Cringely compares (some U.S.) broadband technologies:
How much Internet bandwidth is enough? For most consumers the answer is that no amount of bandwidth is enough. We always want more. For carriers the answer is that just enough bandwidth is enough, because providing more than the minimum hurts profits. But the best rule of thumb says that the right amount of bandwidth varies with the kind of network you are using and what you are doing with it. All Internet technologies are not created equal, it seems, and the wireless varieties — specifically 3G and WiMax — are at a real disadvantage when it comes to bang for the bit.
Bound and Gagged: WiMax Isn’t What It Seems, But Then Nothing Else Is, Either. By Robert X. Cringely, I, Cringely, PBS, July 6, 2006
He remarks that Intel is investing $600 million in Craig McCaw’s Clearwire Corporation, which does WiMax, because Intel wants to push Intel chips. And that WiMax can get up to 70 megabits per second, which is much faster than most current U.S. broadband technologies.
Then Cringely says:
Most WiMax users will find that they can’t get the target 70 megabits per second at 30 miles. They’ll be lucky to get even one megabit per second at 30 miles. Possibly a LOT less, as WiMax’s adaptive modulation slows transmission and throws on lots of forward error correction to make sure the signal gets through, however sluggishly.
If your WiMax or 3G connection syncs at, say, 100 kbps, does it still qualify as broadband?
Compared to dialup, which is often all you can get in rural locations, yes, yes it does. Compared to a locked-down telco connection that chooses content for you, yes, yes, it does. And most metropolitan WiMax connections are not going to be anywhere near 30 miles, so one would expect the speed would be at least comparable to the 1.5 to 4Mbps that’s the most you really get out of most DSL and cable connections.
Also, he’s got expectations that I’m not sure match what actually happens in countries (such as Japan and Korea) that already have fast broadband:
But the WiMax problem goes deeper than that. There’s the dream and then there’s the reality. The dream is watching Friends in HD video, downloaded over my WiMax connection.
That’s the telcos’ dream. Is it really the dream of Korean gamers who spend many hours doing interactive gaming, supporting a grey market in buying and selling online weapons and real estate for offline currency? Cringely thinks cable modems are where real speed will come from. That’s not the case in Japan, where cable is being left in the dust by fast DSL and fiber to the home.
I wonder if it will be the case in e.g., India or China, where nobody is likely to spend the money to string cable or copper to every home, which means the incentive exists to make wireless both ubiquitous and cheap. It seems unlikely to be the case in Africa, where not only are landline technologies not expanding rapidly, in some cases copper is being canibalized by theft. Will we see the next leap in wireless technology come from China, or India, or Africa, and get sold back to the U.S.?
Cringely says landline technologies have a big head start:
Remember that those other networking technologies are piggybacked on telephone and cable circuits that were paid for decades ago, too, and they have the benefit of a decade or more of refinement.
Or that could be interpreted as that they’re old and stodgy and ripe for leapfrogging. Especially given that people in the U.S. don’t even know how fast the old technologies have already gotten in Japan: Cringely says:
DSL can reach speeds as fast as 25 megabits per second,
Yet you can buy 45Mbps ADSL (down; 1Mbps up) from Softbank Yahoo BB for less than $30/month, and NTT East is offering 100Mbps fiber to the home. More on that in a later post.
Cringely concludes:
Reality sets in. And it doesn’t look good.
People in the U.S. mostly seem to have no idea what the reality is of what other countries have already done with broadband, nor about what could be done, while the U.S. continues to fall farther behind as a broadband backwater.
Hiding everyone’s head in the U.S. parochial sand doesn’t seem like good risk management to me.
-jsq
PS: Thanks to johnny for the headsup on the Cringely post.