Get this for delicious ironies of our day. Download speeds on Rogers wireless cellular/HSDPA network are hitting 250 kBytes/sec. Observed torrent rates on the throttled-within-an-inch-of-its-life home “broad”-band are closer to 30 kBytes/sec. What does this mean?
Rogers wireless network is wide open. No deep packet inspection. Due to the physics of airwaves, it’s the one network that should be most constrained and yet they’ll let you run all the bandwidth saturating P2P apps you want. Crazy that you can do this over the air but not over wireline.
Mobile broadband is fast. The highspeed airwaves are empty, like a fresh built freeway just before it’s consumed by suburbia. enjoy while the going is good.
Pissed off by slow access over cable? Run a few torrents over the air. Better effective bandwidth and you can take it anywhere.
Somewhere, someplace, a Rogers network engineer wants to kill me for telling you this.
*This is with a 3.6Mbs cellular PC card (about $99 unlocked on eBay) . 7.2Mbs cards are also on the market, and the network may be capable of it in your area.
What’s better, unlimited wired/wireless broadband access or pay by gigabyte? Here’s why I think you want to pay by gigabyte. There’s a few problems with the way we get access to the net.
One being the major providers of pipes are also significantly vertically integrated media and telco companies. Conflict of interest number 1 and not situation that will chance immediately (though greater competition and some enforcement of net neutrality could go a long way).
The second problem is the all-fixed costs model of offering unlimeted access. Which creates incentives for ISPs to sread their bandwidth as thinly as possible, shape, throttle and upgrade capacity as little as possible, if at all, once subscribers are safely subscribed.
By metering bandwidth the pipe-provider has incentive to offer as much effective bandwidth as possible to subscribers and to continually grow that pipe. Now the provider and the users incentives are aligned. The provider wants the user to be able to get as much value(bits) from the pipe as possible, which is exactly what the user wants too.
Why shouldn’t bandwidth be metered like electricity? a few cents a gig for wired access, a few dollars a gig for mobile wireless say. Would you go for it? Would you go for this plan if it cost the same or more as you are paying now but gave you much faster and unfettered access to whatever you want to use?
The often entertaining Bruce Sterling talking about the future of design and technology, everyware, spimes, mobiles and the long list of devices killed off or consumed by the mobile phone, and the victory condition for geolocative technology (a four year old should be able to find their way to new delhi). The best parts are roughly through the middle section. And some spot on advice for designers. Desigers should obssess over design so users don’t have to. “Don’t make me think” good design minimizes cognitive load and opportunity cost. Longish but packed with cheeky wisdom relevant to anyone contemplating the future of wireless. Hat tip to boing boing.
The World Economic Forum released their annual Global Information Technology Report including rankings of ICT readiness. But you wont see Canada on the first page, or in the top ten at all this year. Canada has slipped to 13th place steadily down from 6th place 4 years ago. Nowadays, if you like bandwidth, it’s better to be a scandinavian.
Take it for what it’s worth (and remember that RIM products go by more names than Apple’s iPhone) but it’s interesting to look at google trends in general as prediction markets of public interest.
Note too, the cultural and language differences. An established market, querty keyboards, and enterprise-friendly features make “blackberry” very much a North American and english-language darling.
But, for style or status concious euro-cats and developing world googlers, it’s iPhone mania all the way. According to one survey, awareness of the iPhone is as high as 68% in China.
It’s amazing to see the power of iPhone fever. And it’s a version 1.0 product. In order to protect the innocent it’s probably best I didn’t plot “windows mobile” on this chart. You could always try that for yourself.
I’ve been trying out a 3G (Rogers HSPA) pc card for about a week now. A more full review coming, but a few remarkable observations:
It’s really great to be connected anywhere. And the device works most anyplace (in the city) you can get a cell signal.
Celular broadband is immeasurably better than rogers/bell Wimax-like “portable” internet.
It’s fast. Or at least fast enough to be indistinguishable from wired broadband for general websufing
You immediately want a smaller/lighter notebook to take with you everywhere. I have 3+lb 13″ notebook. I now want something smaller.
The device works quite well in streetcars, buses, taxis if you can balance a laptop on your knee in those places (see above)
Smart phones and RIMs are nice, but something with a real keyboard and just enough screen to show a whole webpage is even better.
The days of cheap, paperback sized micro-laptops arecoming. With 3G, these are going to sell like crazy.
Unlike in other countries, 3G data plans are still not quite cheap enough for the mass market in Canada. But they may be worth it already for you.
The pricing of the devices by the big 3 is all wrong. $399 + activation fee without a 3 year contract is ridiculous. Signing a 3 year contract on a data card doesn’t make any sense at all because the devices and networks are changing too quickly. In other parts of the world, dongles go for free with a 1 yr contract. And the carriers sell them by the wheelbarrow load.
In Canada, Telus has the best plans and pricing but Rogers as Canada’s only GSM/HSPA carrier (sigh) is compatible with more devices, like you can get an unlocked data card for cheap on eBay (hint). HSPA devices take SIM cards just like GSM phones.
Soon though it won’t matter. The new EeePC from Asus or others (the whole micro PC) will only cost $399. And it will come with HSPA or EVDO built in.
It’s wonderful to go anywhere and bring your own connection with you.
Wifi in general becomes much less important. (and works great at conferences)
No more hunting for open wifi and minutes of frustration trying to connect to flaky base stations.
You IT department is in big trouble.
Want to surf facebook, monster.com, or anything else at work and not have your web use monitored? Just bring your own connection. This will be increasingly prevalent as the price of devices and plans relentlessly falls.
ABI research forecasts global celular 3G modem sales to grow from 5M 2006 to 68M by 2012. Compare this with 65M wifi units sold last year
The good folks at MobileMondayToronto reminded me today that they are doing their 2nd annual discussion meetup with Yahoo and Google to talk about mobile application strategy. In attendance will be Nick Patsiopoulos Director, Network Services, Yahoo! Canada and Shyam Sheth Product Manager, Google Mobile. Should be fun.
There’s a catch though, the event has been moved to next Monday the 14th from the usual first Monday of the month. More details here. So careful heading down to the Canadian Forces armoury on the wrong monday else you should find yourself enlisted in more than you bargained for.
It’s been a busy week in debate for net neutrality and network completion.
# First the other shoe dropped as Bell Canada (pictured left in this undated file photo) revealed the second piece of a newly aggressive strategy to wipe-out local broadband competition (from their own wholesale customers). Not a week after Bell started throttling independent ISPs, Bell petitioned the courts to scrap CRTC requirements that require them to wholesale their DSL network to other providers. [CBC coverage]
# The Canadian Association of Internet Providers meanwhile have filed have filed a cease and desist claim against Bell’s throttling practices which will force the CRTC to address the network neutrality issue. Michael Geist has an excellent coverage of the story, which he calls “the most significant legal development in the Canadian net neutrality debate yet “. Go read Michael’s post. Should they win this case it may have spillover impact on how the likes of Bell and Rogers are forced to treat customers, and packets on their own networks.
# At issue for the indie ISPs and net neutrality advocates is whether or not carriers have the right to open and monitor the internet traffic of Canadians and block or degrade any communications they, the carriers, may not like. Though often cloaked as such, this is not an issue about piracy or bittorrent, or about network management. Those in the know will tell you, “neutrality” in net neutrality is about advocating for adequate competition and a level playing field not just for access to the internet, but also for the content, services and messages that flow a cross it.
For more coverage on the saga this week, see Amber Mac’s latest vidcast:
Congrats to the boys and girls at RIM for another monster quarter. Canada’s favorite smartphone contines to shift shed-loads of pearls and curves to new markets across the world. The iPhone has completely changed how people use data and webservices on their phone. Smartphones have been all the rage lately with expensive little slivers of glass and plastic from RIM, Apple, Nokia, HTC etc. galvanising geek-lust and hoarding media attention. Does anyone want to be seen with a RASR any more?
Though they sometimes get less attention, your “regular” phones are getting better too especially with browers like Opera mini starting to appear. A friend of mine showed me the other day a fine looking SonyEricsson you can get today in Canada that features a full HTML brower and Ajax. Even by 2012, smartphones are predicted to still occupy less than half the market.
As fast as the PC world is moving away from desktop apps to cloud and browser computing, the mobile world is getting just as excited about open OS’s and application platforms. Is the mobile world just behind, or are they getting it backwards.
How s-m-r-t does your phone need to be? do we need apps any more? Surely, a sufficiently decent set of browsers (once they exsist) stands a better chance of uniting the painfully fragmented world of handset plaforms, both “smart” and “unsmart”.
Is the future ultimately in mobile apps or mobile browsers?
If there was any doubt that Canada is lagging in mobile, the industy’s own revenue statistics should make that clear. Despite much higher prices on Data, actual data ARPU (average revenue per user) has been far lower in Canada in recent years than other markets. In 2006, barely 10% of Canadian carrier ARPU was data. For context, this was a milestone acheived in the UK in 2001. Note also that a significant part of this ‘data’ revenue is SMS messaging.
“The answer, of course, is price elasticity. Because the cost of mobile data is so high, Canadians automatically use their data plans much more conservatively than folks in many other parts of the world. We don’t surf the mobile web, stream video, or upload photos from our mobile phones. “
Devices are also a problem. With the exception of blackberry, Canada has also long been a country of hand-me-down handsets from the rest of the world. Notheless, through whatever factors, not only are Canadians getting screwed, but even the carriers are missing out on opportunity.
How can we improve mobile usage in Canada? How can the carriers themselves make more money on data?
Better pricing. $35 is not a reasonable price for uploading a single picture to facebook (true story). Make the prices reasonable and the consumers will come in droves.
Predictable pricing. Even more important than how much the pricing is, make it at leat predictable. Narrow-gardens where some apps are arbitrarily free and others run up your bill 30-50$/MB doesn’t cut it. Consumers are terified to click on apps or links on their phone because they have no idea what it will cost them.
Let consumers choose which apps they want to use, which content they want to view. Trust me, the carrier marketing department does not actually know which youTube vids and applications all the kids will want to see next week.
Be Open! foster, open and nourish access to both on and off-deck content. Open markets are great. Open markets pick the winning content automatically. Winning content drives usage. Usage drives revenues. This is how it works.
Sell better devices. Device makers, content platforms find other/direct ways to get better phones in the hands of consumers
Developers. Make better, more usable apps. Focus on a set of devices, create good experiences, share your tips with the community.
advertising / education to drive usage and awareness of what you can do with new mobile services, new devices.
