Besides world peace and a visit from the Publishers Clearing
House van, the one thing I want in life is an always-on
Internet connection—and, I want it affordably. More
specifically, I want always accessible, reasonably priced,
quick and dependable wireless Internet. After all, my
broadband connection through the cable company is technically
always on, but it’s worthless once I walk out of the house.
It stands to reason, then, that only a mobile provider will
ever be capable of fulfilling this wish.
It dawned on me while on vacation recently that I actually
already have what I’ve always wanted. The problem is that
it’s a last-generation definition of what Internet access is
and needs to be.
There I was on Cape Cod, MA, with a bit of work to sew up
before I could truly get down to what I was there for: to not
work. I’d assumed that my accommodations would supply Wi-Fi
and that was my first mistake. After finding the public
library closed and the local Starbucks filled to capacity
with outlet-hogging loiterers, my only option was to visit
a Verizon Wireless store to investigate Big Red’s mobile
access offerings.
The abridged version of my two-hour nightmare at the Verizon
store is this: I could have very easily purchased a cable to
tether my laptop to my LG Voyager without paying an additional
access fee. But, my connection would have equated to dial-up,
and so I refused to go down that road. No, I’m not a bandwidth
diva. The reality is, dial-up is no longer the speed at which
the Internet (or business, for that matter) moves. Trying to
work on it would have been counter-productive. The alternative
was to buy a wireless access USB dongle for $70 and enter
a two-year $60/month contract (on top of a plan that already
includes data). If I’d owned the new Blackberry Tour, I could
have skipped the dongle and tethered for an additional
$30/month on top of my plan.
And, there’s the rub. Always-on broadband that follows me
wherever I go is mine if I want it—it just happens to be
prohibitively expensive. Now, why’s that? For that answer, we
needn’t look any further than AT&T, which is finally limping
out iPhone MMS this week, two years too late.
By it’s own admission (via the dutiful outreach
manager/apologist Seth the Blogger Guy), AT&T’s network has
been unable to keep up with the bandwidth demands of its
users. Though just about everyone but AT&T saw it coming, the
amount of bandwidth consumed by iPhone users is unprecedented.
And that’s with features like tethering and, until last week,
MMS turned off—not to mention the crippling of high-bandwidth
apps like Skype and Sling. If you think AT&T’s network
robustness is dismal now, imagine how quickly it would have
imploded under the stress of millions of users feely streaming
voice and video.
The quagmire AT&T finds itself in is a problem endemic to all
mobile providers. If they made it easy for us to use our
connections for all that that we want to use them for, they’d
crumble. It’s why Verizon wants to charge me so much money to
get my laptop online. They don’t really want me to do it, and
they certainly don’t want millions doing it. If I want the
privilege of desktop-quality Web browsing, I have to pay
through the nose for it. The issue isn’t lack of demand, it’s
lack of supply which is keeping costs up—prohibitively for
many. Which must drive the suits crazy, because the customer
base waiting to subscribe to an always-on connection when the
price comes down just a bit is a huge one.
Our country’s wireless network providers are playing a losing
game of perpetual catch-up. As devices, apps and speeds
improve, our desires and demands increase. But don’t mistake
4G for the magic pill. Why? Because today’s networks are
built to withstand yesterday’s bandwidth demands. By the time
tomorrow’s networks are widely deployed, the way we want to
use them will have changed. Tomorrow’s demands will have
become today’s. Sure, LTE is going to be sweet when it’s
first launched and all of our 3G devices and apps are
suddenly on the autobahn. But what happens when 4G bandwidth
propagates 4G devices and applications? We’ll be in the same
boat as we are today: not enough bandwidth to handle what we
want and need to do.
Sadly, the FCC’s newly official stance on net neutrality only
exacerbates the situation. The only reason the AT&T network
still even has a pulse is because the provider has been
allowed to manage bandwidth by blocking iPhone access to the
aforementioned high-bandwidth applications. It’s a crappy
compromise we have to swallow, but that’s the sad shape
today’s wireless networks are in. Forcing an AT&T or Verizon
to accommodate the insatiable bandwidth demands of users and
abusers alike is unrealistic. Say goodbye to unlimited access.
Under net neutrality, bandwidth will be managed with
exorbitant per-megabit fees.
For CTIA, the International Association for the Wireless
Telecommunications Industry, the magic pill is more spectrum.
“If the spectrum is the highway, then LTE and WiMax are
brand-new types of cars,” says Chris Guttman-McCabe, CTIA’s
Vice President of Regulatory Affairs. “New cars will be
faster, they’ll carry more people and they’ll get better gas
mileage. But, the highway is crowded. LTE and WiMax are more
spectrally efficient, and so they will benefit both consumers
and providers—but not enough to offset the need for more
spectrum.”
To back his case for more spectrum, McCabe points to some
fairly staggering numbers in a recent CTIA report. The US
currently leads the world in the amount of spectrum made
available for commercial wireless use with 409.5 MHz
(counting the recent AWS and 700 MHz auctions). The UK has
made a little less available with 352.8 MHz. The difference
is, our spectrum is split between nearly 200 million more
wireless customers than in the UK—so there’s much less to go
around. Even more alarming, though, is the fact that the FCC
has only set aside another 50 MHz for potential commercial
wireless use, while the UK has set aside seven times that
amount. Again, for far fewer subscribers. More spectrum means
more can be allocated to every user in a cell site, which,
depending on the band, can translate to higher speeds, more
robustness and better building penetration. If the FCC is
going to open a floodgate of bandwidth usage with net
neutrality, then we all better hope it also opens up more
spectrum.
Of course, the impending spectrum shortage is only half the
answer and shouldn’t be a cop out for what our country’s
mobile providers can do today. AT&T isn’t using a secret
stash of spectrum to finally launch MMS on the iPhone.
According to Seth the Blogger Guy, the company has been,
“working for months to prepare the radio access controllers
in our network to support this launch. That means calibrating
base stations all over the country, and frankly that’s a very
time-consuming process.” In other words, AT&T is using
existing spectrum and existing infrastructure—it’s just using
it better (we’ll see). AT&T should have done this two years
ago, and that’s the point. Our current mobile networks could
be much improved if providers spent less money on PR,
advertising and Seth the Blogger Guy videos and invested more
in the quality of their product.
As for the shape of things tomorrow, a couple of things need
to happen in order to keep the machine running smoothly, if
at all. More spectrum is one of them. The other is that AT&T,
Verizon, Sprint and T-mo need to stop playing perpetual
catch-up with our demand and start making investments today
in what their roadmaps tell them is still 20 years away.
Forget 4G in 2010. It’s already antiquated.
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