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join:2000-07-13
Burlington, MA | Misunderstanding of cell speeds versus tower capacity I think there is a misunderstanding of what the network upgrades do. First, remember this is RADIO and not wired capacity. When AT&T upgrades, the 1MB or 5MB or 7Mb figures are total data capacity for a tower. If you are the only one accessing 3G data from the tower, you get close to the full speed. But the data bandwidth is a shared resource. If one person streams at 2Mbps, others get that much less bandwidth. In many urban areas you can't get full speeds because the data bandwidth is always shared. For web browsing and email this doesn't matter but for video it does.
On a wired net, we can get the full speed that our last mile connection offers if the ISP adds backbone capacity. On a wireless net it is more complicated. It is not easy to change the "last mile" because you have to upgrade the phones, radio technology used and the like. Then, each tower needs a land line that has capacity to handle the max data traffic for the tower. These upgrades are expensive and may mean digging up streets, running new able, etc. And finally, you need the backbone improvements.
All land line and mobile operators assume a contention factor. That is, they assume that they can sell 1Mbps to 100 people but not have 100Mbps of backbone because in the non-video world, we're all not using our 1Mbps all the time. Our pricing for Internet access is based on this assumption and if we were all always using our full capacity, the ISPs would need to do a big build out and raise our rates. This is why they hate video streaming and torrent/P2P traffic.
AT&T is both protecting their revenue by setting TOS to not allow streaming from a laptop through tethering (which is coming in 3.0) or through a laptop card. But, this also means that the 200 people in an area trying to get web access or email get some decent response.
AT&T *is* evil, but there is too much misunderstanding and FUD around the topic of speeds, bandwidth and what we can really reasonably expect. |
