U.S. Mobile Internet Traffic Nearly Doubled This Year

An anonymous reader sends this news from the NY Times Bits Blog: "Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year, up from 690 megabytes a month in 2012, according to Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, who published a new report on industry trends on Monday. Worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month this year, up from 140 megabytes last year, he said."

Comments

Re:Let me wish Verizon a Unhappy Christmas

[Ol Olsoc]

Yes, this huge volume of traffic totally makes their overage charge of $1.99 per MEGABYTE if you go over your 2 GB monthly limit. Why do I fucking pay 15 dollars per gig for the first 2 and then 2 thousand dollars for the next one? Is it to lull me to sleep and then ram a huge charge up my ass? Because it feels like it.

We think of limits as some sort of communist plot, hatched by the president and the Democrats in dark vegetarian only rooms.

Yet there is a problem here. I hate to say this to digital people, but there is a limit to bandwidth when run outside of wires or fiber.

This is a big problem, because people want to look at their porn and watch movies on their smartphones. But that is a lot of data, if we dare call it that.

But we will reach saturation pretty quickly at this point.

And the same old solutions will be trotted out. But the RF spectrum isn't going to cooperate. There are physical limits, apparently unknown to the general public, and digital engineers, of Signal propagation, intermodulation, and just sheer numbers of users that limit the frequencies that will work for data. We're talking about a couple GigaHertz and above.

And we are really rapidly running out of available frequencies.If you want to dig for some, here you go:

http://transition.fcc.gov/oet/spectrum/table/fcctable.pdf

Or a nice graphical chart http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/spectrum_wall_chart_aug2011.pdf

Because it's no fun looking through text lists. Don't even think about those lower frequencies, microwatts can somethings propagate around the world on them, and some other times, solar activity can knock them dead. The lower in frequency you go, they more atmospheric noise too, which will regularly knock out your signal. Look for 2 GHz and above. If you find a suitable place let us know. Not much real estate left.

A year or so, there were tests made to see if Data could be run at frequencies not far from the ones used for GPS. The RF guys said it wouldn't work, because there would be interference. Thee digital guys said, "WTF are you talking about?"

They ran the tests, and it didn't work. The only people surprised were the digital folks.

But what to we do? People "gots to" have their porn on their smartphones. I suspect that we are going to have to have a sort of hybrid system. Signals run through fiber, especially approach infintie bandwidth because if you need more signal, add more fiber. The cell phone towers as they are today are a technological dead end, rapidly being killed through popularity. We are going to have to have fiber going to shf points in individual buildings, and similar setups on the street. Very low power, really high frequencies to keep the range purposely short. It's doable, but people will have to pay. Otherwise, it's data throttling brought to you by the laws of physics.