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As the government makes more spectrum available wireless bandwidth will become abundant. Google and Verizon are setting policy based on a snapshot of current in

by jsz0 16y ago

As the government makes more spectrum available wireless bandwidth will become abundant. Google and Verizon are setting policy based on a snapshot of current infrastructure which will have very long lasting impacts. If we want to be cynical it appears they picked the absolute best time (pre-4G) to use bandwidth scarcity as an excuse to make wireless a second class citizen of the open/fair Internet. In 2 or 3 years when we're getting 10-15Mbit/sec off our SmartPhones we're going to feel pretty god damn cheated when a competing non-Verizon, non-Google, video service is getting gimped down to 50k/sec. That's exactly what this deal allows.

zmmmmm 16y ago
I can't back this up with numbers but I think there is confusion about the point to point link speed of wireless technologies and their total capacity. Eg: just because one person can potentially get 20Mbps out of a 4G connection does not mean that there is enough spectrum that 1 million people can all do it at once in down town San Francisco. Wired connections scale linearly with the number of wires you lay (almost unlimited, although it is expensive). Wireless quickly hits the limits of physics (for any given amount of spectrum there is a theoretical hard limit to the amount of data you can send over it for a given power budget no matter what technology you employ - and spectrum itself is intrinsically limited).
- gamble 16y ago
  I get a lot more than 20 Mbps through my wifi router, even though every other house in the city has identical hardware. It isn't just about bandwidth - geographic separation matters as well. You can always build more towers and crank down the transmission radius for each one.
- jsz0 16y ago
  That's true however wired broadband is also oversubscribed in a similar way. A single DOCSIS channel can provide 38Mbit of bandwidth and it will typically serve ~250 customers. 250 customers @ 10Mbit each would require a 2.5Gbit/sec pipe at the access layer. For DOCSIS 3, 4 channel bonding, the real amount of wire bandwidth increases to 152Mbit/sec so to offer a 50Mbit connection to 250 customers your real maximum bandwidth needs balloon to over 10Gbit/sec. Cable is a bit unique since it's also a shared medium. Throwing more wire at the problem won't really help. It's a similar proposition to building many more cell towers with more antennas and transmitters to use spectrum more efficiently. It can be done it's just insanely expensive. Based on the VZ/Google deal I think the cable industry now has an excellent argument that they should be excluded from most rules of net neutrality.

by jsz0 16y ago

zmmmmm 16y ago

I can't back this up with numbers but I think there is confusion about the point to point link speed of wireless technologies and their total capacity. Eg: just because one person can potentially get 20Mbps out of a 4G connection does not mean that there is enough spectrum that 1 million people can all do it at once in down town San Francisco. Wired connections scale linearly with the number of wires you lay (almost unlimited, although it is expensive). Wireless quickly hits the limits of physics (for any given amount of spectrum there is a theoretical hard limit to the amount of data you can send over it for a given power budget no matter what technology you employ - and spectrum itself is intrinsically limited).

gamble 16y ago
I get a lot more than 20 Mbps through my wifi router, even though every other house in the city has identical hardware. It isn't just about bandwidth - geographic separation matters as well. You can always build more towers and crank down the transmission radius for each one.
jsz0 16y ago
That's true however wired broadband is also oversubscribed in a similar way. A single DOCSIS channel can provide 38Mbit of bandwidth and it will typically serve ~250 customers. 250 customers @ 10Mbit each would require a 2.5Gbit/sec pipe at the access layer. For DOCSIS 3, 4 channel bonding, the real amount of wire bandwidth increases to 152Mbit/sec so to offer a 50Mbit connection to 250 customers your real maximum bandwidth needs balloon to over 10Gbit/sec. Cable is a bit unique since it's also a shared medium. Throwing more wire at the problem won't really help. It's a similar proposition to building many more cell towers with more antennas and transmitters to use spectrum more efficiently. It can be done it's just insanely expensive. Based on the VZ/Google deal I think the cable industry now has an excellent argument that they should be excluded from most rules of net neutrality.