Is Sprint's 2.4MB per second cell network fact...or fantasy?
David Coursey, Executive Editor, AnchorDesk

My piece last week on the Sprint PCS plan for a 2.4MB per second
cellular data network generated a lot of e-mail. Like this one, from a
wireless industry analyst: 

"I would like to respond because I believe that your comments are doing
a disservice to the wireless industry and could well have a negative
long-term impact," wrote David Chamberlain of Probe Research. 

"The article suggested that this fat 2 MBPS pipe will be available to
anybody with a cell phone and we can throw away our DSL modems and get
some real speed. That is wrong and it is harmful."

FOR SOME OF THAT I am probably guilty as charged--I thought most people
understood bandwidth would be shared, and I was talking maximum speed,
just like on a cable modem or DSL network. More users equals slower
speeds for all--but since not everyone is sending/receiving at once,
it's not as simple as dividing the number of users into the available
bandwidth. 

To make sense of all this, I invited Sprint PCS to provide a guest for
last Friday's radio show. They did, and I spent about 10 minutes with
their CTO, a man named Oliver Valente. You can hear the interview
online--please skip to a little more than 12 minutes into program to
hear the discussion.

http://tm.intervu.net/template/s2/iv/g2_vod.ram?stream=smirror/cnetradio/04-13coursey.rm;xtn=.ram

Here's what I learned:

     The bandwidth will be an exclusive data channel,
     not shared with voice traffic as some people in
     TalkBack expressed concern about.

     Total bandwidth will be 144k soon, 300k in 2002,
     and over 2MB per second in 2003, and will be
     shared among all the users of a particular cell
     site. A site typically covers an area between one
     and four miles across.

     Yes, someone, sometime really will get 2MB per
     second, unless the connection is intentionally
     throttled down. This is because not all the users
     will be sending and receiving at once. When the
     connection is idle, all the bandwidth will
     theoretically be available for one lucky user. This
     is how cable modems work, too. 

     Sprint may tune the system for connections
     between 100K and 200K per second, a speed
     they believe to be the sweet spot for mobile
     connectivity. Given real-life traffic patterns, I
     suspect they can offer this rate to hundreds of
     people all doing something at pretty much the
     same time, but I am not an expert on this.

     Good news: The network is designed for "always
     on" connections, just like a network should be.
     Turn on your device and you're connected. You
     will not have to make data calls, just start your
     app and go.

     Bad news: You will need a new handset at some
     point to make this work, but you will--as far as I
     can tell--need a handset for everybody's
     next-generation cellular service.

     Pricing? Intended to be consumer-friendly but no
     word for a while. Probably a long while. 

So if I allowed myself to be a bit oversold--which I am not sure I
did--you now have the complete explanation. And the good news is that
the picture--at least as explained by the CTO of Sprint PCS--is a good
bit happier than the concerns many of you expressed in TalkBacks.

STILL, THIS WIRELESS STUFF is a swamp. It is like the old joke about the
difference between a computer salesman and the used car salesman. The
punch line: The used car salesman knows when he is lying to you.

The wireless industry seems to have taken hype lessons from the
long-distance carriers and improved upon them, building a world of
semi-misleading advertisements and product hype that is hard to fathom.
And I do this for a living.

Too many marketing people are making technical presentations and too
many technical people don't understand the world we customers live in.
Wireless people talk as if there are standards, which in fact only
barely seem to exist--just try to get everyone to agree on what third
generation (3G) cellular service really is. Nothing ever seems directly
comparable to something else.

THE GOOD NEWS IS you can ignore anything that isn't shipping today
because it will almost certainly be different by the time it does ship.
Things are changing that rapidly. By the time Sprint actually begins
offering its 3G service the world will doubtless have changed a couple
of times.

But progress is being made, and we can look forward to easier and faster
communication in the future, pretty much regardless of how the game
plays out. And that is, as well-known telecom expert Martha Stewart
would say, "A Good Thing."