14Mbps via cell phone next year?
June 14, 2005 by Mike Wendland
A Nokia geek is predicting that we’ll see 14Mbps broadband speeds on our mobile phones by next year.
I’m skeptical. If we do, at what cost? $500 a month?
Still… it would be nice.
2006: Mobiles will beat PCs for broadband speed
I disagree. Remember when T-Mobile was touting “broadband” speeds via GPRS?
Sure, in a lab it can burst really fast. In the real world where data is competing with voice traffic on congested cell towers, actual speeds were similar to 56k.
Even now, EDGE and 1xRTT data transfers aren’t much faster than that. Again, the phones might be capable, but the technology at the towers just can’t handle the capacity. I doubt it ever will except in major metropolitan areas where the concentration of data subscribers make sense in terms of the cost to build the infrastructure.
You see, it’s easy to provide fast data services like this in highly concentrated countries like South Korea and Japan. I’m sure a carrier could do it in New York.. but America is just so darn big and sprawl is such a problem that we won’t see these sort of speeds for years (if ever).
I honestly think WiMax will be adopted for data, leaving the towers to handle voice traffic. I could be wrong here, but that’s my opinion.