A_Tester_of_4G
@intel.com
| reply to sousademiami
Re: ROI
said by sousademiami  :I think fiber may likely become obsolete in 15 years or less because of wireless services. If 4G delivers on it's promise, it could be the end of landline services of any kind, TV, Phone, Internet, etc. Oh, please! 
In terms of real world speed, WiMAX is at BEST a competitor for current DSL! I'm working with the stuff right now, and it's not that impressive a technology. I'll take my home cable connection any day!
And the financials are worse. It has very high signal strength requirements to sustain a good connection, compared to conventional cellular, and, in its current incarnation, is situated at a very unfavorable frequency. Therefore, it suffers from very poor building penetration, not much coverage, which all translates to needing a LOT of expensive sites to make it work.
LTE will probably be deployed at a much more favorable 700 MHz, but still, it will require a very good signal to deliver good data rates, which will require a lot of sites.
Then there's the backhaul. You need to get that data stream from the wireless site to the core network somehow. Currently, this is a big concern in the industry.
Wireless may will do well in rural areas where it's just too expensive to run miles and miles of cable (in the same way voice wireless has brought phone service to many 3rd world countries), but it's NOT going to render obsolete any current technologies.
And satellite? A niche market at best. Capacity will always be too low, and latency too high, to make it a mass market data technology. |
