I think the folks over at Wi-Fi Networking News are a wound a little too tight about EVDO, Wi-Fi and what business people need/want out of wireless connectivity. Their article, "Uh, Oh, Verizon Thinks EVDO Trumps Wi-Fi," talks about the bandwidth necessary to support various applications and still provide sufficient speed to its users. They make a few points like having video applications and large downloads over the same bandwidth will ruin it for the masses, an argument that we have seen and heard on the DSL and high speed cable fronts for some time.
While they made some good points, I think they are a little off on what a sterotypical "business user" is and what are their needs. My point of referrence is the law firm where I work as the IT Director. While attorneys (for the most part) are not the most technologically savvy people in the world, they know the value of being able to connect remotely to their office network. What do most of them want? Email access, plain and simple. Email, which is mostly text based, and requires very little bandwidth. Mind you, they would like this to be available to them everywhere, a la Blackberry.
While the attorneys travel, should the need arise to use our terminal server, they simply connect to the high speed network at their hotel, or use the Wi-Fi at the airport. Do the require the same everywhere access for that purpose. No. They are content to only use it where available.
So, while there are some excellent points in the article, I think they need to put into perspective who the average business user is (not necessarily a techno-phile, or techno-phobe), and what needs they really have for everywhere access.
2005/01/13
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Hi, Glenn Fleishman from Wi-Fi Networking News here. I do think you missed my point: if Verizon Wireless truly believes that the applications that it's pushing for 3G will have real uptake, then the same applications should have uptake over Wi-Fi, which doesn't trump but complements 3G.
I have heard over and over again from every cell operator and trade organizations directly, in news reports, and in FCC rulings that spectrum is scarce, and 3G is tricky without more spectrum. (MMDS reform in the 2.5 GHz band might help, but it may be years away if it happens at all.)
Thus you have these two competing forces: marketing wants applications to drive 3G use which will, in turn, drive bandwidth demands, making it harder until 2007 at least to meet the needs of said applications if they're popular.
Meanwhile, companies with a converged Wi-Fi + cell strategy are happily signing up users in droves on Wi-Fi networks, subsidizing or promoting this service heavily (read: T-Mobile and SBC in the US and companies like TeliaSonera in Finland/Sweden) because they know they can offset expensive use of limited spectrum onto cheap use of broadband or T-1 transit.
This is not the same argument as DSL and cable will be overwhelmed by uses. DSL and cable aren't really shared contention media. Sure they all have to terminate somewhere, but that hasn't turned out to be a problem. There's plenty of bandwidth at the top. The cable argument was different with DOCSIS 1.0, it was easy for cable companies to run out of bandwidth; 2.0 reduced this possibility quite enormously; 3.0 will eliminate it and provide higher speeds across huge cable plants.
Likewise, new flavors of DSL will enable a better cost recovery from the same copper base.
By my point here is that the cell operators don't have the same advantages in increasing bandwidth that the wireline operators do. DSL might go from 6 Mbps/1 Mbps to 54 Mbps/8 Mbps in a matter of a year or two with most of the investment in the central offices and in replacing modems (paid for in part by end users).
3G speeds may increase from several hundred Kbps on a reliable basis--we still don't know what happens when you have thousands of people streaming video on Verizon EVDO in downtown Manhattan, just by the way, but we will--to a few Mbps, but it requires tens of billions of dollars of investment and will be at least 2007 or later before we see those speeds. During which time DSL, cable, and Wi-Fi will all be much much faster.
I am a big fan of developing 3G services and availability as the true ubiquity does have a huge benefit.
Now over to the issue of the typical user: when I talk to regular users, most of them do email and Web. But a percentage have to deal with PowerPoint files, which are massive. An increasing number are shipping around PDF files which, although compressed, can be many megabytes in size for internal documents with compression. The typical user, without video and audio streaming, is going to see an ever increasing expectation that they have bandwidth available.
VoIP is making huge inroads. You need low latency and high reliability for voice calls. VoIP over 3G data will be a very weird combo, although I imagine folks will try it. (And Cingular plans to introduce VoIP over Wi-Fi probably with combo phones in 2006...)
If Apple, Microsoft, Real Networks, and other succeed in various efforts, people will very casually be streaming audio and video much more frequently and expect broadband speeds when they sit down at a table to work.
All this to say: applications for the typical user are increasing in their bandwidth requirements and companies like Verizon Wireless are trying to further entice users to use more bandwidth by getting used to services that they provide.
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