Forget WiMAX, I have been hearing enthusiastic people championing it for so long now that it clear it aint gonna go anywhere. When i worked for a large network equipment company we took it seriously for about 5 mins and then moved on.
Many people put their faith in wifi, alas it is starting to look like wifi will remain a technology only useful for corporate and home wireless. Plans to wifi cities are starting to be withdrawn and the ones have have already done it are know realizing that it probably is not the future.
It seems the mobile crowd were right all along, I actually did believe at one point that they would struggle. I had my first 3G phone in 1993 but had involvement with a 3G network a year or two earlier than that and was not too impressed but over the years things have improved and really there can't be much doubt that mobile networks as we know today will start to become the most used way for network connectivity from the majority of devices.
It is amazing really that Apple still do not ship there notebooks with a 3G option, this surely has to be included in the next revisions of the Mac Book Pro and Mac Book Air?
The 3G capabilities will presumably add value to much of the iPhone's attractiveness. But as an iPhone user, I'm still very unhappy with ATT's coverage and am thinking about a switch back to Verizon despite all else the phone offers. Without cellphone utility might as well have an iTouch and a good cellphone.
Revolution? I thought a lot of people were already dating wirelessly? I guess the increased bandwidth will allow for on-the-go HD video chats, but that's hardly a revolution...
I would be willing to bet the minute nonsense will finally be done away with soon enough, as will even the charge per KB or MB nonsense in the next few years. What we may see instead are differences in speed, throttling once particular limits have been reached within a particular time period, paying to have higher of either, etc.
I think two year contracts are here to stay though.
Forget WiMAX, I have been hearing enthusiastic people championing it for so long now that it clear it aint gonna go anywhere. When i worked for a large network equipment company we took it seriously for about 5 mins and then moved on.
I have trouble believing that. Do you seriously believe both Google and Intel would invest all of that capital in an obvious "loser" (Clearwire)? They've done their homework and have good reason to support it.
That's not good. I drive that route a lot myself and that could be an issue. I've been holding out for a 3G iPhone. I currently have Sprint and pretty much always have service along that same route.
Might wanna grab a friend/a friend's phone for the ride one day to check it out yourself.
Forget WiMAX, I have been hearing enthusiastic people championing it for so long now that it clear it aint gonna go anywhere. When i worked for a large network equipment company we took it seriously for about 5 mins and then moved on.
Many people put their faith in wifi, alas it is starting to look like wifi will remain a technology only useful for corporate and home wireless. Plans to wifi cities are starting to be withdrawn and the ones have have already done it are know realizing that it probably is not the future.
It seems the mobile crowd were right all along, I actually did believe at one point that they would struggle. I had my first 3G phone in 1993 but had involvement with a 3G network a year or two earlier than that and was not too impressed but over the years things have improved and really there can't be much doubt that mobile networks as we know today will start to become the most used way for network connectivity from the majority of devices.
It is amazing really that Apple still do not ship there notebooks with a 3G option, this surely has to be included in the next revisions of the Mac Book Pro and Mac Book Air?
It's funny, you write off WiMAX at the start and then ask why you can't get built in data in laptops. If mobile phone companies are the answer, why don't we have wireless data for our computers now? Because the technology is non-standard, its heavily encumbered with patents and restrictions and the network operators are oligopalists, not visionaries, who want to make money by limiting your choices.
WiMAX will provide an open standard with a goal of developing massive scale. That's how the computer industry works. It isn't easy getting to critical mass, but when it gets there it will slay the phone companies and you won't think about your mobile phone becoming your computer, it'll just be that every computer is naturally connected to the net, all the time, wirelessly.
..and they're 10 times more expensive and slower than 3G.
So you can get 40G a month for 5 pounds a month on HSPA? Which phone company offers that? I'd also say that 2M/1M is comparable to HSPA. Anyway you'd hardly judge by the first entrant. SO you're saying no one else is going to enter the market? Right...
In typical Apple fanboy fashion, I'm eschewing the 3G iPhone and starting the online clamor for the 4G iPhone. When do you think it will be released? Apple needs to get on their 4G game if they plan on enticing customers.
After Apple's first HSPA phone in 2008 (it may not even include HSUPA), the 2009/2010 iPhone should include HSPA+ - which offers 50% talktime battery life improvements, speeds up to 42Mbit/s, dramatic latency improvements and spectacular network capacity increases.
That should hold us over until 2010/2011 when the LTE iPhone has enough processing power and LTE network coverage to start using LTE's blazing speeds starting at 326.4Mbit/s.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
If it's true, then it's probably not by much. All the US phone companies are problematic, and Sprint is part of a pretty tight grouping..
Sprint has not ruled out rolling out LTE. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have announced their plans to. If The T-Mobile merger goes ahead, LTE is a certainty for Sprint.
Quote:
Originally Posted by merdhead
It's funny, you write off WiMAX at the start and then ask why you can't get built in data in laptops.
Over here most mid-range and high end laptops come with HSPA built in or as an available internal option. Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, HP and Toshiba are some popular brands which all have available HSPA but which not be available in your country.
Quote:
Originally Posted by merdhead
WiMAX will provide an open standard with a goal of developing massive scale.
Over 3 billion customers are on interoperable 3GSM/HSPA networks. HSPA is available today in 73 countries. Considerable investment has been made in these network, most countries have several HSPA networks competing with each other and the networks have a great upgrade path to HSPA+ and LTE in the future.
Much of the current work on the LTE project is building in an easy upgrade path for the network builders who will have unfortunately found themselves stuck in 2012 with a legacy Wimax network no-one wants to use.
WiMax is set to become the next HD-DVD. HSPA and HSPA+ are outstanding enough to compete with it today, and with LTE on the horizon, it seems pointless to spend massively on building new Wimax infrastructure.
HSPA+ devices are seamlessly backward compatible with HSPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS giving the best capabilities of whatever network is in range. 218 countries have compatible networks (over 700 of them)!
After Apple's first HSPA phone in 2008 (it may not even include HSUPA), the 2009/2010 iPhone should include HSPA+ - which offers 50% talktime battery life improvements, speeds up to 42Mbit/s, dramatic latency improvements and spectacular network capacity increases.
That should hold us over until 2010/2011 when the LTE iPhone has enough processing power and LTE network coverage to start using LTE's blazing speeds starting at 326.4Mbit/s.
Sprint has not ruled out rolling out LTE. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have announced their plans to. If The T-Mobile merger goes ahead, LTE is a certainty for Sprint.
Over here most mid-range and high end laptops come with HSPA built in or as an available internal option. Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, HP and Toshiba are some popular brands which all have available HSPA but which not be available in your country.
Over 3 billion customers are on interoperable 3GSM/HSPA networks. HSPA is available today in 73 countries. Considerable investment has been made in these network, most countries have several HSPA networks competing with each other and the networks have a great upgrade path to HSPA+ and LTE in the future.
Much of the current work on the LTE project is building in an easy upgrade path for the network builders who will have unfortunately found themselves stuck in 2012 with a legacy Wimax network no-one wants to use.
WiMax is set to become the next HD-DVD. HSPA and HSPA+ are outstanding enough to compete with it today, and with LTE on the horizon, it seems pointless to spend massively on building new Wimax infrastructure.
HSPA+ devices are seamlessly backward compatible with HSPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS giving the best capabilities of whatever network is in range. 218 countries have compatible networks (over 700 of them)!
3 billion customers, the vast majority of which don't use 3G and don't use data. The point is not GSM's head start, its that the industry is setup for milking the customer on voice and SMS. I think CDMA is HD-DVD, WiMAX is a different business to the mobile phone business. Where ever 'over here' is, it's not America and Western Europe where most laptops have no such wireless connectivity.
The mobile phone industry is focusing on closed machines centred around voice, when what people really want long term is general purpose machines which are open and more powerful.
3 billion customers, the vast majority of which don't use 3G and don't use data.
Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service on the planet, with 72% of all mobile phone users worldwide or 1.9 Billion users. As their users data requirements grow, more EDGE networks will upgrade to HSPA. 73 countries now have HSPA networks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by merdhead
The point is not GSM's head start, its that the industry is setup for milking the customer on voice and SMS.
I find it odd that you argue that the actions of Wimax carriers are less likely to milk customers without providing any justification. Wimax networks are even more expensive to build and those costs have to be recovered somehow.
Quote:
Originally Posted by merdhead
The mobile phone industry is focusing on closed machines centred around voice, when what people really want long term is general purpose machines which are open and more powerful.
I fail to see what is closed about a GSM or HSPA phone or laptop. An unlocked phone will work on any GSM or HSPA network in the world. Conversely, a network locked Wimax device will only work on its own carrier. Your point?
Without network locks, any one of the 3 billion SIM cards can be inserted in any of the 3 billion GSM/HSPA phones or laptops and the device would work in seconds with no additional configuration. It's probably the most open standard in the world. Amazing.
Yes everyone pronounced Bluetooth dead several times and it eventually became huge. Why? Because it's a good idea. So is WiMAX. LTE, the 4G version of GSM is realistically not going to be rolled out before next decade and maybe 2013. Given how long it took mobile phones to take it I think you can cut WiMAX some slack.
Intel are still committed, delays are typical, doesn't mean it won't happen.
Interesting enough, Nokia released a WiMax Internet Tablet. Supposedly from some of the forums it is quite useable in WiMax environments.
The 3G capabilities will presumably add value to much of the iPhone's attractiveness. But as an iPhone user, I'm still very unhappy with ATT's coverage and am thinking about a switch back to Verizon despite all else the phone offers. Without cellphone utility might as well have an iTouch and a good cellphone.
I have been saying this for weeks, months, etc... The phone part of the iPhone part is not that great, but the rest is pretty good.
If it's true, then it's probably not by much. All the US phone companies are problematic, and Sprint is part of a pretty tight grouping. Every carrier has an overall satisfaction / dissatisfaction rating that differs at most by maybe a percent or two from the others. This is from a wide survey of every region, not individual anecdotes.
Mmm... no. Sprint is in very serious trouble right now, having suffered a net loss of over 1 million customers in Q1 alone. The other national carriers (Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile) by contrast, all net gained 1 to 1.5 million customers in Q1.
Sprint's churn rate (the rate at which customers leave) is much higher than it is for the other national carriers, to the point where it's starting to significantly shrink their user base. They are, in effect, bleeding customers. \
They're not quite in a death-spiral yet (like the old ATT Wireless, before the Cingular buy-out), but they need to do something serious, like sell or spin-off Nextel, where the problems are the worst. According to some reports, Sprint top management is already strongly considering such a step.
WiMax hasn't lived up to its over the top hype. In fact, one Australian company that rolled out WiMax lambasted it at the last WiMax conference because it's not really working out on a wide scale. Couple that with the delays in getting anything deployed, delays in inclusion in even Intel's consumer wireless chipsets, it's an open question whether it will be eclipsed before it can catch on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by murphyweb
Forget WiMAX, I have been hearing enthusiastic people championing it for so long now that it clear it aint gonna go anywhere. When i worked for a large network equipment company we took it seriously for about 5 mins and then moved on.
Although this is only my experience with one service provider in one area, it was Clearwire (who is partnering with Sprint for Wimax build-out). My sister had Clearwire WiMax service in Boise, Idaho. She was in an apartment that was apparently outside the cable loop. Anyways, long story short, the service was crap. The signal was intermittent, and even when it was good, the speeds were very slow, usually around 200-400kbps (25K/s -> 50K/s) download if you were lucky and the latency was even worse --- in the 700-1500ms range. Thats almost worse than my old DirecPC satellite system from 10 years ago!!. Now I'm not saying that that's necessarily indicative of everyone's experience, but I sure am not holding my breath for Wimax. Couple this with the fact that Sprint's cash and customer base is hemorrhaging faster than a drunk hemophiliac and I don't think they'll be around long enough to even launch the network.
AT&T can promise anything, but until they put up some more towers it is all of no use to me.
I live in Iowa - just 4 miles north of Iowa City, a Big 10 University town, on I-80.
My Verizon cell phone has 5 bars, and my friend's iPhone had ZERO signal here when he came to demonstrate it to me. AT&T's coverage outside of big cities is a joke. I will never forgive the Verizon CEO for turning down Apple because they have a much better network and it could have been a great combination.
So, I can forget the iPhone until the AT&T network gets expanded.
Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service on the planet, with 72% of all mobile phone users worldwide or 1.9 Billion users. As their users data requirements grow, more EDGE networks will upgrade to HSPA. 73 countries now have HSPA networks.
I find it odd that you argue that the actions of Wimax carriers are less likely to milk customers without providing any justification. Wimax networks are even more expensive to build and those costs have to be recovered somehow.
I fail to see what is closed about a GSM or HSPA phone or laptop. An unlocked phone will work on any GSM or HSPA network in the world. Conversely, a network locked Wimax device will only work on its own carrier. Your point?
Without network locks, any one of the 3 billion SIM cards can be inserted in any of the 3 billion GSM/HSPA phones or laptops and the device would work in seconds with no additional configuration. It's probably the most open standard in the world. Amazing.
I think you're missing the point. The point isn't what you can or can't do with mobile phones, the point is the business models and industry orientation. If you look at it from a technical point of view it's all fairly meaningless, but what is a somewhat subtle difference will make a profound difference in how wireless networks are used in the future.
Comments
Many people put their faith in wifi, alas it is starting to look like wifi will remain a technology only useful for corporate and home wireless. Plans to wifi cities are starting to be withdrawn and the ones have have already done it are know realizing that it probably is not the future.
It seems the mobile crowd were right all along, I actually did believe at one point that they would struggle. I had my first 3G phone in 1993 but had involvement with a 3G network a year or two earlier than that and was not too impressed but over the years things have improved and really there can't be much doubt that mobile networks as we know today will start to become the most used way for network connectivity from the majority of devices.
It is amazing really that Apple still do not ship there notebooks with a 3G option, this surely has to be included in the next revisions of the Mac Book Pro and Mac Book Air?
Revolution? I thought a lot of people were already dating wirelessly? I guess the increased bandwidth will allow for on-the-go HD video chats, but that's hardly a revolution...
On second thought...
Spectacularly well done man, truly.
I would be willing to bet the minute nonsense will finally be done away with soon enough, as will even the charge per KB or MB nonsense in the next few years. What we may see instead are differences in speed, throttling once particular limits have been reached within a particular time period, paying to have higher of either, etc.
I think two year contracts are here to stay though.
But I'm just pulling this from my... yeah.
Edit:
companies is spelled companies not comapnies
How did I do that?
Forget WiMAX, I have been hearing enthusiastic people championing it for so long now that it clear it aint gonna go anywhere. When i worked for a large network equipment company we took it seriously for about 5 mins and then moved on.
I have trouble believing that. Do you seriously believe both Google and Intel would invest all of that capital in an obvious "loser" (Clearwire)? They've done their homework and have good reason to support it.
That's not good. I drive that route a lot myself and that could be an issue. I've been holding out for a 3G iPhone. I currently have Sprint and pretty much always have service along that same route.
Might wanna grab a friend/a friend's phone for the ride one day to check it out yourself.
Forget WiMAX, I have been hearing enthusiastic people championing it for so long now that it clear it aint gonna go anywhere. When i worked for a large network equipment company we took it seriously for about 5 mins and then moved on.
Many people put their faith in wifi, alas it is starting to look like wifi will remain a technology only useful for corporate and home wireless. Plans to wifi cities are starting to be withdrawn and the ones have have already done it are know realizing that it probably is not the future.
It seems the mobile crowd were right all along, I actually did believe at one point that they would struggle. I had my first 3G phone in 1993 but had involvement with a 3G network a year or two earlier than that and was not too impressed but over the years things have improved and really there can't be much doubt that mobile networks as we know today will start to become the most used way for network connectivity from the majority of devices.
It is amazing really that Apple still do not ship there notebooks with a 3G option, this surely has to be included in the next revisions of the Mac Book Pro and Mac Book Air?
It's funny, you write off WiMAX at the start and then ask why you can't get built in data in laptops. If mobile phone companies are the answer, why don't we have wireless data for our computers now? Because the technology is non-standard, its heavily encumbered with patents and restrictions and the network operators are oligopalists, not visionaries, who want to make money by limiting your choices.
WiMAX will provide an open standard with a goal of developing massive scale. That's how the computer industry works. It isn't easy getting to critical mass, but when it gets there it will slay the phone companies and you won't think about your mobile phone becoming your computer, it'll just be that every computer is naturally connected to the net, all the time, wirelessly.
WiMAX has absolutely zero chance of widespread success here in the UK. We've one WiMAX provider...
http://www.trustedreviews.com/networ...ce-Launched/p1
..and they're 10 times more expensive and slower than 3G.
So you can get 40G a month for 5 pounds a month on HSPA? Which phone company offers that? I'd also say that 2M/1M is comparable to HSPA. Anyway you'd hardly judge by the first entrant. SO you're saying no one else is going to enter the market? Right...
In typical Apple fanboy fashion, I'm eschewing the 3G iPhone and starting the online clamor for the 4G iPhone. When do you think it will be released? Apple needs to get on their 4G game if they plan on enticing customers.
After Apple's first HSPA phone in 2008 (it may not even include HSUPA), the 2009/2010 iPhone should include HSPA+ - which offers 50% talktime battery life improvements, speeds up to 42Mbit/s, dramatic latency improvements and spectacular network capacity increases.
That should hold us over until 2010/2011 when the LTE iPhone has enough processing power and LTE network coverage to start using LTE's blazing speeds starting at 326.4Mbit/s.
If it's true, then it's probably not by much. All the US phone companies are problematic, and Sprint is part of a pretty tight grouping..
Sprint has not ruled out rolling out LTE. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have announced their plans to. If The T-Mobile merger goes ahead, LTE is a certainty for Sprint.
It's funny, you write off WiMAX at the start and then ask why you can't get built in data in laptops.
Over here most mid-range and high end laptops come with HSPA built in or as an available internal option. Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, HP and Toshiba are some popular brands which all have available HSPA but which not be available in your country.
WiMAX will provide an open standard with a goal of developing massive scale.
Over 3 billion customers are on interoperable 3GSM/HSPA networks. HSPA is available today in 73 countries. Considerable investment has been made in these network, most countries have several HSPA networks competing with each other and the networks have a great upgrade path to HSPA+ and LTE in the future.
Much of the current work on the LTE project is building in an easy upgrade path for the network builders who will have unfortunately found themselves stuck in 2012 with a legacy Wimax network no-one wants to use.
WiMax is set to become the next HD-DVD. HSPA and HSPA+ are outstanding enough to compete with it today, and with LTE on the horizon, it seems pointless to spend massively on building new Wimax infrastructure.
HSPA+ devices are seamlessly backward compatible with HSPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS giving the best capabilities of whatever network is in range. 218 countries have compatible networks (over 700 of them)!
After Apple's first HSPA phone in 2008 (it may not even include HSUPA), the 2009/2010 iPhone should include HSPA+ - which offers 50% talktime battery life improvements, speeds up to 42Mbit/s, dramatic latency improvements and spectacular network capacity increases.
That should hold us over until 2010/2011 when the LTE iPhone has enough processing power and LTE network coverage to start using LTE's blazing speeds starting at 326.4Mbit/s.
Sprint has not ruled out rolling out LTE. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have announced their plans to. If The T-Mobile merger goes ahead, LTE is a certainty for Sprint.
Over here most mid-range and high end laptops come with HSPA built in or as an available internal option. Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, HP and Toshiba are some popular brands which all have available HSPA but which not be available in your country.
Over 3 billion customers are on interoperable 3GSM/HSPA networks. HSPA is available today in 73 countries. Considerable investment has been made in these network, most countries have several HSPA networks competing with each other and the networks have a great upgrade path to HSPA+ and LTE in the future.
Much of the current work on the LTE project is building in an easy upgrade path for the network builders who will have unfortunately found themselves stuck in 2012 with a legacy Wimax network no-one wants to use.
WiMax is set to become the next HD-DVD. HSPA and HSPA+ are outstanding enough to compete with it today, and with LTE on the horizon, it seems pointless to spend massively on building new Wimax infrastructure.
HSPA+ devices are seamlessly backward compatible with HSPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS giving the best capabilities of whatever network is in range. 218 countries have compatible networks (over 700 of them)!
3 billion customers, the vast majority of which don't use 3G and don't use data. The point is not GSM's head start, its that the industry is setup for milking the customer on voice and SMS. I think CDMA is HD-DVD, WiMAX is a different business to the mobile phone business. Where ever 'over here' is, it's not America and Western Europe where most laptops have no such wireless connectivity.
The mobile phone industry is focusing on closed machines centred around voice, when what people really want long term is general purpose machines which are open and more powerful.
3 billion customers, the vast majority of which don't use 3G and don't use data.
Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service on the planet, with 72% of all mobile phone users worldwide or 1.9 Billion users. As their users data requirements grow, more EDGE networks will upgrade to HSPA. 73 countries now have HSPA networks.
The point is not GSM's head start, its that the industry is setup for milking the customer on voice and SMS.
I find it odd that you argue that the actions of Wimax carriers are less likely to milk customers without providing any justification. Wimax networks are even more expensive to build and those costs have to be recovered somehow.
The mobile phone industry is focusing on closed machines centred around voice, when what people really want long term is general purpose machines which are open and more powerful.
I fail to see what is closed about a GSM or HSPA phone or laptop. An unlocked phone will work on any GSM or HSPA network in the world. Conversely, a network locked Wimax device will only work on its own carrier. Your point?
Without network locks, any one of the 3 billion SIM cards can be inserted in any of the 3 billion GSM/HSPA phones or laptops and the device would work in seconds with no additional configuration. It's probably the most open standard in the world. Amazing.
Yes everyone pronounced Bluetooth dead several times and it eventually became huge. Why? Because it's a good idea. So is WiMAX. LTE, the 4G version of GSM is realistically not going to be rolled out before next decade and maybe 2013. Given how long it took mobile phones to take it I think you can cut WiMAX some slack.
Intel are still committed, delays are typical, doesn't mean it won't happen.
Interesting enough, Nokia released a WiMax Internet Tablet. Supposedly from some of the forums it is quite useable in WiMax environments.
Yeah it takes a long time, but they're still ahead of the GSM people on 4G technology.
LTE isn't really GSM, though it is backwards-compatible with it.
GSM is TDMA-based, LTE is OFDM-based... a very different and much more advanced tech. Even some CDMA carriers, like Verizon, are going to LTE.
.
The 3G capabilities will presumably add value to much of the iPhone's attractiveness. But as an iPhone user, I'm still very unhappy with ATT's coverage and am thinking about a switch back to Verizon despite all else the phone offers. Without cellphone utility might as well have an iTouch and a good cellphone.
I have been saying this for weeks, months, etc... The phone part of the iPhone part is not that great, but the rest is pretty good.
If it's true, then it's probably not by much. All the US phone companies are problematic, and Sprint is part of a pretty tight grouping. Every carrier has an overall satisfaction / dissatisfaction rating that differs at most by maybe a percent or two from the others. This is from a wide survey of every region, not individual anecdotes.
Mmm... no. Sprint is in very serious trouble right now, having suffered a net loss of over 1 million customers in Q1 alone. The other national carriers (Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile) by contrast, all net gained 1 to 1.5 million customers in Q1.
Sprint's churn rate (the rate at which customers leave) is much higher than it is for the other national carriers, to the point where it's starting to significantly shrink their user base. They are, in effect, bleeding customers.
They're not quite in a death-spiral yet (like the old ATT Wireless, before the Cingular buy-out), but they need to do something serious, like sell or spin-off Nextel, where the problems are the worst. According to some reports, Sprint top management is already strongly considering such a step.
.
WiMax hasn't lived up to its over the top hype. In fact, one Australian company that rolled out WiMax lambasted it at the last WiMax conference because it's not really working out on a wide scale. Couple that with the delays in getting anything deployed, delays in inclusion in even Intel's consumer wireless chipsets, it's an open question whether it will be eclipsed before it can catch on.
Forget WiMAX, I have been hearing enthusiastic people championing it for so long now that it clear it aint gonna go anywhere. When i worked for a large network equipment company we took it seriously for about 5 mins and then moved on.
Although this is only my experience with one service provider in one area, it was Clearwire (who is partnering with Sprint for Wimax build-out). My sister had Clearwire WiMax service in Boise, Idaho. She was in an apartment that was apparently outside the cable loop. Anyways, long story short, the service was crap. The signal was intermittent, and even when it was good, the speeds were very slow, usually around 200-400kbps (25K/s -> 50K/s) download if you were lucky and the latency was even worse --- in the 700-1500ms range. Thats almost worse than my old DirecPC satellite system from 10 years ago!!. Now I'm not saying that that's necessarily indicative of everyone's experience, but I sure am not holding my breath for Wimax. Couple this with the fact that Sprint's cash and customer base is hemorrhaging faster than a drunk hemophiliac and I don't think they'll be around long enough to even launch the network.
I live in Iowa - just 4 miles north of Iowa City, a Big 10 University town, on I-80.
My Verizon cell phone has 5 bars, and my friend's iPhone had ZERO signal here when he came to demonstrate it to me. AT&T's coverage outside of big cities is a joke. I will never forgive the Verizon CEO for turning down Apple because they have a much better network and it could have been a great combination.
So, I can forget the iPhone until the AT&T network gets expanded.
Find all towers and coverge here:
http://www.cellreception.com/towers/
and for AT&T towers, go here:
http://www.wireless.att.com/coverage...l=calltoaction
LTE isn't really GSM, though it is backwards-compatible with it.
GSM is TDMA-based, LTE is OFDM-based... a very different and much more advanced tech. Even some CDMA carriers, like Verizon, are going to LTE.
.
I'm using GSM to refer to the whole grouping, as in the GSM association, who support GSM, UMTS and LTE.
Today text messaging is the most widely used mobile data service on the planet, with 72% of all mobile phone users worldwide or 1.9 Billion users. As their users data requirements grow, more EDGE networks will upgrade to HSPA. 73 countries now have HSPA networks.
I find it odd that you argue that the actions of Wimax carriers are less likely to milk customers without providing any justification. Wimax networks are even more expensive to build and those costs have to be recovered somehow.
I fail to see what is closed about a GSM or HSPA phone or laptop. An unlocked phone will work on any GSM or HSPA network in the world. Conversely, a network locked Wimax device will only work on its own carrier. Your point?
Without network locks, any one of the 3 billion SIM cards can be inserted in any of the 3 billion GSM/HSPA phones or laptops and the device would work in seconds with no additional configuration. It's probably the most open standard in the world. Amazing.
I think you're missing the point. The point isn't what you can or can't do with mobile phones, the point is the business models and industry orientation. If you look at it from a technical point of view it's all fairly meaningless, but what is a somewhat subtle difference will make a profound difference in how wireless networks are used in the future.