Wireless Folks, this has been a most edifying exchange for me, and I'm certain for many others, so far. (Hi Linda!)
I extend my thanks for the education to you all, and encourage more of the same.
Jim, allow me to take the edge off of the financial aspect of the discussion for a moment, and introduce some geek stuff. Your last point in brackets raises (resurrects?) an issue I've barked myself to sleep on in the past:
"An interesting sidelight on the use of newer forms of modulation applied to capacity increases and demographics is that, of course, we are talking about shared resources. What will be the net effect on claims for data transmission rates, when capacity has doubled, but so has the number of users?"
Which leads me to ask within the context of the discussion at hand, Are you referring to fixed wireless a la xmds, or to x.gen mobile, or both? It's no secret that I've favored a form of fiber delivery to end users where mobility is not an issue. Perhaps fiber to the curb architectures may be augmented in tough business cases that don't justify to the home, by wireless last thousand feet extensions from pole mounts or field nodes, in what could be termed a hybrid fiber/wireless (HFW) model. xMDS mimics this already, but it's usually over longer distances and at lower bit rates and most often shared, than would be needed to compete with future wireline models that, for the most part, are over dedicated LM links (although this excludes most cableco offerings, as well, which *are* shared, too).
The latter design would also support a degree of mobility, as well, albeit not in the traditional sense of wireless pcs or cellular, although with future voice over IP adaptations, perhaps connections to the PSTN, too.
[In fact, one can bet on a future capability, using VoIP, whereby "dialing" over public network will be achievable from personal area networking (PAN) appliances in and around the home, or wherever, just as one would dial over the pcs or cellular (or even wireline) models today, at some point in the future. Indeed, with the right client software installed, this is achievable today in laptops that hang off of 802.11x WLANs, for example, which is a smaller-diameter expression of the same model that I'm ultimately referring to in the way of an HFW. Hi Elmat.]
Short of that, for the residential and soho spaces, I think that wireless delivery schemes will be severely constrained due to the dynamics associated with spectrum sharing and contention/arbitration, as you have implied, or cited. Especially, when network-based applications and web page form factors increase in size over time, enabled by fiber-based, non-wireless capabilities.
Here one can almost envisage the same sort of WAP'ing taking place in future generations of wireless (even those that boast next gen speeds), compared to wireline speeds that might exceed the wireless model's top speeds by an order of magnitude.
Any thoughts on this, and how best to leverage wireless assets that are suited for the telecommuter or the power user at home, both now and into the future?
Will shorter distances from micro-cells allow greater frequency re-use in future architectures, thus mitigating some of the downsides that are associated with sharing bandwidth? Comments and corrections welcome.
FAC |
