I'm one of them.. actually, I have satellite, which many people can get, too, for a price (crazy expensive, way limited).
The 700MHz auction holds out some hope, but I'll believe it when I get the offer to hook me up (I will tell HugesNet to go pound sand shortly thereafter, I expect) AT&T got a part (227 regions) of the 12MHz-wide "B" block, but Verizon is the big winner, with nation-wide ownership of the 22MHz-wide "C" block. Frontier Wireless and EchoStar got national coverage on the 6MHz-wide "E" block. So Verizon's got the change to dominate this one. If only they weren't just an evil company...
Again, there are only two 850MHz slots on that band, and Verizon owns a heap of them. As mergers and acquisitions happen, that can open up one of the slots. For example, in much of the West, Alltel owned the other 850MHz slot. Now, as part of Verizon, these are opened up again. Alltel was the 5th largest carrier, so I'd bet a good portion of AT&T's recent 3G/850MHz expansion came from sucking those slots up, as well as repurposing their existing 850MHz slots from D-AMPS, which they shut down completely in 2008. None of those, of course, had any direct effect on the 2G/EDGE coverage, since that was already 1900MHz in any of those affected areas (eg, any place AT&T just got 850MHz).
Most if not all of AT&T's 2G/EDGE/Voice network was originally 1900MHz. They had D-AMPS on the 850MHz slot, where they had a license for one of the two 850MHz slots you can have in any area (Verizon probably owns at least one of them in any given area). And all the D-AMPS stuff seems to have been converted to 3G-only.
I like T-Mobile as a company.. best cellphone company I've dealt with. But they have pretty nasty coverage in many areas. I'm in South Jersey... essentially one of the original VoiceStream areas, and I was on T-Mobile for two years. They had shoddy coverage.. I could get the well at the end of my driveway, and one and off outside near the house, but they're at least a tower short of anything approximating true coverage. That's an inevitable part of being "the little guy". I was kind of hoping that would get fixed.. after all, T-Mobile is a major world power in wireless -- third largest multinational carrier. This is a part of living "out in the sticks", I suppose...
Yeah, I'm rural... but I can get Verizon better, in my cellar for that matter, than I could get T-Mobile out on the deck. Some of that's certainly 850MHz vs. 1900MHz, but I think in this area, Verizon's just better built out. I just wish they weren't so frickin' evil.
Well, AT&T was in the process of dumping the D-AMPS system in favor of GSM. They started switching off D-AMPS (what AT&T called "TDMA") in May 2007, and completed it the following February. If you still got D-AMPS service after that, it was only via some roaming service.
And yeah, you want 850MHz outside of cities... less bandwidth, but it propagates much farther. And, often even more important, it's much better through foliage and walls, which are a pretty effective stop against 1900MHz. Particularly the trees.. also not much of a problem in urban areas.
Of course, there are some areas in which AT&T doesn't own the 850MHz license... they're 1900MHz only. But you can pretty much expect anything that was TDMA on 850MHz got converted to UMTS/HSDPA, not plain old GSM. There are some rumors around of AT&T switching 2G/EDGE off 850MHz, but AT&T denies this. It would likely have been a residual network from someone they bought up, I would think.
Most of their 2G/EDGE network was already on the 1900MHz (PCS) band, particularly if your area was covered by the original AT&T, rather than the original Cingular, since the D-AMPS system only used 850MHz (same as analog AMPS). There are only two 850MHz frequency blocks, versus six at 1900MHz. Verizon has much of the 850MHz slot country-wide... Altel used to be another, pre-merger. These guys were in place long before there was any significant GSM in the country... VoiceStream (later bought by T-Mobile) was the first, and they were all 1900MHz.
Moving people from their own computing resources to yours is about one fundamental: control. I control my PC in ways that I normally have a great deal of say about (sure, "regular people" may have to hire consultants or expert systems to regain control of their systems, but at least the potential is there).
The recurring payment model is the modern gold rush... companies are willing to give you "free" satellite STBs, cell phones, etc. in return for knowing they're getting your $50-$100 back on a regular basis. This also moves to an interesting market model. With regular purchases, you probably have to convince me that you're the best for my needs, if I'm a well informed consumer. With contracts, once I've bought in, you need to finr the minimal amount of satisfaction that keep the vast majority of your customers "hooked". So people love and defend their choice of Nikon over Canon, or Sony over Panasonic, for the most part. But everyone complains about their cable company, their cellular provider, etc. And yet, those are the guys making the Big Bucks.
So it's inevitable that web services will go in that direction, at least some of the time. There's currently little precedent for getting consumers to pay, but "cloud" subscriptions are at the same time being sold to business as an alternative to expensive desktop tools (even when free desktop tools are also available). For some business use, it's not going to be about the money, per se. They might actually prefer a subscription to a lump payment... that makes expenses predictable... the same reason many businesses lease equipment, rather than buy, even though the long-term expense is greater.
But what they'll really be buying is control. Many companies work hard to keep workers from installing "unapproved" software applications. Move everyone to the cloud, and they lose the ability to customize anything you don't want customized. This is probably the engine that'll push business into the cloud, and get them to pay.
For consumers, follow the cell/cable model... if you sign up for two years of Bubba Jones' computing services, we'll send you a netbook (running a ChromeOS style OS that puts everything under control of the cloud services, even though some local storage will still be possible). There are enough people unconcerned about "real" desktop computing that this will probably seem like a good deal. Particularly if they're unable to do the real math. Which many won't... ask any iPhone toting friend what they paid for their iPhone.. they'll usually say "$200" or some such. When in fact, they're probably paying a total of something like $2000-$3000 over the course of two years, once you factor in the contract costs. But if it's a slow enough bleed, and you keep them happy enough, folks don't notice.
Residential 4G will most likely be done via rooftop antennas, in rural areas anyway. 700MHz isn't that bad through foliage, it's also pretty reasonable for long range. Of course, the longer wavelength also will benefit from rooftop use... at 1 mile range, the fresnel zone radius is 43ft.
4G for residential internet is not going to be competitive with wired solutions... you would need too many cells in a city, and at higher frequencies (less range, more bandwidth and smaller fresnel radius), and you're still competing against entrenched wired solutions that are just better, if you can be wired.
As an evolution to today's 3G wireless, it's just "bigger, better, faster, more", so that's of immediate use, but still not a threat to wired connections. But for the 80% or more of the country that's considered not worth the ISP's efforts to wire things, 4G might be a decent option.
Well, LTE (eg, the 4G protocol embraced by everyone but Sprint, who are using WiMax) will offer what sounds pretty good: peak download rates of 326.4 Mb/s and upload rates of 86.4 Mb/s for every 20 MHz of spectrum. But then you have to take into account, that's spread across a potential of 800 active data clients (200 active clients per 5MHz)... and that not every cell is going to have 20MHz channels to play with. Many will stick to 5MHz channels, which means 81.6Mb/s down, 21.6Mb/s up, spread across as many as 200 users.
With that said, some of the companies are thinking "residential last mile", not simply improved cellphone. Verizon's widely publicized purchase of the C-Block of the 700MHz band covers 22MHz, so that's likely to offer pretty decent internet connections if the don't oversubscribe. They could offer voice, too, but not TV, so that's never going to be a replacement in Verizon's mind for FiOS, only an option (boosted, perhaps, by the rural internet initiative in the Stimulus Bill) where FiOS isn't available (eg, they don't feel like running it).
Basic FiOS is already offering symmetric 20Mb/s up/down, with 50Mb/s downlink available, and 100Mb/s in trials here (already rolled out in other countries). The only real bottleneck in most situations is the routing back at the head end... not your link to that head end, which is always capable of delivering the stated speeds.
So LTE, when available, if reliable, reasonably priced, and treated like other residential services (eg, few to no limits) sounds like a great replacement for my satellite internet. But, unless you're in a pretty empty area, it won't hold a candle to today's FiOS, much less tomorrow's. That, on top of a big stack of "ifs".
Satellite TV offers all of the same real channels as cable, and it's probably lower cost than most cable services. It'll fade out in severe rain, but other than that it's very reliable.
What you miss, versus cable, are real interactive services (they can fake it a bit, or let you uplink via your internet connection... which you probably don't want to do, given that, when you have satellite TV, you probably have bandwidth-policed satellite internet as well). So you can't get real video on demand, the kind of stuff cable and FiOS offer these days. But Dish Network at least makes some pretty decent PVRs, which get around at least some of that.
In layman's terms, they all have essentially the same head end. At the head end, there will any number of satellite receivers, which pull the original feeds (ABC, Comedy Central, HBO, etc), perhaps add advertising inserts and possible bit rate conversions, then MUX them into transport streams, depending on data type (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, etc) and slot allocation numbers (eg, all channels in a transport stream have to fit within certain overall limitations, depending on the specific technologies).
Next, they all modulate the digital streams into analog slots, generally based on the old NTSC (or perhaps PAL in DVB countries) channel widths of 6MHz (8MHz for PAL). For cable, that's basically the thing that goes out. For satellite, there will be various smaller channel sets sent to different satellites. For FiOS, that whole cable TV channel set will be frequency-division multiplexed with other traffic over the fibre optic links (one laser color for TV, one or more for internet downlink, etc).
That's why, even with a FiOS installation in your house, you're probably running coax though the house to hook up your satellite boxes. The network interface box from the FiOS provider will include the transceivers, to get RF back from optical... your STB is basically just a modified cable TV box for FiOS... probably changed to use TCP/IP for the uplink, but otherwise similar.
Actually, it's more than 500ms latency... more like 750ms+ by the time you're done with additional layers of routing/optimization software, on top of that trip from earth to space and back.
And when the locals of all sorts (Verizon, Comcast, etc) refuse you any sort of land-based connection, this is one of the few options (the other being cellular modem, which has its own set of problems and availability issues).
When you're in a locale, as I am, where the only choices are Dish Network or DirecTV, you realize very quickly that those are "competition". Well, ok, there's HughesNet for internet connections, as well.
One doesn't have to be all that competitive to be considered "competition"... I pay something like $120 a month for HugesNet, 1.5Mb/s down, 0.5Mb/s up, and a daily high-speed cap of 500MB (over that, and you get dial-up-or-so speeds for the next 24 hours). Anyone with access to basic DSL would laugh at this (much less state-of-the-art FiOS), but hey, it's faster (usually) than dial-up.
I think this should be a two-way thing... if the telecom companies want unlimited growth, they should have limits on additional acquisitions (to keep the competition alive), and they should have to hook up anyone in the general area (town, city, county, however this is broken down) for no additional charge. That's how the government and AT&T worked things out in the telephone era, and that's why pretty much everyone who wanted it got phone service.
When DEC unveiled the first Alpha CPUs, way back when, they called for a 1000x increase over their projected 25 year life cycle. 10x of this was coming from architectural improvements, 10x from clock speed improvements, and 10x from parallelism. The cycle's much shorter these days, also shorter with today's GPUs vs. CPUs, so I don't see the problem. Plus, there are quite a few advantages to being a GPU, far as benchmarking and software goes -- they aren't subject to the same kind of legacy issues that CPUs are.
A couple of years ago, you got around 128 stream processors on a high-end card -- the top of the line stuff today has what, 800 (Radeon 48xx series). This trend show no end it sight... and they might actually be getting more useful, as chips are designed with numbers of stream processors in tight clusters, and at the same time they're getting more general purpose. So much work is done internally on these types of operations, memory bandwidth may need only grow by 10% to match a 100% increase in overall performance.
In a way, it's kind of a cheat, though, compared to CPU performance. GPUs are complex enough, and right now still fairly specific purpose, the only benchmarks you get are actual graphics benchmarks, and some estimate of peak performance. So that's your 570x factor here: it's based on a peak measure of everything going as well as can be expected. In real life, that may not be something you get to see often, if ever.
Also, GPU performance is and will for some time be measured by things the GPUs do well. If the GPU doesn't help, you use the CPU(s) in the system. This seems normal, but what it really means is that GPU performance well largely only be judged by what GPUs do well.. they don't get bad marks for code that's not designed to run on 2400 processors simultaneously. CPUs, on the other hand, will be judged as part of that default expectation... if that great new Athium Coreathon x16 only speeds up Photoshop by a factor of three, that's what people will care about... not whether it's really peaking at several times that level. CPUs will still have to run non or poorly threaded code, and only get the credit in the public mind for where regular things get faster.
With that said, it's also the case that the CPU companies have been at it longer, and have had access to state-of-the-art chip process for much longer, too. Because of this, CPUs are a more mature technology than GPUs, so one naturally expects their growth to be slower. It's fairly recent than GPU companies have had access to the same kind of process magic that folks like Intel and IBM have had for decades.
They may leave Marvell alone.. after all, given that most of Quentin Tarantino's and Kevin Smith's films are though Disney-owned studios (Miramax, Dimension Films... Disney bought Miramax and Dimension shortly after "Reservoir Dogs" was released), I don't think "Disney-owned" automatically means any loss of blood, filth, nudity, violence, drug and alcohol humor, or any other of those other things that get me to the cinema.
Disney doesn't destroy (or even Disni-fy) everything they touch. Some of it, maybe.. though I don't know if they necessarily made ABC any worse than it already was.
Keep in mind, they have a number of different studio names for film releases. Sure, if it's a kiddie film, it's put out under the Disney label. If it's a smart kiddie film, it's probably from Pixar, whom they seem to have left pretty much alone. They also own Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, older releases by Dimension Films, and Miramax (acquired in 1993).
And yeah, that Miramax.. the same company that put out both halfs of "Kill Bill", all of Kevin Smith's films, "Gangs of New York", "Hero", etc... not what most people think of Disney. Not to say that's perfect, but I think they do know from where their money comes. And as the largest entertainment company on the planet, it's going to be hard to live a Disney-free life and still watch TV and film. Or, now, read mainstream comics.
In a Democracy, the government IS the people,by way of direct representation. Their job is whatever the people decide their job should be. That's the only criteria for defining the government's job in a free society.
That's logically and morally correct, but technically... not so much.
Look at the copyrights on most any CD or LP or whatever. A few will be copyrights in the name of the artist, but in the vast majority of cases, it'll be "Copyright (C) 2007 Big Evil Recoding Co, Inc". While the modern record company is usually not part of the creative process, and even usually these days requires the artist to pay for all of the expenses of production (unless you're an "American Idol" winner or some other special case, just try getting any sort of recording contract without bringing a pretty-damn-near finished first album with you).
The big recording companies are fighting to remain relevant, and yes, to such in as much money as they can on the backs of the creative folks. There was a time when such entities were an inherent part of the process, for good or bad. Back in the 1950s, most recording artists worked much in the fashion of movie stars at the time... they were signed to a label, and dependent on that label for recording, production, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, etc.
These days, they're pretty much on their own for anything other than manufacturing, distribution, and if they're lucky, advertising. Which is pretty much the same thing a book published organizes... but you aren't like to see "Copyright 2009 Scribner, Inc." on Stephen King's next book.
The recording companies are way out of bounds these days, even as they are increasingly unnecessary. You don't need a recording company to launch an album online, or even in physical space necessarily. Other companies are starting to show up and take on the "publisher" role that the RIAA-represented companmies refuse to realize is their only remaining natural reason for being.
Actually, the SI multipliers are k = 10^3 and Ki = 2^10.... "k" is the exception to using upper case for >10^0 and lower case for 10^0 (to avoid confusion with "K" = kelvins, was it?).
The thing is, HDD manufacturers are correct... for HDDs. And humans. The SI definitions for kilo, Mega, Giga, etc. existed long before computers came along, and for anything not based on memory address lines, the power-of-10 definitions make perfect sense...at least as long as most humans have 10 digits.
The power-of-2 definitions make it easy to think in terms of memory addresses... the problem was, computers had memory before other kinds of storage, and the folks at the time just got lazy about 10^3 vs. 2^10 and all -- natural units for memory, not for anything else. There was no consensus about using power-of-2 even back in those days on non-memory things... a kilobaud was and is still 1000 Bd/s, not 1024, for example. But then discs came along, and most formats complicated things further by matching disc sectors to memory sizes.
But that's all history... as ugly as some folks might think the units are, there are actual standards now for both power-of-2 and power-of-10 multipliers. Plain old users don't much care about what they're called, they just want consistency. We ought to be smart enough to deal with MiB and MB alike.
Good in theory, sure. Here's why people fear Verizon.. the Verizon version of the RAZR (and followup phones with mini-USB jacks) would only charge with Verizon-approved chargers. Go figure! My buddy at work could connect his AT&T RAZR to his laptop and charge it... I connected mine, and got "unauthorized charger" messages. Same with connecting a bog-standard USB cable to a bog standard USB power dongle, either on AC or in the car.
That kind of petty evil has been keeping people away from Verizon. They have the best signal in my area, but give me someone else who can reach my house with a functional 3G signal (even if they can do voice, I'd have to consider it), and I'd dump them in a heartbeat.
If Verizon takes the introduction of their Android phone to change this behavior, for real, I'll be on-board in a heartbeat. If they do this right, they could knock the iPhone down a notch or two, and that would be good for everyone.. even, in the long run, iPhone users. If it's business as usual, they could screw it all up for Android before they have a chance to hit critical mass.
If they can really claim thousands of applications, even at this early date, that's saying something pretty profound about the potential for the Android market.. because that's showing that developers believe it (and perhaps, that it's easy to write apps, which is also important). Add in the possibility of using 3rd party apps... not possible on iPhone. Then you have lots of companies looking to Android to solve their problem with the iPhone, and perhaps even re-invent their cellular business. Motorola reportedly has 250 people working on some aspect of Android. At some point, it's not simply a measure of possible success, but rather, how could this possibly fail? Android could well become to smart phones and PDAs what Windows has been to PCs.. the Default Choice.
Sure, Apple's had a head start. But they also had a big head start in the personal computer business over IBM. For a short time, they had better hardware and a better OS... didn't help, and that's largely because no single company will deliver the same kind of success you get from "everyone else" working on the same platform.
Stupid Apple Dogma is also only tolerated by iPhone users, because the iPhone has been the bright, shiny object in the light there last few years. But it does eventually get back to reality. One problem is battery life -- both kinds. When you have an all-in-one device, don't be surprised if people use it that way. Can I get a day's worth of phone, PDA, MP3 player, video player, etc. use out of an iPhone. Sometimes, others... not so much. Now consider that, this pretty much means charging it every night. I have a two-year A&T contract, but my battery is good for somewhere between 300-500 charges, being as it is a normal everyday Li-Poly cell. That means, if I'm really using an iPhone as intended, the battery won't last the life of the frickin' contract.
That was no big deal for my Treo 700p... I could buy a new, factory-original battery for $20 on Amazon and replace it myself. It IS a big deal having to send the phone back to Apple, and paying what amounts to ransom to get it back with a new cell. And yet, this Apple dogma isn't going away, it's spreading.. they're doing this to laptops, now.
The greatest thing about the PC market is that someone will make a machine that's close to what I want.. if not, I can make it myself. If you use a Mac, Apple has 5-10 options for you. If you use a PC, HP has 50, and if they don't suit you, there's Dell, Gateway, Acer, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Boxx, etc. This same thing should take hold in the Android market.. we already have Motorola and Sony/Ericsson announcing Android phones, and plenty more to follow... it's not just weird Chinese companies. This will ultimately be the big win in the Android market... Apple's tunnel vision will exclude most users, just as it does in the personal computer market.
Currently, GSM is about 80% of the world's wireless market.
IDEN carriers are sill active in the USA (Sprint/Nextel, Boost Mobile, others), Saudi Arabia (Bravo), Singapore, India, China, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, Jordan, Mexico, and most of South America.
There are a number of very small providers using CDMA in Eastern Europe and Asia. China Telecom uses CDMA, and has 42 million subscribers.. but that's pretty small, for China. India has several CDMA providers, with over 100 million total subscribers. Japan has no significant GSM providers.. they're mostly PDC and CDMA (one tiny company does UMTS but not standard GSM 1G/2G stuff). Korea is nearly all CDMA.
In short, while GSM is the predominant standard, there are dozens of non-GSM providers still out there in the world. You need to update you definiton of "the world" to including something other than the USA, Canada, and Western Europe.
Actually, Apple did quite a bit of convincing AT&T to carry the iPhone the way Apple wanted it to be carried. And to get their kick-backs from the AT&T fees charges, and even to be able to charge as much as AT&T ultimately did. AT&T's 3-year exclusive deal was payment in return for everything AT&T did for Apple.
It's easy to say, today, they'd all love to carry the iPhone.. of course they would. And Apple would love to have that, even enough to crank out a CDMA version if need be. But that's after the fact.. there was no guarantee that the iPhone would be as popular as it turned out to be. And much of that success is based on having made the iPhone a well supported SmartPhone.. something it didn't even do at launch.
Back in the 1990s, GSM was virtually unknown here. The lone company providing GSM was VoiceStream, which had virtually no coverage. I was working quite a bit in Germany in the mid-to-late 1990s, and really looked around for a phone that could be universal. VoiceStream coverage was more myth than reality, so I would up buying a dual-mode Nextel phone, IDEN here, GSM there. In theory.. it was pretty much still an alpha-test unit... the GSM would always cut out after a few seconds of connection. Great for money making, since you got charged for making the call, but useless for communications purposes (naturally, I got all charges removed, sent the phone back twice, but they never got it working). VoiceStream was eventually bought by T-Mobile, owed by Deutsche Telekom, and currently the third largest multinational wireless company.
The alternative to CDMA (and the tiny bit of Nextel IDEN) was the D-AMPS sytem, also just called TDMA.. nearly the same as GSM (also a TDMA protocol.. that's why it makes all that noise if you're phones near a stereo-system speaker), only different. Nothing like re-inventing the wheel, poorly, but hey, that's what they did --- at least there's a technical advantage to CDMA (which is why all the 3G and 4G technologies are CDMA). This was still in use until this year... part of Altel's network was D-AMPS until last year (from Western Wireless), and US Cellular just shut down their D-AMPS network in February.
AT&T had been the largest D-AMPS provider, but began the shutdown of D-AMPS in 2007, to open that spectrum for increased GSM use.
Actually, an iPhone works very well in the market as a $200 device.. that's about what you pay for an iPod Touch, which of course is the same device, sans phone. And some people might even buy an unlocked iPhone, particularly if offered by Apple, just as people buy the fairly pricey unlocked Nokia high-end smart phones.
Verizon uses CDMA.. no SIMs. The code that you'd normally get from a SIM is permanently in the phone. You can change your phone online, for free.. but Verizon knows the codes assigned to them, and will most likely reject a code from some other CDMA phone.
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I'm one of them.. actually, I have satellite, which many people can get, too, for a price (crazy expensive, way limited).
The 700MHz auction holds out some hope, but I'll believe it when I get the offer to hook me up (I will tell HugesNet to go pound sand shortly thereafter, I expect) AT&T got a part (227 regions) of the 12MHz-wide "B" block, but Verizon is the big winner, with nation-wide ownership of the 22MHz-wide "C" block. Frontier Wireless and EchoStar got national coverage on the 6MHz-wide "E" block. So Verizon's got the change to dominate this one. If only they weren't just an evil company...
Again, there are only two 850MHz slots on that band, and Verizon owns a heap of them. As mergers and acquisitions happen, that can open up one of the slots. For example, in much of the West, Alltel owned the other 850MHz slot. Now, as part of Verizon, these are opened up again. Alltel was the 5th largest carrier, so I'd bet a good portion of AT&T's recent 3G/850MHz expansion came from sucking those slots up, as well as repurposing their existing 850MHz slots from D-AMPS, which they shut down completely in 2008. None of those, of course, had any direct effect on the 2G/EDGE coverage, since that was already 1900MHz in any of those affected areas (eg, any place AT&T just got 850MHz).
Most if not all of AT&T's 2G/EDGE/Voice network was originally 1900MHz. They had D-AMPS on the 850MHz slot, where they had a license for one of the two 850MHz slots you can have in any area (Verizon probably owns at least one of them in any given area). And all the D-AMPS stuff seems to have been converted to 3G-only.
I like T-Mobile as a company.. best cellphone company I've dealt with. But they have pretty nasty coverage in many areas. I'm in South Jersey... essentially one of the original VoiceStream areas, and I was on T-Mobile for two years. They had shoddy coverage.. I could get the well at the end of my driveway, and one and off outside near the house, but they're at least a tower short of anything approximating true coverage. That's an inevitable part of being "the little guy". I was kind of hoping that would get fixed.. after all, T-Mobile is a major world power in wireless -- third largest multinational carrier. This is a part of living "out in the sticks", I suppose...
Yeah, I'm rural... but I can get Verizon better, in my cellar for that matter, than I could get T-Mobile out on the deck. Some of that's certainly 850MHz vs. 1900MHz, but I think in this area, Verizon's just better built out. I just wish they weren't so frickin' evil.
Well, AT&T was in the process of dumping the D-AMPS system in favor of GSM. They started switching off D-AMPS (what AT&T called "TDMA") in May 2007, and completed it the following February. If you still got D-AMPS service after that, it was only via some roaming service.
And yeah, you want 850MHz outside of cities... less bandwidth, but it propagates much farther. And, often even more important, it's much better through foliage and walls, which are a pretty effective stop against 1900MHz. Particularly the trees.. also not much of a problem in urban areas.
Of course, there are some areas in which AT&T doesn't own the 850MHz license... they're 1900MHz only. But you can pretty much expect anything that was TDMA on 850MHz got converted to UMTS/HSDPA, not plain old GSM. There are some rumors around of AT&T switching 2G/EDGE off 850MHz, but AT&T denies this. It would likely have been a residual network from someone they bought up, I would think.
Most of their 2G/EDGE network was already on the 1900MHz (PCS) band, particularly if your area was covered by the original AT&T, rather than the original Cingular, since the D-AMPS system only used 850MHz (same as analog AMPS). There are only two 850MHz frequency blocks, versus six at 1900MHz. Verizon has much of the 850MHz slot country-wide... Altel used to be another, pre-merger. These guys were in place long before there was any significant GSM in the country... VoiceStream (later bought by T-Mobile) was the first, and they were all 1900MHz.
Moving people from their own computing resources to yours is about one fundamental: control. I control my PC in ways that I normally have a great deal of say about (sure, "regular people" may have to hire consultants or expert systems to regain control of their systems, but at least the potential is there).
The recurring payment model is the modern gold rush... companies are willing to give you "free" satellite STBs, cell phones, etc. in return for knowing they're getting your $50-$100 back on a regular basis. This also moves to an interesting market model. With regular purchases, you probably have to convince me that you're the best for my needs, if I'm a well informed consumer. With contracts, once I've bought in, you need to finr the minimal amount of satisfaction that keep the vast majority of your customers "hooked". So people love and defend their choice of Nikon over Canon, or Sony over Panasonic, for the most part. But everyone complains about their cable company, their cellular provider, etc. And yet, those are the guys making the Big Bucks.
So it's inevitable that web services will go in that direction, at least some of the time. There's currently little precedent for getting consumers to pay, but "cloud" subscriptions are at the same time being sold to business as an alternative to expensive desktop tools (even when free desktop tools are also available). For some business use, it's not going to be about the money, per se. They might actually prefer a subscription to a lump payment... that makes expenses predictable... the same reason many businesses lease equipment, rather than buy, even though the long-term expense is greater.
But what they'll really be buying is control. Many companies work hard to keep workers from installing "unapproved" software applications. Move everyone to the cloud, and they lose the ability to customize anything you don't want customized. This is probably the engine that'll push business into the cloud, and get them to pay.
For consumers, follow the cell/cable model... if you sign up for two years of Bubba Jones' computing services, we'll send you a netbook (running a ChromeOS style OS that puts everything under control of the cloud services, even though some local storage will still be possible). There are enough people unconcerned about "real" desktop computing that this will probably seem like a good deal. Particularly if they're unable to do the real math. Which many won't... ask any iPhone toting friend what they paid for their iPhone.. they'll usually say "$200" or some such. When in fact, they're probably paying a total of something like $2000-$3000 over the course of two years, once you factor in the contract costs. But if it's a slow enough bleed, and you keep them happy enough, folks don't notice.
Residential 4G will most likely be done via rooftop antennas, in rural areas anyway. 700MHz isn't that bad through foliage, it's also pretty reasonable for long range. Of course, the longer wavelength also will benefit from rooftop use... at 1 mile range, the fresnel zone radius is 43ft.
4G for residential internet is not going to be competitive with wired solutions... you would need too many cells in a city, and at higher frequencies (less range, more bandwidth and smaller fresnel radius), and you're still competing against entrenched wired solutions that are just better, if you can be wired.
As an evolution to today's 3G wireless, it's just "bigger, better, faster, more", so that's of immediate use, but still not a threat to wired connections. But for the 80% or more of the country that's considered not worth the ISP's efforts to wire things, 4G might be a decent option.
Well, LTE (eg, the 4G protocol embraced by everyone but Sprint, who are using WiMax) will offer what sounds pretty good: peak download rates of 326.4 Mb/s and upload rates of 86.4 Mb/s for every 20 MHz of spectrum. But then you have to take into account, that's spread across a potential of 800 active data clients (200 active clients per 5MHz)... and that not every cell is going to have 20MHz channels to play with. Many will stick to 5MHz channels, which means 81.6Mb/s down, 21.6Mb/s up, spread across as many as 200 users.
With that said, some of the companies are thinking "residential last mile", not simply improved cellphone. Verizon's widely publicized purchase of the C-Block of the 700MHz band covers 22MHz, so that's likely to offer pretty decent internet connections if the don't oversubscribe. They could offer voice, too, but not TV, so that's never going to be a replacement in Verizon's mind for FiOS, only an option (boosted, perhaps, by the rural internet initiative in the Stimulus Bill) where FiOS isn't available (eg, they don't feel like running it).
Basic FiOS is already offering symmetric 20Mb/s up/down, with 50Mb/s downlink available, and 100Mb/s in trials here (already rolled out in other countries). The only real bottleneck in most situations is the routing back at the head end... not your link to that head end, which is always capable of delivering the stated speeds.
So LTE, when available, if reliable, reasonably priced, and treated like other residential services (eg, few to no limits) sounds like a great replacement for my satellite internet. But, unless you're in a pretty empty area, it won't hold a candle to today's FiOS, much less tomorrow's. That, on top of a big stack of "ifs".
Satellite TV offers all of the same real channels as cable, and it's probably lower cost than most cable services. It'll fade out in severe rain, but other than that it's very reliable.
What you miss, versus cable, are real interactive services (they can fake it a bit, or let you uplink via your internet connection... which you probably don't want to do, given that, when you have satellite TV, you probably have bandwidth-policed satellite internet as well). So you can't get real video on demand, the kind of stuff cable and FiOS offer these days. But Dish Network at least makes some pretty decent PVRs, which get around at least some of that.
In layman's terms, they all have essentially the same head end. At the head end, there will any number of satellite receivers, which pull the original feeds (ABC, Comedy Central, HBO, etc), perhaps add advertising inserts and possible bit rate conversions, then MUX them into transport streams, depending on data type (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, etc) and slot allocation numbers (eg, all channels in a transport stream have to fit within certain overall limitations, depending on the specific technologies).
Next, they all modulate the digital streams into analog slots, generally based on the old NTSC (or perhaps PAL in DVB countries) channel widths of 6MHz (8MHz for PAL). For cable, that's basically the thing that goes out. For satellite, there will be various smaller channel sets sent to different satellites. For FiOS, that whole cable TV channel set will be frequency-division multiplexed with other traffic over the fibre optic links (one laser color for TV, one or more for internet downlink, etc).
That's why, even with a FiOS installation in your house, you're probably running coax though the house to hook up your satellite boxes. The network interface box from the FiOS provider will include the transceivers, to get RF back from optical... your STB is basically just a modified cable TV box for FiOS... probably changed to use TCP/IP for the uplink, but otherwise similar.
Actually, it's more than 500ms latency... more like 750ms+ by the time you're done with additional layers of routing/optimization software, on top of that trip from earth to space and back.
And when the locals of all sorts (Verizon, Comcast, etc) refuse you any sort of land-based connection, this is one of the few options (the other being cellular modem, which has its own set of problems and availability issues).
When you're in a locale, as I am, where the only choices are Dish Network or DirecTV, you realize very quickly that those are "competition". Well, ok, there's HughesNet for internet connections, as well.
One doesn't have to be all that competitive to be considered "competition"... I pay something like $120 a month for HugesNet, 1.5Mb/s down, 0.5Mb/s up, and a daily high-speed cap of 500MB (over that, and you get dial-up-or-so speeds for the next 24 hours). Anyone with access to basic DSL would laugh at this (much less state-of-the-art FiOS), but hey, it's faster (usually) than dial-up.
I think this should be a two-way thing... if the telecom companies want unlimited growth, they should have limits on additional acquisitions (to keep the competition alive), and they should have to hook up anyone in the general area (town, city, county, however this is broken down) for no additional charge. That's how the government and AT&T worked things out in the telephone era, and that's why pretty much everyone who wanted it got phone service.
When DEC unveiled the first Alpha CPUs, way back when, they called for a 1000x increase over their projected 25 year life cycle. 10x of this was coming from architectural improvements, 10x from clock speed improvements, and 10x from parallelism. The cycle's much shorter these days, also shorter with today's GPUs vs. CPUs, so I don't see the problem. Plus, there are quite a few advantages to being a GPU, far as benchmarking and software goes -- they aren't subject to the same kind of legacy issues that CPUs are.
A couple of years ago, you got around 128 stream processors on a high-end card -- the top of the line stuff today has what, 800 (Radeon 48xx series). This trend show no end it sight... and they might actually be getting more useful, as chips are designed with numbers of stream processors in tight clusters, and at the same time they're getting more general purpose. So much work is done internally on these types of operations, memory bandwidth may need only grow by 10% to match a 100% increase in overall performance.
In a way, it's kind of a cheat, though, compared to CPU performance. GPUs are complex enough, and right now still fairly specific purpose, the only benchmarks you get are actual graphics benchmarks, and some estimate of peak performance. So that's your 570x factor here: it's based on a peak measure of everything going as well as can be expected. In real life, that may not be something you get to see often, if ever.
Also, GPU performance is and will for some time be measured by things the GPUs do well. If the GPU doesn't help, you use the CPU(s) in the system. This seems normal, but what it really means is that GPU performance well largely only be judged by what GPUs do well.. they don't get bad marks for code that's not designed to run on 2400 processors simultaneously. CPUs, on the other hand, will be judged as part of that default expectation... if that great new Athium Coreathon x16 only speeds up Photoshop by a factor of three, that's what people will care about ... not whether it's really peaking at several times that level. CPUs will still have to run non or poorly threaded code, and only get the credit in the public mind for where regular things get faster.
With that said, it's also the case that the CPU companies have been at it longer, and have had access to state-of-the-art chip process for much longer, too. Because of this, CPUs are a more mature technology than GPUs, so one naturally expects their growth to be slower. It's fairly recent than GPU companies have had access to the same kind of process magic that folks like Intel and IBM have had for decades.
They may leave Marvell alone.. after all, given that most of Quentin Tarantino's and Kevin Smith's films are though Disney-owned studios (Miramax, Dimension Films... Disney bought Miramax and Dimension shortly after "Reservoir Dogs" was released), I don't think "Disney-owned" automatically means any loss of blood, filth, nudity, violence, drug and alcohol humor, or any other of those other things that get me to the cinema.
Disney doesn't destroy (or even Disni-fy) everything they touch. Some of it, maybe.. though I don't know if they necessarily made ABC any worse than it already was.
Keep in mind, they have a number of different studio names for film releases. Sure, if it's a kiddie film, it's put out under the Disney label. If it's a smart kiddie film, it's probably from Pixar, whom they seem to have left pretty much alone. They also own Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, older releases by Dimension Films, and Miramax (acquired in 1993).
And yeah, that Miramax.. the same company that put out both halfs of "Kill Bill", all of Kevin Smith's films, "Gangs of New York", "Hero", etc... not what most people think of Disney. Not to say that's perfect, but I think they do know from where their money comes. And as the largest entertainment company on the planet, it's going to be hard to live a Disney-free life and still watch TV and film. Or, now, read mainstream comics.
In a Democracy, the government IS the people,by way of direct representation. Their job is whatever the people decide their job should be. That's the only criteria for defining the government's job in a free society.
That's logically and morally correct, but technically... not so much.
Look at the copyrights on most any CD or LP or whatever. A few will be copyrights in the name of the artist, but in the vast majority of cases, it'll be "Copyright (C) 2007 Big Evil Recoding Co, Inc". While the modern record company is usually not part of the creative process, and even usually these days requires the artist to pay for all of the expenses of production (unless you're an "American Idol" winner or some other special case, just try getting any sort of recording contract without bringing a pretty-damn-near finished first album with you).
The big recording companies are fighting to remain relevant, and yes, to such in as much money as they can on the backs of the creative folks. There was a time when such entities were an inherent part of the process, for good or bad. Back in the 1950s, most recording artists worked much in the fashion of movie stars at the time... they were signed to a label, and dependent on that label for recording, production, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, etc.
These days, they're pretty much on their own for anything other than manufacturing, distribution, and if they're lucky, advertising. Which is pretty much the same thing a book published organizes... but you aren't like to see "Copyright 2009 Scribner, Inc." on Stephen King's next book.
The recording companies are way out of bounds these days, even as they are increasingly unnecessary. You don't need a recording company to launch an album online, or even in physical space necessarily. Other companies are starting to show up and take on the "publisher" role that the RIAA-represented companmies refuse to realize is their only remaining natural reason for being.
Actually, the SI multipliers are k = 10^3 and Ki = 2^10.... "k" is the exception to using upper case for >10^0 and lower case for 10^0 (to avoid confusion with "K" = kelvins, was it?).
The thing is, HDD manufacturers are correct... for HDDs. And humans. The SI definitions for kilo, Mega, Giga, etc. existed long before computers came along, and for anything not based on memory address lines, the power-of-10 definitions make perfect sense...at least as long as most humans have 10 digits.
The power-of-2 definitions make it easy to think in terms of memory addresses... the problem was, computers had memory before other kinds of storage, and the folks at the time just got lazy about 10^3 vs. 2^10 and all -- natural units for memory, not for anything else. There was no consensus about using power-of-2 even back in those days on non-memory things... a kilobaud was and is still 1000 Bd/s, not 1024, for example. But then discs came along, and most formats complicated things further by matching disc sectors to memory sizes.
But that's all history... as ugly as some folks might think the units are, there are actual standards now for both power-of-2 and power-of-10 multipliers. Plain old users don't much care about what they're called, they just want consistency. We ought to be smart enough to deal with MiB and MB alike.
Good in theory, sure. Here's why people fear Verizon.. the Verizon version of the RAZR (and followup phones with mini-USB jacks) would only charge with Verizon-approved chargers. Go figure! My buddy at work could connect his AT&T RAZR to his laptop and charge it... I connected mine, and got "unauthorized charger" messages. Same with connecting a bog-standard USB cable to a bog standard USB power dongle, either on AC or in the car.
That kind of petty evil has been keeping people away from Verizon. They have the best signal in my area, but give me someone else who can reach my house with a functional 3G signal (even if they can do voice, I'd have to consider it), and I'd dump them in a heartbeat.
If Verizon takes the introduction of their Android phone to change this behavior, for real, I'll be on-board in a heartbeat. If they do this right, they could knock the iPhone down a notch or two, and that would be good for everyone.. even, in the long run, iPhone users. If it's business as usual, they could screw it all up for Android before they have a chance to hit critical mass.
If they can really claim thousands of applications, even at this early date, that's saying something pretty profound about the potential for the Android market.. because that's showing that developers believe it (and perhaps, that it's easy to write apps, which is also important). Add in the possibility of using 3rd party apps... not possible on iPhone. Then you have lots of companies looking to Android to solve their problem with the iPhone, and perhaps even re-invent their cellular business. Motorola reportedly has 250 people working on some aspect of Android. At some point, it's not simply a measure of possible success, but rather, how could this possibly fail? Android could well become to smart phones and PDAs what Windows has been to PCs.. the Default Choice.
Sure, Apple's had a head start. But they also had a big head start in the personal computer business over IBM. For a short time, they had better hardware and a better OS... didn't help, and that's largely because no single company will deliver the same kind of success you get from "everyone else" working on the same platform.
Stupid Apple Dogma is also only tolerated by iPhone users, because the iPhone has been the bright, shiny object in the light there last few years. But it does eventually get back to reality. One problem is battery life -- both kinds. When you have an all-in-one device, don't be surprised if people use it that way. Can I get a day's worth of phone, PDA, MP3 player, video player, etc. use out of an iPhone. Sometimes, others... not so much. Now consider that, this pretty much means charging it every night. I have a two-year A&T contract, but my battery is good for somewhere between 300-500 charges, being as it is a normal everyday Li-Poly cell. That means, if I'm really using an iPhone as intended, the battery won't last the life of the frickin' contract.
That was no big deal for my Treo 700p... I could buy a new, factory-original battery for $20 on Amazon and replace it myself. It IS a big deal having to send the phone back to Apple, and paying what amounts to ransom to get it back with a new cell. And yet, this Apple dogma isn't going away, it's spreading.. they're doing this to laptops, now.
The greatest thing about the PC market is that someone will make a machine that's close to what I want.. if not, I can make it myself. If you use a Mac, Apple has 5-10 options for you. If you use a PC, HP has 50, and if they don't suit you, there's Dell, Gateway, Acer, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Boxx, etc. This same thing should take hold in the Android market.. we already have Motorola and Sony/Ericsson announcing Android phones, and plenty more to follow... it's not just weird Chinese companies. This will ultimately be the big win in the Android market... Apple's tunnel vision will exclude most users, just as it does in the personal computer market.
Currently, GSM is about 80% of the world's wireless market.
IDEN carriers are sill active in the USA (Sprint/Nextel, Boost Mobile, others), Saudi Arabia (Bravo), Singapore, India, China, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, Jordan, Mexico, and most of South America.
There are a number of very small providers using CDMA in Eastern Europe and Asia. China Telecom uses CDMA, and has 42 million subscribers.. but that's pretty small, for China. India has several CDMA providers, with over 100 million total subscribers. Japan has no significant GSM providers.. they're mostly PDC and CDMA (one tiny company does UMTS but not standard GSM 1G/2G stuff). Korea is nearly all CDMA.
In short, while GSM is the predominant standard, there are dozens of non-GSM providers still out there in the world. You need to update you definiton of "the world" to including something other than the USA, Canada, and Western Europe.
Actually, Apple did quite a bit of convincing AT&T to carry the iPhone the way Apple wanted it to be carried. And to get their kick-backs from the AT&T fees charges, and even to be able to charge as much as AT&T ultimately did. AT&T's 3-year exclusive deal was payment in return for everything AT&T did for Apple.
It's easy to say, today, they'd all love to carry the iPhone.. of course they would. And Apple would love to have that, even enough to crank out a CDMA version if need be. But that's after the fact.. there was no guarantee that the iPhone would be as popular as it turned out to be. And much of that success is based on having made the iPhone a well supported SmartPhone.. something it didn't even do at launch.
While true, it could be worse. And it once was.
Back in the 1990s, GSM was virtually unknown here. The lone company providing GSM was VoiceStream, which had virtually no coverage. I was working quite a bit in Germany in the mid-to-late 1990s, and really looked around for a phone that could be universal. VoiceStream coverage was more myth than reality, so I would up buying a dual-mode Nextel phone, IDEN here, GSM there. In theory.. it was pretty much still an alpha-test unit... the GSM would always cut out after a few seconds of connection. Great for money making, since you got charged for making the call, but useless for communications purposes (naturally, I got all charges removed, sent the phone back twice, but they never got it working). VoiceStream was eventually bought by T-Mobile, owed by Deutsche Telekom, and currently the third largest multinational wireless company.
The alternative to CDMA (and the tiny bit of Nextel IDEN) was the D-AMPS sytem, also just called TDMA.. nearly the same as GSM (also a TDMA protocol.. that's why it makes all that noise if you're phones near a stereo-system speaker), only different. Nothing like re-inventing the wheel, poorly, but hey, that's what they did --- at least there's a technical advantage to CDMA (which is why all the 3G and 4G technologies are CDMA). This was still in use until this year... part of Altel's network was D-AMPS until last year (from Western Wireless), and US Cellular just shut down their D-AMPS network in February.
AT&T had been the largest D-AMPS provider, but began the shutdown of D-AMPS in 2007, to open that spectrum for increased GSM use.
Actually, an iPhone works very well in the market as a $200 device.. that's about what you pay for an iPod Touch, which of course is the same device, sans phone. And some people might even buy an unlocked iPhone, particularly if offered by Apple, just as people buy the fairly pricey unlocked Nokia high-end smart phones.
Verizon uses CDMA.. no SIMs. The code that you'd normally get from a SIM is permanently in the phone. You can change your phone online, for free.. but Verizon knows the codes assigned to them, and will most likely reject a code from some other CDMA phone.