering challenges. Saracco, a senior member of the IEEE and the director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre, said during an interview Tuesday that the major reason carriers are placing data caps on their LTE services is to prevent users from going exclusively with wireless data services and ditching their landline connections. 'You're always going to want to make the maximum amount of value,' he said. 'And you don't want to have your fixed-line network being cannibalized by mobile.'"
there's no guarantee that a wireless carrier would also be a particular customer's landline carrier..
so, if tfa is even partially right, there must be some level of collusion among them all
All those kind, honest and benevolent carriers, doing something to unduly distress consumer? Bless my soul, I need a chair, so I might sit a spell til the shock wears off.
Just because you are not mobile, why does that mean you should use wide-area air waves for internet access? The air waves are a finite resource that needs to be divided up. The more we can shift over to land based communications, the better.
OTOH, we need to push the carriers into making more smaller cells. That's what can increase the air wave bandwidth. But we can also do that ourselves by using Wifi to our landline internet connections.
Hey, I have an idea. Free landline internet to those that make their internet connection available to mobile users of the same carrier.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
All of the U.S. carriers have been doing this from the start. They are all about the double-dipping. Unlike the wired home phone, they've always charged for both the incoming calls as well as the outgoing calls. Now some of the carriers are also the wired internet service providers to many homes as well as our mobile phones. This is now simply just another means for them to continue double-dipping our wallets for the sake of their own.
With any wireless service, you have a limited amount of bandwidth. That bandwidth is shared by everybody connecting to a tower.
If you have more than 1 person trying to use as much bandwidth as they can, it will just degrade the service for everyone.
You could get another frequency to operate on, or use more directional antennas so that less people connect to each transmitter, but that will only delay the inevitable.
In these days of ever increasing bandwidth demands, there is no way that wireless can supply that demand.
With a wired connection, you can add more cables.
With a wireless connection, that is not an option.
Death has been proven to be 99% fatal in lab rats.
I might believe it if there weren't any carriers that offer mobile data but not landline services. But when I look at Clear (formerly Clearwire) or even T-Mobile, I just don't buy that. They would offer totally wireless service, if they could.
As an engineer for an ISP, I can't say that I blame them. Netflix, and video streaming in general, has caused massive leaps in traffic trends. Netflix alone consumes about 45% of our total bandwidth, other streaming (hulu, youtube, etc) consumes another 20%. While most companies saw this coming, I don't think many predicted the scale and expediency. Operators are scrambling to upgrade equipment / technologies to meet this demand. You almost have to reign in the usage, or increase costs to the consumer. I expect within five years most ISP's will push this cost to the consumer by migrating to a metered service model (like the power companies).
There is just a limited amount of bandwidth you can have. Look up Shannon's Law and then realize that is what you are up against. To increase the amount of bits per second you get you can either increase frequency bandwidth, which is infeasible with wireless since you have to share with others, or increase SNR, which is infeasible with wireless since there is natural noise all around. So basically there is only so good it gets. Now technologies like MIMO (having multiple antennas on transmitters and receivers to get array gain) can help increase what you get, at the cost of more complex transceivers, but still, there's only so much. It isn't as though you can just say "Let's do 100 spatial streams, no problem!" and it'll work.
Also that bandwidth? Shared with EVERYONE on the segment. So if you have 100mbps of effective WiFi throughput and you have 10 users on the AP, you all share it. It isn't like a wired connection where you each have that amount of bandwidth back to the switch, you all share the same 100mbps. So if four people are going full bore, you get only 25mbps each max (in reality, the more that share the less you get because of collisions).
Only thing to be done is to build out the network, make segments smaller. That is feasible and a good idea to an extent, but can only be done so much. Remember that you have to have antennas and hardware for each segment, there are a limited number of places you can stick all that. Also you have to have a cable going to it. The ultimate in segmentation might be Picocells, little devices you can hook to your net connection to provide local coverage for your house. Of course you need a wired network connection so...
All that and the best wireless can't compare to wired at all. Take the consumer space: The best you can get right now is 802.11n. If you have a 5GHz network (which reduces range) 40MHz channel you will get at best 150mbps of raw signaling per stream, with 4 streams max, though in actual practice I've never seen equipment with more than 3. So 450mbps raw signaling best case. Effective throughput you see probably 150-200mbps tops, wireless has a lot of overhead between link rate and effective rate. Oh and all that applies in a homogenous n network only, no older clients on it. Also not really anything faster for general use, this is as good as it gets right now.
Wired? 1gbps, full duplex no problem. Getting hard to buy equipment that doesn't support that speed anymore. So long as you cables aren't too long (100 meters or less) or kinked/broken, you'll really get it too. You can come very close to the theoretical speed without much difficulty. Works fine in a heterogeneous network, older clients don't mess with newer ones.There's faster out there too, 10gbps is real and working well. At this point it is still too expensive for consumer use, but price is the only barrier, the tech is finalized and released. Price has been dropping rapidly too.
What it comes down to is wired is a good idea, if we want to be able to have lots of bandwidth. On wireless connections, we need to be nice and share more which means less heavy bandwidth stuff. The wider area the wireless connection, the more true that is. WiFi isn't bad, its range is pretty short, you don't tend to have a ton of people on one AP (though at an office it can get heavy at times). Still though if you regularly do large file transfers with servers, you'll want to go wired as WiFi will start dragging, particularly with multiple users doing it.
LTE, you need to be share even more. On a 20MHz channel, if you are lucky enough to have that big of one for your service in your area, you can get 802.11n like data rates (in ideal conditions) but you share with many more people. You could easily have 100+ people on the same segment, meaning that you have to share that much more. If all those people try to go full blast, speed will quickly plummet.
If you had everyone using LTE in their homes and trying to do something like stream Netflix HD, it just wouldn't work. The cells would
The bandwidth is just lower period. When you compare wired to wireless wired is always way, WAY ahead.
I mean take common consumer wireless and wired. Best you can get for wireless is 802.11n. If you run a 5GHz network, pure N mode, 40MHz channel, 3 antennas in the station and laptop (theoretically it supports 4 in the standard, never seen it in reality), with good signal you get 450mbps raw data rate max. Now with wireless, there's a heavy overhead so that raw rate equals 150mbps, maybe 200mbps effective data rate. That's as good as it gets in the home right now. That is shared between all devices, and degrades rapidly.
As an example my laptop has a 2 antenna card, not 3. In my bedroom, about 40 feet from the base station, I'm lucky to see a raw rate above about 72mbps.
Wired? 1gbps, no problem. Hard to even buy a NIC or switch that isn't gig these days. That is 1gbps, full duplex, to each device on the switch. So long as you don't damage the cable, anywhere with 100 meters can have that, as many devices as you like. 10gbps is perfectly doable too. It isn't pie-in-the-sky, it is a finalized, released, working standard. Only issue keeping it out of the home is cost and that is falling. Oh and in all cases legacy 100 or 10mbps devices are fine, they inter-operate and don't slow the whole system down.
So never mind even adding more cable, wired is way ahead of wireless, always has been and probably always will be. Same thing on the high end too. Lest someone go find a proprietary wireless standard that allows for faster point-to-point links, please go have a look at what you can get on DWDM fibre optics. At any level, wired is a ton faster and then as the GP says, you can always add more cable.
Wireless is nice because of the convenience, but wired will always rule for high bandwidth. LTE is nice and fast when people don't use it a ton. When someone goes and grabs a webpage and then sits quietly and allows others to use it, ya it is nice and fast, like cable modem fast. However if you all try to stream HD Netflix, the network will fall over, not enough bandwidth.
Nay!
Uh oh, the horses are out! Better close the barn door.
The first company to truly manage to do unlimited, no bullshit wireless internet and not treat its customers like shit is going to make a fucking fortune.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Advertise the services offered on the phone or tablet such as TV, video streaming, etc to show how great the device is then cap the data, so if someone really wants to take advantage of those services telcos will be reaping the profits from the over cap usage fees.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That blows out the wireless towers. Or jamming. I know everyone loves wireless connectivity, but I'm more of a throwback to security 1st, convenience 2nd. That was kind of the entire reason DARPA buried hardline connections all those years ago.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Exactly. This is a prime example of creative destruction ridding the world of what look like monopolies but are temporary in scope.
My very first thought was that if there is enough wireless capacity right now to disrupt landlines, the carriers must have excess capacity sitting idle, and that some upstart, or some small carrier (T-Mobile or Sprint in the US) who is desperate to differentiate themselves will soon ditch landlines, make a big advertising push about it, make a lot of money, and discombobulate the major carriers who will resist until the last moment as all dinosaurs do. This is how industries are overturned almost overnight, without the government stepping in to save us. Within five years all the carriers will be scrambling to build more wireless capacity to get on the bandwagon they tried to hide for so long.
Infuriate left and right
Not really. Massive influx of new customers is actually not a good thing in telecom industry. You get massive congestion since you will be unable to expand fast enough due to logistical problems, and in a few months all the new people will be gone alongside many of your old clients.
Controlled influx that matches growth is much better for long term success. Of course, with many modern telecoms making an absolute killing from simply massively oversubscribing their capacity, it's not a very realistic scenario in many cases either.
There is enough capacity for the early adopters to do it. Just enough to make it seem like a good idea. Then people start doing it more commonly and capacity shits out.
I thought that was clear.com-- I have no knowledge/personal experience of them- but thought that clear.com did just that
http://www.clear.com/packages
$49.99 a month gets you 3-6ish mbps down and 1.5mbps up, 34.99 1.5 down, .5 up
As I say, I have no experience- but I am familiar with their website (I'm outside their range) do they perhaps treat their customers like shit?
their plans are strictly month to month- you can halt and resume readily. Do they not fit the scenario you describe?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
In the US at least, wireless services are also exempt from the neutrality requirements that the telcos negotiated with content providers.
So, switching to wireless-only for your home internet may, depending on your provider, mean opening yourself up to all that non-neutral stuff -- deep-packet inspections, throttled torrenting, blocked or throttled access to non-ISP-provided streaming video, and so forth. As far as I know, none of the LTE carriers are doing any of this now, but Verizon fought pretty hard for the exemption, they must have had a reason.
If you search for "net neutrality wireless exemption", you'll get lots of good hits, like this one.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
They were clandestinely capping, amongst other things.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If he gets the "big Office" what he needs to do is
1 fix OCare so that it will actually work correctly
2 fix the economy (or at least make sure it doesn't crater in the US)
3 keep us out of any more "wars"
and the one that all of US can back
4 require that all the local carriers have fiber to 80% of households (with say a 5 meg minimum bandwidth available) by 2015.
then i think he will be a lock on getting a second term.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
They have an... unenviable... reputation.
In addition to the usual weasel-wording around just exactly what 'unlimited' means, and what conditions will get you throttled, there are persistent allegations that they deliberately oversold their coverage area and then collected early termination charges from customers who discovered that little or no service was actually available where they had been told it was.
This hardly wins them the title of 'most abusive', in the competitive world of the wireless telcos; but they aren't exactly a white knight.
If only you could invent a business that survived without customers...
I prefer cable/fiber internet. Why? Because RF spectrum is finite, and there is a very real risk that if people start using their wireless data plan as their primary data, everyone will end up with crappy, low-speed connections. Maybe not so much in rural areas, but quite possibly in suburban and urban markets.
Cable/Fiber has the nice advantages of isolating different users' data, so that you can effectively re-use the same spectrum in different physical cables.
Uh oh, the horses are out! Better close the barn door.
The first company to truly manage to do unlimited, no bullshit wireless internet and not treat its customers like shit is going to make a fucking fortune.
Yes but they might get sued by the Comcasts, TimeWarners and other providers that currently price-gouge and lock their customers into land-line service.
There are several. I'm on BOOST (which was bought out by Sprint). The ToS does say that if you hog bandwith they can cap you, but I use the hell out of my phone; internet, text, email, long phone calls, and never hit the cap. If I do, I'll be pissed.
The telcos should face the fact that landlines are obsolete. When everyone in the house has a cell phone, what possible use would a landline be? I haven't had a landline in over ten years.
Free Martian Whores!
Two things:
1. Comcast - crap service for exorbitant prices
2. MBA professors apparently don't expect you to know grammar
Uh-uh. If the carriers were able to build excess capacity in the first place, it's cheap enough to do so that competitors can jump in.
Infuriate left and right
Where will the competitors get the spectrum? If you were talking about MVNOs, is LTE even opened up to the MVNOs yet?
Just out of curiosity, to which physical limits do you refer?
The limit is spectrum. A copper wire or optical fiber acts as a waveguide through which a set of multiplexed signals can propagate. Selectivity in a wired environment is (near) perfect, unlike the wireless situation where an antenna receives the interference (that is, sum) of wanted signals and unwanted signals.
The biggest bulk of data is transferred via http and other less cpu intense protocols.
That will change as more big sites implement HTTPS to cut down on Firesheep-style attacks. It'll change even more after April 2014: Once Internet Explorer for Windows XP leaves extended support, all major still-supported web browsers for PCs will support HTTPS on shared hosting plans.
MUNICIPALITIES in most cases can just string up their neighborhood, and complaints will be limited.
Tell that to the people in Wilson, NC.
Oh, and the people of Monticello, MN., too.
The "limited complaints" you're talking about involved millions of dollars in legal fees and even the involvement of members of congress and other federal agencies.
Not to mention the fact that these companies were given their local monopolies as incentive in order to speed the spread of high-speed internet in the communities (not to mention prevent the nightmare that would be multiple brand-specific network infrastructures), but now that most everyone outside of rural areas are wired, they're abusing their market position by keeping prices artificially high and speeds somewhat lower than most first-world countries, and all this while bringing in record profits year after year and signing up more and more customers than ever before.
This is why, in my opinion, they need to open up the network like the did telephones and have mandated line-sharing regulations in place to ensure that the last-mile is covered. Then we'd have real competition and, I'm betting, end user prices would plummet. The metered internet idea scares a lot of people because they're used to paying an arm and a leg for internet, but if you could sign up with any provider in the U.S., I'm positive the prices would plummet and be more reflective of the actual costs of maintaining the networks themselves. We've seen this before with long distance telephone service, when over the course of a few short years the per minute costs went from over 25cents/minute to 10cents/minute to less than 5cents/minute (when I last had terrestrial telephone I think I was paying 3cents a minute after the free 120 minutes a month they gave me).
I'm ready to join that angry mass of citizens, believe me, but unfortunately 50% of the people in this country still think the internet is a luxury good for people solely to play video games, consume pornography, or worship Satan with, so it's probably going to be a while before that comes to pass. I'm being facetious, but I honestly speak to a surprising number of people that have a real disdain for the internet as a whole.
Welcome back to the Compuserve model - where it's only metered if you don't bribe the ISP to put you on their whitelist. It is a model that was buried ages ago and needs to stay buried even with the pressure to bring it back.
The only sane solution is flat rate(read:no caps or metering) data and make the differentiation be the speed. Metering only makes things worse when you make it a public utility; see Australia's Telstra for an example of why not to do metering on a public utility (or to meter at all).
Then again, your argument would be to marginalize and otherwise hope that an ISP dumps people that support my argument.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Then they wouldn't implement caps, they'd bite the bullet and charge by the GB or TB.
The real reason they want data caps is because they think eliminating all-you-can-eat will alienate more customers than data caps will.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.