Maurice, you've recently referenced comments by Q's Dr. Viterbi to support the argument that G* won't be a good carrier of data in addition to voice.
I recall a post of some such comments to the effect that data signals and voice signals should be processed separately, for the obvious reasons that users don't care if data packets arrive several hundred milliseconds late, and that data can be sent at arbitrary and highly variable rates....whereas voice signals, even if processed as packets, have to arrive at the user precisely on time, and with a narrowly set data rate (too slow and voice quality is bad, too fast and bandwidth is wasted.) It doesn't follow from that that the user and network equipment have to be segregated...on the contrary, it's much more efficient if the same equipment can do both services.
As to G* data capacity and pricing...G* has said that it's estimated voice capacity is on the order of 10B minutes per year, but has never really provided the detailed basis of estimate for this figure. A voice equivalent minute of data, assuming a vocoder rate of 9.6 kbs, equals 72 kilo BYTES per minute (so, let's see, that's 720 thousand Giga bytes of data per year!). My understanding of G*'s intent w.r.t. data pricing, is they plan to get the same average price for data as for voice. Then, they should charge wholesale rates of about $0.50 for a 72K file download, (and the retail customer could expect to be soaked for $1.50). 72K is several pages of text in memory hog MSWord; it's about one page of fax'd information, and probably scores of short e-mails. So, I'd judge, it's rather affordable for those types of uses...and the G* handset s/b capable of these rates without any extra equipment
Now, when one is on an airplane or ship, where access to a GEO antenna/reciever is possible, much faster and cheaper data rates are possible, especially for data which can be "broadcast" like movies, news, sports events, popular web site content, etc, and I think that is what IFN and Connexion by Boeing have in mind doing for broadband services. |
