Saturday, January 11, 2003
IP Wireless Puts Your Car on Broadband
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 04:10 PM
I'm certainly not the first to predict the death of the cell phone companies, but after reading this article it all started to come together. Imagine paying $39 US a month for real-world 50 KB/s (400 kb/s) bandwidth that you can use as easily at home as in your car. Compared to the real-world GPRS speeds of 6 KB/s I can get here for $50, this seems like a very good deal. Add to that the pain the carriers are in from licensing 3G frequencies, and you have the setting for a major shake up in the way people communicate.
"The company has installed a small base station at a local cell phone tower and uses special modems, about the size of 802.11b adapters, in its mobile demo booth. With that setup, I was able to surf the Web at upwards of 400 kilobits per second (about ten times faster than the real-world speed of current cell phone data services). I could view streamed television images from the BBC and made a very clear voice call over the Net. As we drove around downtown Las Vegas, we never lost our signal or even suffered a data hiccup. Company officials say the system can achieve a maximum of 3 megabits per second on downloads and 1 mbps uploading information.
IP Wireless is selling its system to cell phone and Internet access providers, who will remarket the service to consumers. It's already available through companies in Maui and in Jacksonville, Florida, which are providing mobile broadband service as inexpensively as $39 monthly--competitive with rates for traditional DSL service. But unlike traditional DSL service, which can't extend beyond the range of your home network, the IP Wireless system works anywhere a cell phone will, once it's deployed, according to Chris Gilbert, chief executive officer. The company says its base stations will cover a range of up to 17 miles."
"The company has installed a small base station at a local cell phone tower and uses special modems, about the size of 802.11b adapters, in its mobile demo booth. With that setup, I was able to surf the Web at upwards of 400 kilobits per second (about ten times faster than the real-world speed of current cell phone data services). I could view streamed television images from the BBC and made a very clear voice call over the Net. As we drove around downtown Las Vegas, we never lost our signal or even suffered a data hiccup. Company officials say the system can achieve a maximum of 3 megabits per second on downloads and 1 mbps uploading information.
IP Wireless is selling its system to cell phone and Internet access providers, who will remarket the service to consumers. It's already available through companies in Maui and in Jacksonville, Florida, which are providing mobile broadband service as inexpensively as $39 monthly--competitive with rates for traditional DSL service. But unlike traditional DSL service, which can't extend beyond the range of your home network, the IP Wireless system works anywhere a cell phone will, once it's deployed, according to Chris Gilbert, chief executive officer. The company says its base stations will cover a range of up to 17 miles."
