Walt Mossberg is singing the praises of Verizon’s Broadband Access service in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. He hails the coming of truly wireless broadband. I think he should have called it the truly and highly mobile wireless broadband. I think we should hold the praise up until Nextel starts pushing its own version of real wireless broadband.
bq. Verizon claims the new service will deliver average downstream speeds of between 300 and 500 kilobits per second. That is three to five times as fast as the typical speeds available over older cellphone networks, and about what many people get from wired DSL lines. In my tests, the service did even better. Over several days, I averaged 585 kilobits per second. In fact, much of the time I was connected at over 700 kbps. The service can achieve peak speeds of more than two megabits a second, but I never saw that.
This is a technical question from a skeptical mind. Will someone tell me what happens when say about 2 million subscribers opt for this service?
Me Sir! Me Sir! Can I answer that one Sir?!
OK, here’s what happens. It goes totally titsup. Because the reverse link isn’t really CDMA. And it was slow to start off with. And the channel grab and release is slow. And it takes a lot of spectrum. And it scales REALLY BADLY. But it looks great in a demo to the telco execs, and the bits per hertz figures for the downlink look good, so who cares, right?
Yes that’s total correct.
It goes tits up.
I love the british way with words.
What’s even worst is that the Forward link is NOT even CDMA, its CDSA (SingleAccess).
That is to say, the way QCOM boosted the speed on DO, is to limit the complete channel to only ONE user at a time. One step forward, 47 steps back.
So as the load increases the latency dies and throughput can really drop.
Whenever I hear about DO, Sideshow Bob (from the Simpsons) always comes to mind.
At CTIA the QCOM boys had 1xEV-DO Verison 2 on display. Which improves the latency (it matches Flarion on the demo) and the reverse link is finally upgraded. But when I asked them, who is buying this, who will deploy it, and why did they even waste their time when DV Rel D. is on its way?
I got silence. Needless to say they didn’t cotton to me.
PS. Oh and QCOM is a bunch of bloody wankers.
talking about wankers, i think as more and more folks are signing on to this network i am using right now to read the posts, the performance is basically going down way down. getting around 60 kbps and it is near mid night. oh well. guys thanks for the explaination.