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I still want to see the potential of 4G realized. In most places its illogical to want to run fiber to the home to everyones house when you could just setup cel
by zanny 11y ago
I still want to see the potential of 4G realized. In most places its illogical to want to run fiber to the home to everyones house when you could just setup cell towers at the 20-40mb rates 4G usually gets and provide everyone with Internet that way.
For most people, their phone really should be their router and gateway. Getting new-classification broadband to everyone would be so incredibly cheap if all we had to do was give everyone 4G modems and let them use unlimited 40mb/s data over them, but its blatantly apparent the spectrum mafia is holding technology back - we need vastly more spectrum liberated for public consumption, especially that which is corporate controlled today, so that we can better provide the world with wireless connectivity. Right now the allocated spectrum is like a tap barely open where if regulation would let us we could get so much more bandwidth out of if archaic ideas about the private ownership of mathematical patterns would go away.
- nitrogen 11y agoWhat kind of latency would people get on 4G vs. fiber? People don't know what to call it, but they do care about lag in voice/video calls and games.
- zanny 11y agoHaving used 4g for calls all the time, that has never been a problem. Conferencing is fairly latency tolerant. Games are always the exception, but I'm not sure how many would truly value low latency in games over the aggregate savings of millions not having to supply and support wired uplinks in the last mile. But I'm not really talking about places you already get 20+ mbps by wire - I'm talking about places like my grandmothers town in rural PA where 4G coverage and speed can be up to 10x faster than the low rate dsl / cable options available to her ranging from 1.5 to 10 mbit. Whenever I visit sprint 4g is 50mb/s and her best landline option is 10mbit residential cable from the township.
- nitrogen 11y agoConferencing is fairly latency tolerant. It's easy to say this until you've experienced six remote people all trying to say something and, because of the latency, nobody knows who actually started first :). Also when you haven't tried something like Mumble. http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page
- zanny 11y agoI run my own mumble server and regularly conference with people from Europe (and my server and I are in the US). In my experience, 4G doesn't have the insane latency variance 3G does - its usually only around 200-300ms. If you are having half second or more delay it gets really hard to hold a conversation, but there is also the factor that people adapt fairly alright to asynchronous verbal communication - people with good manners get in the habit of waiting for responses. People on my server usually get 150-200ms just from the hop across the bay.
- mikeash 11y agoCan you achieve 20-40Mbps per person when so many people are using it simultaneously?
- zanny 11y agoCertainly not with the tower density and limited spectrum we have today, but thats not the point. GSM tech is capable of providing last-mile wireless access at broadband speeds and would be much cheaper than infrastructure fiber.