281–290 of 332 posts
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The latency on cellular internet makes it unusable for many applications like gaming.
I've played many games of Starcraft on a Verizon LTE connection. Many (most?) online games have 250ms of latency "built in" to even the playing field for users with ping times below 250ms. LTE latency is usually closer to 50ms
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Internet providers need to quit playing these shenanigans all the time. What they do is they build public roads. You wouldn't allow a company to build a public road, and then go: "Safeway trucks get a free pass, cause we have a deal with them; everyone else, $5 per vehicle. Except for you, Best Buy, you pay $25 - except Saturday and Sunday, when you may not pass at all."
Well a long time ago I would have been all for public roads, but alas do you really trust the Federal government to dictate what does go down the pipe and who is allowed?
I recommend blind trust in nobody, as a rule. But with the government, at least there's the option of voting against the current office holders. Whereas when a Comcast-TimeWarner super-juggernaut takes over the whole market, what are my options? My lawyers versus theirs? Yeah, that would end up "well".
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Internet providers need to quit playing these shenanigans all the time. What they do is they build public roads. You wouldn't allow a company to build a public road, and then go: "Safeway trucks get a free pass, cause we have a deal with them; everyone else, $5 per vehicle. Except for you, Best Buy, you pay $25 - except Saturday and Sunday, when you may not pass at all."
Well, I do see signs on side streets all the time that say "no trucks over 3 tons". And I've seen parking signs that had incomprehensible terms. I agree with your position, but I think your analogy is tortured.
Secondly, if you think the "no trucks over 3 tons" signs impinge on your "liberty", then go ahead and drive a 25 ton truck down that road, see what happens. I'm having this discussion about "liberty" versus common sense with my 3rd grade son all the time.
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I would love to see Google enter that fight instead of trying to regulate their competition away. Not because I'm that anti regulation, but because I don't appreciate the irony of Silicon Valley always bitching about regulation, but then demanding that the government create an artificial reality where owning the pipes doesn't give you a natural competitive advantage.
Comcast has a huge advantage owning the pipes into my house, but they squander it. Rather than provide services, they become highway robbers on their own toll road. Comcast could have been netflix, akamai and so much more years ago. So tell me how they don't have advantage?
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No. I believe in the concept of a natural monopoly for most utilities though - Building outside plant is horrendously expensive - it to me makes as much sense to have multiple cable providers as it does multiple sets of power/telephone/water/sewer infrastructure. I'd even like to see a fewer wireless carriers (consider that each for carrier are spending billions of dollars to roll out what amount to essentially ident…
Conventional economics states that in a natural monopoly the state should be the sole provider.
Since the most common objection to this is privacy, I propose that the government provide the infrastructure (fiber, airwaves, satellites, etc) and that the use of that infrastructure have strong privacy guarantees and the protections of the existing unalienable rights in the forth amendment of the constitution:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
ISPs already have strict privacy guidelines, and if anyone thinks that corporations act to insulate users from government surveillance, they are fooling themselves. The protections must start with government itself and require constant vigilance. With regard to the commons, the profit motive should be limited to government contractors in service to the people, not the other way around.
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I think people are overly optimistic about the ability to endlessly increase the performance of wireless networks. The existing networks make fairly efficient use of the spectrum they're allocated. That means you really only have two options to make it go faster. 1) More spectrum. But it's massively in demand (read: expensive), nobody wants to give any up, and even if you had "all" the spectrum there are still practi…
3) Municipal fiber-optic lines that ISPs can lease access to in order to provide service to customers. Boom, no more monopolies.
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No. I believe in the concept of a natural monopoly for most utilities though - Building outside plant is horrendously expensive - it to me makes as much sense to have multiple cable providers as it does multiple sets of power/telephone/water/sewer infrastructure. I'd even like to see a fewer wireless carriers (consider that each for carrier are spending billions of dollars to roll out what amount to essentially ident…
> I'd even like to see a fewer wireless carriers (consider that each for carrier are spending billions of dollars to roll out what amount to essentially identical network infrastructure often even from the same vendors) The identical network infrastructure argument only works if you assume it's a big part of the cost. I don't think that's true, only a fraction of your cell phone bill is spent building or maintaining…
You missed the other argument I made, you know at the bottom. If pricing was regulated - as in the old days, based on rate of return - this strategy would work, if the carriers are left up to their own devices, they will just try to extract the greatest dollar they can out of the rate paying public.
- - - >> Having been in the industry for about 2 years now, looking at the spectrum, I believe that we have enough for two, possibly three really competitive national wireless carriers - as in a complete nation wide footprint > I don't know where you get that. We have four carriers now, and none of them are hurting for spectrum, except in a handful of specific markets that are interrupted by other players or outside forces. > Seattle, for instance, has plenty of spectrum. However, some of it is being hoarded for speculation (Allen/Vulcan Inc sitting on 700a in Seattle and Portland comes to mind, or Dish sitting on nationwide AWS, or Sprint sitting on tons of 2.5ghz). If the unused spectrum becomes used, and the smaller carriers like US Cellular / Leap / Cincinnati Bell merge into T-Mobile / Sprint, everyone has a pretty decent playing field in every market nationwide, and there's plenty of spectrum for 4 nationwide carriers nationwide.
2.5 works great in a dense metro area, where you have the customers required to support the density to pay for the much higher required number of cell sites, clearwire has done wonders with it. 2.5 doesnt work anywhere near as well outside the urban core. I read a study that right now there is 350 mhz of spectrum nation wide for cellular/mobile - I did a back of the napkin and figure you need about 100 mhz in a market (the largest ones) to make it really viable (by viable I mean wired equivalent speeds).
I personally believe in something of a use it or loose it concept for spectrum, either offer service on it, or you loose the right to do so, it's a public resource, not private property.
- - - >> but consider the current for a moment, that Sprint in Seattle on 1900 mhz only has 20 mhz duplex, and nothing on 800 at all - this is excluding the acres on 2.5, because of the obvious limitations of use with atmospheric issues. > If your in the industry, you know that Sprint's problems are not spectrum related, they're all execution related. Sprint's got plenty of capacity on spectrum, they are just too cheap to deploy it properly. Seattle is a perfect example of this. > There are no "atmosphereic issues" with 2.5. There's no issues with 2.5, period. The only issue is Sprint trying to pretend 2.5ghz is 800mhz, and deploying 2.5 as if it is as low as 800mhz. The spectrum is not at fault, Sprint is. Seattle's a major market, there's no reason downtown Seattle doesn't have Sprint small-cell 2.5 radios on every street intersection in the whole city - it would allow Sprint to offer multiple 20x20 LTE carriers on 2.5ghz to work properly, even indoors, throughout the majority of the city. Sprint phones shouldn't be using data over PCS in the urban area, except in the most strenuous of situations (deep underground). > Seattle's density supports this deployment, the tech is easily available, off the shelf equipment. Sprint's just not executing properly. Hopefully, SoftBank forces them to wake up and care about fixing their service.
There are most certainly more atmospheric issues with 2.5 compared to 1900, in so much as higher frequency brings more atmospheric attenuation. That aside - Sprint has not even begun 2.5 deployment yet, not even close, none of the NV sites have 2.5 on the tower, and the only 2.5 is the legacy clearwire network, and if you look at the NV documentation thats been leaked/released it shows that Sprint is expecting a lower overall footprint for 2.5 compared to either 1900 or 800 (in the markets that have enough 800 mhz spectrum to be viable) - without the PCS G-Block Sprint would have a hell of a time deploying LTE.
Another factor complicating the LTE deployment, I've been told that EV-DO Carrier demand is well outstripping LTE demand - even in areas where LTE is fully turned up - I suspect this is because of the demand MNVO's place on Sprints network - I was also told that something like 20-40% of the devices on the network are 1x only (I wish I could remember the exact number, I know it was large enough to surprise the hell out of me).
Supposedly microcells are part of the future planning for Sprint, but nothing is past the post yet, which will solve the problems in the downtown core. The problem of course is out in the suburbs which is where the majority of the population lives - the density is simply not present to make microcells pay, you need more spectrum at 1900 or 800 to really make it fly, and even if you had more 1900, in many places you'd still need more infill sites to make it really work.
For what its worth, no one up here is doing wide deployment of microcells, unless you count all the in-building systems out there, they are sort of the exception.