It's comforting to know that I'm not alone in realizing that bandwidth demand
is outstripping capacity. To wit, in minuscule measure, this email reply and
how it was sent. The cell networks
aren't the only ones stressing out, residential broadband providers (cable and
DSL) are also, albeit their crisis is a bit farther off.
The heavy hitter remains streaming video (3D HDTV looming on horizon), but
there are other major contributors: P2P file transfers (wondering how much of
that is video and software), MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) and
SPAM email.
A number of major residential providers in the US have vigorously opposed "net
neutrality" because they're worried about bandwidth limits and do NOT want any
constraints or potential liabilities in how they decide to go about targeting
and selectively throttling specific kinds of network use (P2P file transfers
top their list of "evil" bandwidth hogs). Comcast has been one of the more
stridently outspoken cable providers claiming their "right" to limit, throttle
or outright "kill" anything and everything they think is using too much
bandwidth. That's a very slippery slope - WHO decides what to throttle or kill,
what are the decision criteria, and how would it NOT be subjected to
accusations of free speech censorship, discrimination (racial, religious, age,
disability, sexual orientation - you name it), either real or imagined.
For the "wired" networks it's infrastructure upgrade cost which does not come
cheap when it must extend through all of urban, suburban, and some of rural US
to each household. There are huge swaths of rural midwest that still do not
have cable or DSL (phone line) broadband - they're still using 56k dialup
modems and might get 28k out of it on a good day with the "rusty wire" very
noisy phone lines prevalent in rural US - and no provider wants to run miles of
stuff to get to one household.
If you're in a 4G service area - feel lucky! We just got 3G a couple years ago
- and I predict it will be some years before we see any 4G here - from Sprint,
Verizon or AT&T. Already feeling the bandwidth pinch on Verizon here as the
data speed dropping to a crawl and eventually falling to 1X connection with the
blue circle of death symbol (slower than Edge or EVDO). Like wired service - go
very far into rural Indiana and 1X is all there is - no Edge or EVDO - and
that's when there's cell coverage (from any carrier).
John
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 19, 2011, at 9:12 PM, Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Spectrum is indeed limited. And the data usage caps that most of the
> carriers have won't be going away anytime soon. They MUST put those caps in
> place because there just isn't enough bandwidth there to allow everybody to
> be streaming from Netflix onto their smartphones, iPads and other 3G/4G
> devices. This is a matter of physics. You can only squeeze so much brown
> stuff through the colon.
. . .
> As spectrum represents a real and fixed cap on capacity in what we call
> "access", there are several ways of addressing this. Do note that I'm
> specifying the "access" portion of wireless service. From the tower to
> the world is what we call "backhaul" and that is scalable thanks to the
> miracles of fiber-optics. Data traffic doubles about every 18-20 months.
> This trend is historical back to the days of the telegraph, so I feel it is
> safe to continue to use this figure in planning. With today's technology,
> we can get as far as 2016 and we'll run out capability. Fortunately,
> instead of 10GbE, we'll be deploying 40Gbe and 100GbE backhauls so no
> worries.
. . .
>
> Anything else?
Nope :-)
>
> AG (and so on) Schnozz
> --
--
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