On Aug 2, 2006, at 11:13 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> I heard that AT&T had introduced 3G in Albuquerque. Has anyone a
> phone/PDA that can do this, and does it? I find that speed is still
> the limiting factor on the utility of even the fanciest PDAs..
If history is to be our guide, it will take at least 4-5 years to
have 3G and any of its variants, UMTS, EV-DO etc. I'd far prefer
something like wifi.
You see, the carriers, long ago, decided TCP/IP would not work on
phones. Naturally they were wrong. I sat in on endless meetings,
while working at Sun Microsystems, with them discussing how TCP/IP is
easily tuned for various packet size, and other "quality of service"
issues. We even had excellent prototypes of TCP/IP running on small,
limited devices.
But the carriers really were way, way too unwilling to do anything
they did not have total control over. This lead to a couple of ex-
Sun folks building a company which built "WAP", a horrid telco
protocol with even more problems than TCP/IP and indeed ended up with
a near parallel TCP/IP clone.
All this is to say that I am very suspicious of 3G. Whatever it ends
up being, I want it to:
1 - Be a world wide standard, not bound to a single carrier
protocol. So I don't want it to work only on GSM, CDMA, etc.
2 - Be TCP/IP from the ground up.
Thus far, only TMobile shares this idea. It wants wifi hotspots
everywhere, and indeed is slowly succeeding with this. Luckily they
also are GSM, so if you get a GSM/WiFi box, you're in pretty good shape.
I realize this leaves out good TCP/IP while in the woods, but the
existing incompatible solutions are good enough (GPRS, Edge, ...).
The next big increase in bandwidth should work on all of our phones.
Oh, and BTW: There are fine solutions that don't need 3G. Certainly
Edge and even GPRS do fine on "smallsites" a great set of sites
designed explicitly for phones. Google also offers a service that
simplifies pages, making them very usable with low bandwidth:
http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=.. just prepend this to any url to get its smaller size.
-- Owen
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