Posted by Mike Harakal on Wed, Jul 22, 2009
I am excited to see that we may have caught up to Western Europe and Japan in regard to mobile internet service. It seems Sprint/Nextel has rolled out its first 4G network in Baltimore. We'll get it in Philadelphia, Sprint claims, by the end of the year. Verizon claims 4G by the end of the year as well. And surprise, surprise, the Japanese company NTT_DoCoMo, who is leading the Japanese effort, is scheduled to roll out its first commercial network in 2010.
I hope this is the forefront of a new trend in utility markets getting their act together, and joining the global competition for efficient and effective research and deployment of cutting edge technology. That may be too much to hope for in a county with manual power allocation across our grid, but beating the Japanese to mobile-accessible-HDTV on my laptop while I'm driving in a car is way cool. I hope that means we'll start seeing those advanced mobile apps in application, like we've been promised for years, such as using your mobile phone as a credit card.
From a realistic standpoint, at the present rates of 15-30 Mbit/s while moving, 4G is capable of providing users with streaming high-definition television. At rates of 100 Mbit/s while moving, which is the goal of the 4G consortia, the content of a DVD-5(for example a movie), can be downloaded within about 5 minutes for offline access.
Crazy cool, both the technology and the fact it seems that we're up first.