The drive to stream TV directly to HD sets, to tablets, or to PCs in the home may create a broader demand for streaming, and this could create a major new source of traffic pressure on mobile networks, mobile pricing, and mobile service policies.
I HAVE NO IDEA! It still happens to this day and it drives me insane. I mean, it's an apt building but that's still horrible. I've run speed tests and gotten less than 2MBps at night on a connection that peaks at 5-6MBps during the day.
We part ways (gently and respectfully) on that point, Kim; my model says that linear RF will be best for channelized video for at least a decade. But we do need to explore the role of mobile video and also the business model for all the players, and we're not doing a thorough job at this point.
Great points here. I'm convinced that streaming video is the future for all kinds of content, and that it can ultimately replace cable television. But we have to make it work, and work on the variety of devices consumers expect to be able to use.
What we're seeing is a predictable reaction to the low ROI on consumer broadband access of any type, I'm afraid. Operators are, for example, incented by competition to offer "fast" service, meaning service that has a fast interface. We all know that LTE is "faster" than 3G, right? The problem is that a fast interface isn't always a fast Internet connection. All Internet access (and in fact all IP and Ethernet services) are "oversubscribed" in that the sum of the speeds of the user interfaces is much higher than the capacity of the network to deliver the traffic. Congestion is built in, and that's because the cost of making the service work at true rated speed is higher than the buyer would pay. The FCC said they wanted to get truth into the performance numbers, but that's just not happening!
Thanks for the reply, Tom. I hope you had a great trip! Since I last commented, my at-home Internet has gotten much slower -- so slow that it is, at times, not usable. I have been relying on my 3G iPhone service which, while not incredibly fast, is running at lightspeed in comparison to my at-home wireless.
@pcharles, I wonder if someone else or some other function was tapping into your friend's bandwith because that is remarkably slow. It reminds me of the days before I had a high speed connection and had to wait 20 minutes for some pictures to transfer over via email.
I was trying to upload a video to Youtube at a Starbucks using the public wifi, the upload time was around 62 min (I thought that was bad). Then i went to my firend's apartment thinking it would be quicker... NOPE. The upload time there was 240 min.
I thought, How in the world is it possible that public wifi is 4x faster than in-home broadband service nowadays??? Unbelievable
I work a lot with providers, Nicole, and as I noted in response to the first post (delayed--apologies--by a holiday in New Zealand!) the issues are complicated for the carriers. LTE allows higher capacity per cell, but it also demands more backhaul bandwidth and higher transport costs. Carrier revenue per bit has been falling sharply, and Wall Street has already said that the lack of return on infrastructure investment has likely stalled investment in networks overall, for the first time in modern history.
I think we're going to need a review of how we deliver content wirelessly or we risk creating a structure that can't be sustained at prices users are prepared to pay.
The network equipment vendors need to step it up here too, Nasimson, IMHO. The financials of most network operators globally show that they're operating at a much lower return on investment than firms like Netflix or Google, so we need a better system for distributing mobile/streaming video that's less bandwidth-consumptive. People have been talking about taking CDN technology down to the neighborhood level for things that are really popular, for example!
It's not so much bandwidth as much as it is providers refuse to do whatever it's going to take to deliver flawless content-media-whatever one prefers to call it. In order for that to happen they are going to have to invest (take on debt) rather than resisting the inevitable. Then again they can just continue to not care and hope consumers just get used to the idea of sub par crappy Internet. We can keep upgrading our end-user equipment for the next 1000 years and it still won't make any difference if they can't deliever a fast and flawless high quality signal. We kind of feel we are being held hostage here to certain companys at this point, and thats a rotten deal to have to live with.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
A survey by JD Powers found that customer interest in product features is lessening as phones evolve. Rather than features, price is driving purchases, and that change could have a dramatic impact on how IT departments secure these devices.
Mobile TV is everywhere, and yet, nowhere. Nobody uses it – because the handsets aren't good, the pricing is too high, and the coverage is not good enough. But Qualcomm's FloTV Personal TV aims to change all of that.
A Citigroup researcher says Amazon is developing its own cellular phone. Amazon, take heed: It's a tougher business to crack than selling the Kindle Fire.
Today's infants quickly move from the womb to a touchscreen. A survey by Common Sense Media found that half of children under eight years old access a mobile device like a smartphone, a video iPod, or a tablet; and experts are mulling the ramifications of this.
Microsoft's buy of Skype could revitalize Phone 7, give Microsoft a social, gaming, and collaborative strategy, and spell the end for old-fashioned telco voice. It will also certainly give Google a headache in its Voice, Chat, and even Android strategy!
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
Email This
