Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Improving wireless bandwidth

Peter Wayner has a story about a WiMax rollout in Baltimore in the US. They seem to be getting 6 Mb/s download and 1 Mb/s upload. This is termed a `4G' network (which might just be marketing speak).

In India, Thomas K. Thomas has an article on price cuts by Airtel. My sense is that we're in for a big crash in prices of bandwidth through a combination of improvements in prices of wired services and the rollout of 3G which is now a credible alternative to land lines.

The exciting new development on mobile bandwidth is the CDMA EVDO devices being sold by Reliance and Tata Indicom. Last night I did a bulky upload and it worked at 350 kb/s without interruptions. Naman Pugalia and Alok Parekh are measuring the performance of Reliance and Tata Indicom at locations all over India. The picture so far is that EVDO is a lot better than dialup (or CDMA 1.x) but it ain't really fast.

3 comments:

  1. The EVDO devices are not that great compared to what Wimax is doing. A lot of people, including myself, have moved to Wimax in the past 6-months. And both Reliance and Indicom have rock-solid services on that front. The best part? No last-mile issues. You just need line-of-sight to a nearby tower.

    ReplyDelete
  2. wimax doesnt have the support of the big vendors/telcos in 3gpp2. it is likely to be marginalized

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have been a customer Sify--->Bsnl--->Tata Wimax ---> Airtel

    Tata Wimax was good for the line of sight solutions they are offering , there customer care was pathetic, switched to Airtel on first instance Airtel got into our colony.

    Still i am waiting for something like http://www.railwire.in/ , even with 1:4 ratio tariff plans looks unbelievable.Still havent got a feedback about there Network and Support.

    ReplyDelete

Please note: Comments are moderated. Only civilised conversation is permitted on this blog. Criticism is perfectly okay; uncivilised language is not. We delete any comment which is spam, has personal attacks against anyone, or uses foul language. We delete any comment which does not contribute to the intellectual discussion about the blog article in question.

LaTeX mathematics works. This means that if you want to say $10 you have to say \$10.