John Linton .....keeps tracking towards its 'destiny'.
I read the IDC report:
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/349602/3_comes_last_mobile_broadband_rankings/?fp=16&fpid=1
in this article which simply confirms what you expect to see in the development of a commercially delivered wireless technology over time - a gradual improvement in overall performance as the technology continues to be developed and as the 'deployer' upgrades the delivery mechanism in line with the economies of scale of an ever growing user base. I have been using the Optus wireless broadband service pretty much since it became available and I have only occasionally noticed a speed or latency improvement because since I first used it there never were any problems in the few areas I needed it to work.
Clearly the change from 3.6 mbps to 7.2 mbps was noticeable but in all other respects I have always had a service (all days of the week and all hours of the day) that seldom delivered less than 1 mbps plus and on most occasions provided close to or above 2 mbps. Not being a games player the early 100 ms latency never affected me and now, when I last bothered to check, latency is well below 100 ms; and whatever it used to be or is now never affected my use of VoIP. So there is nothing of particular interest in IDC's report and, personally, I would expect wireless broadband to continue to improve in performance year on year until the limits of the technology have been reached - whenever that turns out to be.
The proposed Telstra and Optus trials of LTE later this year will be interesting in that they will get a lot of publicity and a lot of uninformed comment but if they follow the deployment of LTE in the EU they will simply confirm that speed and latency of today will continue to be improved as new advances in wireless broadband technology continues to be commercially deployed. It has always been the case although the majority of the communications media and all the 14 year olds who tend to give the rest of us the benefit of their pig ignorant comments based on their zero knowledge and tiny time frame of experience of communications technologies will continue to exhibit their 'blanket' incomprehension of technology development - wireless will continue to become ever more ubiquitous and ever more useful. One interesting comment in the report was this:
"With social networking booming, and consumers increasingly sharing
images and videos, having a broadband connection with fast upload speeds
is becoming critically important. Today, mobile broadband on average
provides significantly faster upload speeds than most residential fixed
broadband connections.”
I think that's the first time I've seen some analyst state a real speed advantage of wireless over fixed wire broadband - and there's a lot more to come.
The issue with wireless, although it keeps improving, remains its price. I commented about AT&T's withdrawal of its unlimited mobile data plans a few days ago and I read this article that states the largest UK carrier is doing the same:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704312104575298662561224620.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews
However their new charges make Australia's current charges look like an absolute bargain. So it seems that the US and EU carriers are as equally inept at understanding what wireless broadband users will actually download as Australian carriers are. At least it will mean that a more rational approach to wireless broadband 'plans' is now being adopted in some markets. Exetel has yet to find a way of offering a sensible (for us) and attractive to the end user wireless broadband service but we will continue to try for another year - but with much lower expectations.
It will be interesting to see whether the half year ABS figures confirm the continuing rapid acceptance of wireless technology and whether that growth has had an impact on ADSL usage. Those figures are three months away so they are too late to make any impact on current planning but they will be useful when they do become available. In the mean time I continue to use wireless broadband and will buy a new note book before I go on leave that has the embedded sim slot to save fiddling around with an external modem and the ever present opportunity of daily packs/unpacks of losing one or more of the devices during the constant moves.
I will be interested in what happens to Telstra's wireless broadband pricing over the coming months.
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