Beyond 3G — Practical Cellular Internet Access 116
PreacherTom writes "For years 3G, or 'third generation,' denoted some future wireless utopia where voice, data, and video would all merge into a wondrous amalgam, marked by snazzy phones that do everything perfectly — and fast. There is indeed a new wireless utopia, and again, it's about merging voice, data, and all the other stuff at even faster speeds. It is known as High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, or HSDPA, and it has started appearing on wireless networks operated by companies such as Vodaphone in Europe and Cingular Wireless in the U.S. Meanwhile, South Korea's Samsung has even started building HSDPA-ready phones. The technology promises wireless speeds as high as 3.6 Mbps but in practice will be much slower than that — fast enough, though, to make wirelessly surfing the Web and downloading music and video well worth the effort."
Sounds good but... (Score:1)
Taking bets on how many companies will try!
EvDO? (Score:1)
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too expensive (Score:2)
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That's because very few devices allow you to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the new bandwidth of these services.
Contrary to popular marketing, people don't routinely download music and video on their phones via their phone's Internet connection. Why? Because the screens are too small, it's too expensive to do (because they charge you per song in addition to the Internet usage fees), and the devices themselves are poorly constructed for mobile Internet usage (for the
Mainly sold for PC Cards, not phones (Score:3, Informative)
Phone-only service is boring, and doesn't need high data rates. Not only do most phones have screens that are too small (though a Treo has a bigger screen than the video iPods), but the audio on p
3.6 Mbps at... (Score:1)
What's the fastest you can move you make cell handover feasible? That's one of the issues of 3G, isn't it?
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As long as... (Score:2)
-b.
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Micro$oft in their infinite wisdom started requiring tru$ted applications starting with WM2005.
-b.
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Your reseller may have already unlocked it. Trivial to do with the right software. Also, you may have been using software that was signed and blessed by MS. The phone in question was bought from a reseller, not through a cell provider. New.
The real PITA
Technology speed (Score:2)
There is too little time in order to get those technologies more mature, wider spread and accepted.
As of today GPRS/EDGE is the real solution (at least in Europe) unless you want to mimick your xDSL.
Instead of putting money in those 3rd, 4th and 5th technology dreams I would both enhance the services and lower the cost for both the services and the terminals.
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Maybe choosing a hotel with Internet service can be a better and cheaper solution!
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GPRS/EDGE/UMTS are here and quite useable.
The prices in Germany are acceptable (UMTS flatrates are available), and even in Austria they are reasonable for staying connected all time via say a Nokia Communicator.
Yes, it's not there yet, that every kid has it. But prices are starting to become reasonable for professional work.
And the biggest problem is not the price, IMHO, it's the latency issue. HSPDA is only a partial solution, because it's currently available only on some providers, plus it
yet another competing standard.. (Score:2)
Digita is building country-wide solution [digita.fi] in Finland based on first one.
What's interesting about their project, is that they started building in mind of covering all rural areas before offering service to larger cities.
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>What's interesting about their project, is that they started building in mind of
>covering all rural areas before offering service to larger cities.
Rah! I live in the boonies and slurp bandwith from the next town with a glorified Pringles solution; cable & DSL will never be available. Wish USA telcos would utilize wireless technologies to make broadband widely available instead of expanding a Smörgåsbord of soluti
Awesome! (Score:2, Funny)
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Cellular internet access in Europe (Score:2)
Anyone know of a way to do this, with good speeds and reasonable prices?
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T-Mobile USA charge $0.99, $1.99 or $2.99 per minute for calls made whilst overseas.
T-Mobile UK charge £0.50 to £1.40 ($0.95 to $2.66) per minute for calls made whilst overseas.
My my maths (With an exchange rate of 1.9 USD to GBP) it's cheaper to roam from the UK than it is to roam from the US.
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Roam in France with a US T-Mobile account $0.99 per minute.
Roam in France with a UK one at 1:1.90 (0.5*1.9) $0.95
Roam in France with a UK one at 1:1.80 (0.5*1.8) $0.90
Roam in France with a UK one at 1:1.70 (0.5*1.7) $0.85
In fact with T-Mobile's rates the only way for the US carrier to be cheaper is for the US to loose even more against the pound and hit the magical 1:2 ratio!
Roam in France with a UK one at 1:2 (0.5*2.0) $1
That's right - to save a penny on your roaming r
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The roaming charges stem from increased competition in the domestic markets pruning the monies raised from a finite number of local subscribers.
In the beginning (I'm talking about 10 years ago here) I could roam abroad for just 120% of the local charge for a call. Now it can be 1000%.
The easiest way of getting reliable connectivity is to use someone like T-Mobile's hotspots. THey bill consistently and cheap
3G = expensive (Score:2)
The problem is prohibitive data prices - at £4 a megabyte from Orange, I literally can not afford to use it.
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You might want to investigate T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk [t-mobile.co.uk] plans. I've switched over to them from Vodafone, for specifically this reason. i pay about £7.50 more per month that I paid under Vodafone, but I have a 2gig data transfer limit instead of paying £1 per megabyte.
Cheers,
Ian
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Finally 'web'n'walk' is web only - it's not all ports and protocols (although they tried to tell me in the shop that it was 'full internet access'), however they have been threatening to cancel the contracts of users running Skype [reghardware.co.uk].
Orange do an 'off peak' for £5 a month where 'off-peak' is after 7pm until 7am weekdays and al
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I know they limit VoIP, but I'm happily using ssh/sftp, ftp, iChat (AOL's IM client protocol, Jabber, iSync etc.. It's not purely a web service, just VoIP that's limited as far as I know. Not perfection, but compared to £1 a meg I'm prepared to overlook quite a few flaws...
Cheers,
Ian
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Compared to the other providers in the UK, it's great value.
de facto prohibited VoIP in EDGE/3G (Score:1)
I am using EDGE access on TIM [www.tim.it] in Italy, and have flat plan with 9 Giga for 25 euro/month in evenings and at weekends. I must say, that the quality of the service is very unreliable. Sometimes I may see a download at 200 kbps, but sometimes I can hardly browse the web.
While I
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It compresses the data before it gets to your phone,and YMMV but I get about 30-50% extra for the money. Sadly, it's so much better than the comedy Orange browser that I use it twice as often.
What's the Point? (Score:2)
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Even worse, many phones sold as, "unlocked", through Amazon are unable to utilize even correctly countersigned binaries from the carriers since the phone lacks the correct carrier root certificate.
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I agree that usually unlocking a phone means being able to use a sim from any provider. Some phones can be unlocked to the point (and that's what I meant here) where restrictions to software on the phone can be overridden.
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anyone got any links about more info on doing this?
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I just downloaded and installed the Mobile Google Mail application on my Cingular phone, and it works fine.
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N
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I bought (and returned) a T-mobile Samsung T809 because it cannot run Google Local for Mobile, or any other unsigned java app. I've had T-mobile for years, I'm a T-mobile "Platinum" customer (meaning that the CS people are really nice to me), and they've unlocked many phones for me.
T-mobile will not admit that they ordered T809s that require signed apps, and Samsung says the problem is squarely on T-mobile's end.
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Sprint doesn't. I moved my apps and data from my Tungsten T to my Treo 650 with no problems (and I've had some of those apps since I started with a PalmPilot Pro some 8 or 9 years ago). If a website offers up an uncompressed .prc, I can tap it in Blazer to download & install it; otherwise, I can unpack the zipfile on my computer and either HotSync it over or copy
Why not just Mobile VoIP? Why not Mobile ISPs? (Score:2)
Then I could choose whoever would charge me the least for the traffic, and I could do VoIP (or any standard TCP/IP traffic) with anyone on the internet without extra costs.
Have the "phone" companies switched to end-to-end data calls yet? If so, why are we forced to use them for voice calls? Shouldn't I be able to use my SIP provider?
90% of my phone calls are to people within thirty miles, a city-wide mesh netwo
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You'll
The real problem is latency (Score:1)
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I don't see the attraction (Score:2)
Music? Yes.
Web surfing for anything other than a quick information lookup? Maybe.
But I do not comprehend the attraction of looking at video on a postage stamp sized (slight exaggeration) screen.
Use them as modems. (Score:1)
I admit it is not the most astounding technology out there, but it could be pretty useful. I know I've even used by Motorola cellphone as a dialup modem (recognized by Windows and Ubuntu Linux as a Hayes modem) to dial up a connection in a few circumst
Utopia at a price (Score:2)
Most of these services are priced several times the cost of other Internet access and they all seem to have restrictions to limit access to brief email and browsing use. For instance, they specifically prohibit streaming music or video... unless, of course, you are paying them big extra bucks for their "special" DRM content.
This will take off big when they get realistic about pricing and use but I don't think this
Technology good, price bad (Score:2)
EvDO Baby (Score:1)
The problem..... (Score:1)
The market for cellular internet is small right now, catering to the business professional or the extreme geek. Maybe in a few years I'll be able to w
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Your wet dreams suck.
My experience with cingular wireless Internet (Score:2)
I will say that as far as surfing at home I might as well have bought a land line and used dialup. The connectivity simply blew. Yes, I'm talking GPRS here as someone will surely point out is inferior, but that's not the wors
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The error in my thinking was assuming these people would do as good a job as I would, were I in their shows....
But Can Providers Explain It...? (Score:2)
Then the website help areas are, not surprisingly, NO HELP. Out of date instructions, etc.
The average customer service person is someone young, out of work, lacking skills, not very motivated, and probably making $10/hr and figuring on 'moving out & up' fast, and not interested in learning.
If "NEXT GENERATION" cell
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Been there done that.
Customer service people are really not interested when I call.
Telstra have launched this (Score:2)
Although personally I have no plans to go near it untill Motorola have a HSDPA capable phone.
solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cripes I dropped my Nextel for a Boost Moble and cut my work phone bill in 1/2 and kept all the features I had. I still have a blackberry and still get email (*not through the BB service or app but a jme app) I get 24/7 unlimited internet access that my laptop happily still uses, and 2 way "beep-beep" they like to call it, and pay HALF of what I paid on a plan.
none of this will take off until the phone companies stop screwing the customers that are loyal and signed up for a plan/contract...
Then we get to coverage, most cellphone companies have crap coverage, my family has personal cingular phones and they recently did a change to the tower software ot hold onto a call as long as possible... so you dont get a dropped call. you get a 30-60 seconds of silence until you get fed up and press end... OHH! fewer dropped calls!!! my ass. my stepson has a "go phone" cingular's prepaid... he get's SMS for $0.05 each outgoing and free incoming..... while as a good doobie contract holder I pay $0.10 for every incoming AND outgoing...
They can develop all the technology they want, the customers will not use it or want it until it's not at gouge you to hell prices...
Moo (Score:1)
UUWAW (Unfinished Unpronounceable Wearisome Acronym With) (pronounced ooh-wahw) with the added bonus of starting with a vowel, so people can debated whether the preceding word is "a" or "an", refers tio a list of acronbyms made, just to be acronyms.
"HSDPA" doesn't sound whizzbangy, but is useless and hard to pronounce. Definitely a low qualifier.
This is all speculative nonsense (Score:2)
T
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Or buy a PCMCIA card (Score:2)
But that still doesn't answer the main question, which is how usable is this as a mobile technology? If you're talking about sitting in Starbucks or at the bookstore and using your laptop, then why not use the (free?) WiFi there? Maybe if you're on the train, you might have your laptop and the need for highspeed (some of the trains here have WiFi), but how many people do you know (outside the
The problem? (Score:1)
I would love to have my phone used for sending and receiving email, browsing the web, checking my RSS feeds, and using IM, but I simply can't justify the cost.
Bitrace (Score:2)
500Kbps compressed audio will also complement the small, detailed screen with the (relatively) hifi audio that is the priority for mobile media.
Which puts HSDPA's 3.6Mbps max r
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Don't forget compression.
AT&T is delivering 3 SD TV streams, and 1 1080p HDTV stream, over a 19 Mbps connection.
With a modern codec you can do full screen XGA video (less bandwidth than 720p) in 6 Mbit/s. Apple does 720p Quicktime Trailers at 6 Mbit/s.
For comparison's sake, they do 1080p trailers at 9 Mbit/s, and 480p at under 2 Mbit/s.
Similarly 500 Kbps is WAY over kill. Most people say that stereo MP3's compressed at 384 Kbps are indistinguis
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I'm not sure which post you're replying to. Because the mobile screen I detailed is QVGA, not QXGA.
I have not seen/heard the AT&T streaming you mention. But since it's
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Please re-read my post.
The bitrates you specify do not come close to the bitrates currently being acheived via modern video compression (H.264). AT&T's Project Lightspeed is a drop-in cable replacement service, and is currently operating IPTV over Fiber-To-The-Node, with VDSL providing the last leg, at a total of 25 Mbit/sec per residence.
The quality is supposedly pretty good; though I doubt it is as good as a conventional cable provider.
And the "QXGA" I w
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Finish what you start (Score:2)
Riiiiight . . . more of the same (Score:2)
Cost? (Score:1)
Oh, and let's not forget (Score:2)
Japan has it starting now (Score:2)
I was told that you need a separate provider (I have NiftyServe, which I use to get a login account on my home fiber connection from Tokyo Gas, which I can use apparently). There are 64K, 384K and 3.6M (2 models) but I am still trying to figure out just what
Better wait for WiMAX mobile (Score:1)
Believe me, it's worth some patience.
/Joss
3G is already here, just not for the Europeans (Score:1)
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I use HSDPA! (Score:1)
The current HSDPA phone in the US (Score:2)
I have it... (Score:1)
I live in Portugal, and not even 3G is accessible in every zone. Lately the cell companies have been improving the access points, and at least I can now connect using 3G in almost everywhere (even in the mountains).
Some things good about this tech:
* I have network access everywhere in my country, in those places I have cellular phones (that means 90+% of the country). It ranges from plain GPRS (64kbit),UMTS (384kbit) and HSD
CDMA & WCDMA caught in the 1990's for now (Score:2)
For many years I had mostly ignored CDMA systems and worked primarily on TDMA systems like GSM+GPRS+EGPRS, IS-136, PDC, DECT, PHS and PDC. I were of the impresseion that CDMA systems like IS-95, CDMA2000 and WCDMA R99+HSDPA were overhyped but I assumed they deep down had some merit despite the hype.
How dissapointing to figure out that the guys who worked on these standards had largely missed out on 10 years of development in GSM so now we are stuck with something that is a solution to yesterdays problems
Top speed for me... (Score:1)
However, Sprint is retarded when it comes to PAM (phone as modem) use. If you have the cheap plan and try to use your phone a