Read this if you're in need of a little laugh: Not to be totally harsh, but this is a really weird opinion article about Wi-Fi in Atlanta's Hartsfield airport clearly written by someone who has pretty much no understanding of Wi-Fi. It's just weird.
OK, this one isn't nearly as weird: The article is about the city of Cincinnati's efforts to build a Wi-Fi cloud around town. These plans that include city governments are pretty exciting, but I'm getting a bit tired of hearing that every city will have the largest Wi-Fi network in the country. It's pretty funny at this point.
One guy in this article says that Wi-Fi is "becoming a high-class way of doing business." I didn't realize that anyone was that concerned with doing business the high-class way.
This is looking like my day to vent, but sometimes this group supporting CDMA astounds me. Here's a press release about a paper the CDMA Development Group put out supposedly about interoperability of CDMA and Wi-Fi. Really it seems to be an opportunity for the group to assert that CDMA is much better and will be more successful than Wi-Fi.
The group tries to say that data throughput of some CDMA data networks, like the one just launched in Washington, D.C. by Verizon, is the same as a hotspot backed by a T-1. Verizon, the operator offering the service, is touting it as an average throughput of 300-500 Kbps. Alan Reiter ran a number of tests and found he usually got around 200 Kbps. A T-1 line is 1.544 Mbps.
The problem with these guys is when they make specious assertions like this it makes it really hard to take anything they say seriously. There are some valid points about benefits the cellular networks have over Wi-Fi like coverage and security. But it's hard to even pay attention to those points when they're wrapped up in these other bogus conclusions.
The sad thing about the wireless data industry is the lying/misleading incompetence of people marketing and selling wireless data services.
It's really a shame. The industry has made genuine progress with data rates, services, handsets, coverage, etc.
But the brain-dead marketing people aren't content to promote services on their merits. There seems to be some aberrant gene infecting wireless data marketers that forces them to hype products and services.
They've done it with CDPD, WAP, "high resolution" camera phone photos (!) and the data rates of GPRS, EDGE and 1x technologies. It's as if they don't think customers will realize the truth. The truth is the customers are often smarter and more honest than the people marketing these services.
I wish I could find some Babylonian, Assyrian or Lovecraftian god -- The God of Two Steps Forward and One and a Half Steps Backward. It would be the god of cellular marketing vice presidents. The cellular data industry is its own worst enemy.
I have a question: what is so "wierd" about the Atlanta Hartsfield airport article?
The only way a hot spot can deliver the full throughput of a T-1 is if a) you're close enough to have a full signal, and b) there's no interference, and c) you're the only user. Otherwise, you'll get a fraction of the T-1.
So what if Alan Reiter got 200 kbps? I've used DO and got 500 kbps in a lightly loaded network while driving. I've seen other users report between 400 kbps and 700 kbps.
a t1 line is 1.5mbits witch = around 150k a second.
Now they are saying 200 kbps does that = 20k a second or is it really 200k a second?