

We already use Wi-Fi more than cellular; Why not continue the trend? - mtgx
http://www.gigaom.com/2012/07/10/we-already-use-wi-fi-more-than-cellular-why-not-continue-the-trend/

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Tooluka
Lol, carriers will never EVER willingly became "simple internet providers".
EVER. They will scream and fight to the last dollar for their "right" to
provide monopolized "services" - separate voice traffic, separate plaintext
traffic, separate image traffic, and other "services". They'll cut and limit
all generic internet connections, they'll filter unwanted packets (VoIP,
iMessage etc.), they'll reroute traffic through their internal resources and
inject ADs or spyware. They'll do lots of thing, except of cource becoming
ISP.

~~~
imaginator
You should check some of the MVNO providers in Germany.

These mobile operators compete on price and anything that smells like custom
development of a blah-portal-blah is cut.

There was a time when ISPs used to think the could do value-add crap. Orange-
dialup had a news service. BT had a portal and email. Like the ISPs, our
carriers will become the fat pipe they fear. Just slower than we'd want.

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notatoad
The reason that wifi is better than cellular is because you don't have to
fight with a carrier to use it. if AT&T starts pushing everything onto wifi,
it won't make AT&T better, it'll just make wifi worse.

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aggronn
I almost never use wi-fi on my phone. It drains the battery too much.

edit: I'm not familiar with cellular hardware tech. My observation is true for
my phone, necessarily, because my 3G reciever is active 100% of the time, and
turning on wifi is just turning on another component. If this isn't the case
for you, do you turn off your 3/4G while you're in a wifi spot? Does it
manager this all automatically?

Do you have your wifi on while you're outside of a wifi spot? If so, how does
that not cause a loss in battery life over never having it on?

~~~
mkaltenecker
That seems unlikely. WiFi should certainly drain your battery less than
cellular. (I have yet to jump on the smartphone train but my iPad gets
consistent 7 hours with 3G, 10 hours with WiFi.)

~~~
randomdata
There is, however, a cost in searching for WiFi networks every time you want
to make a connection.

I imagine it becomes most apparent if your device is polling for email. On
every interval it needs to wake up, turn on WiFi, look for any available
networks, discover there are none and then finally revert to the cellular
network. With WiFi disabled, it can go straight to cell.

The iPhones were famously bad for this in the early days, though they seem to
improve later on; either through a hardware or software update, I'm not sure
which.

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learc83
I've been using Republic wireless (hyrbrid wifi phone) for about 6 months now.
99% of the time I forget it's anything other than a regular cell phone.

For me it works better than a regular cell phone, because it works in my
basement workshop where I can't get reception from most carriers.

~~~
josefresco
How does it work in the car?

~~~
bartonfink
My understanding (I signed up for their beta but opted not to sign a contract)
is that their service switches over to cellular network when wifi isn't
available. I seem to remember them saying that they could maintain a telephone
conversation through that switch, but I've not used their service so have no
real-world data. In a car, I'd assume you'll be using a cellular network
(Sprint if I remember correctly).

They use some heuristic to determine when you're using the cellular network
"too much", because their whole pitch is that traffic over a cellular network
is more expensive than traffic over the existing ISPs. If you use their
cellular network too much, they will terminate your contract - but again, I'm
not a customer so I don't know where that line lives.

~~~
evandena
I'm pretty sure they switched their stance on "too much" termination.

Also, I believe while on a call you can transfer off of wifi, but not on to
it.

~~~
jerf
"I'm pretty sure they switched their stance on "too much" termination."

Here's the most recent statement on that matter, I think:
<http://republicwireless.com/blog/unlimited>

(Also, I think they made the wrong call, and they should have "stepped back
from unlimited". It won't be unlimited, they shouldn't call it unlimited. But
I'm not planning on abusing it either way.)

I'm sitting in their Wave G, patiently waiting. I refuse to pay for both a
nice home connection and a cell data connection, so I still have a dumbphone.
Buying a smart phone that primarily uses local Wifi (which I am in about 90%
of the time) but can use cellular networks as a backup when there's no Wifi,
and thus only charges for that "backup" contingency, is something I'm willing
to pay for. I'll recover the cost of purchasing the phone in something like 6
months, even ignoring the fact it'll be a much better phone in the meantime.

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jessriedel
> “For example a cellular picocell costs from $7,500 to $15,000 whereas a much
> higher capacity carrier-grade Wi-Fi access point costs around $2,000,”
> Thanki wrote. “The cost of a Wi-Fi chipset for a consumer device is around
> $5, whereas 3G cellular chipsets costs around $30.

Won't a cell tower cover at least a couple orders of magnitude more area than
a wifi access point? Is this analysis silly or am I missing something?

~~~
ef4
By that argument, you could also just build one extremely powerful tower and
cover a vast region. But that would support far less data, because everyone in
the region would be waiting for a turn to broadcast at the same frequency.

This is why cellular phones are called cellular phones. The key enabling
technology was the ability to divide a large geographic area into many smaller
cells. Each cell needs to use different frequencies than its neighboring
cells, but you can reuse the same frequencies many times across the wider
region.

The smaller you make the cells, the more data you can pack into the same set
of frequencies, because non-neighboring cells can be using the same frequency
concurrently.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
With analog cellular, yes. With digital cellular, several connections can
share a given frequency, somewhat expanding the number of connections per
tower, although there is still a limit. However, I find that AT&T ignores the
pressing bandwidth needs of the customers. During rush hour, no matter how
perfect my signal strength, I get terrible data bandwidth. Its not the cell
tower, its the connection from there onward.

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roc
Because Wi-Fi kinda sucks at roaming?

It's fine if you need a network connection at arbitrary end-points. But IME
it's not so fine when you need a sustained connection while moving. (excluding
on-train/on-plane wifi and the like , natch)

~~~
rkangel
You're right except that by 'kinda sucks' you actually mean that it doesn't
support base station hand off at all. You can kind of simulate one ubiquitous
wifi network by using the same SSID everywhere. Then, when a user moves out of
range of one access point, they'll attempt to reconnect and pick up the new
one that's in range.

Wifi and cellular radio are massively different technologies, and wifi does
not fit the use case that we currently use cellular for from a technical point
of view.

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akoumjian
This article is misleading on several accounts. First, it completely ignores
the incredible difference in range you can get with 4g vs. Wifi. This is
directly related to the frequencies you are operating at.

Secondly, the reason that WiFi frequencies are not regulated the same was as
cellular frequencies has to do directly with that limitation. If we suddenly
had AT&T, Verizon, and other WiFi routers littering our streets every sixty
feet, there would be a terrible amount of noise and it would interfere with
people's home or business networks.

Suddenly, you would need to start licensing that spectrum. See how it works?

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hammock
If you had a wifi-capable Blackberry and T-Mobile in the US, you could use
what's called UMA calling- which offers normal uninterrupted voice service
over wifi, with seamless handoff mid-call between Wifi hotspots and the normal
cellular network (i.e. no dropped calls). The best part about it is the wifi
calls don't count against your monthly minutes. It was an awesome service but
never really caught on.

~~~
untog
It's also available on Android. Unfortunately I've flashed mine to have a
generic ROM, meaning that I've lost the ability. Hoping to see it ported back
in.

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bradleyland
Is this really what we want?

Let's say AT&T decides to go the author's suggested route, and let's also
pretend that I'm a paying AT&T customer. I travel to an area where AT&T is
delivering their data through WiFi, but several shop owners in the same area
have set up WiFi access points and have overrun the available WiFi spectrum in
the area. The quality of my data connection suffers significantly, and I get
upset at AT&T for providing poor service.

Does anyone really think this is in AT&T's best interest?

By using licensed spectrum, wireless providers gain tighter control over the
engineering of their networks. Yes, it's a double-edged sword, but I don't see
an opportunity for improvment by moving to unlicensed spectrum.

------
willidiots
Carriers realize the value in WiFi - it's present everywhere, cheap to deploy
at scale and already exists on most mobile devices. There's precedent for WiFi
offload - particularly in dense urban areas - and the industry is moving to
support that model even further with Hotspot 2.0 and Passpoint certification.

That said, WiFi's not a panacea. Technologically it's subject to interference,
the protocols allow for NO control over the handset (at present), and its
range is limited. Speaking from experience running several large muni WiFi
networks, the protocol does not handle power asymmetry well - your phone's
WiFi needs to be roughly as strong as the AP or performance is terrible.
Compare this to licensed cellular technologies which can pull in a tiny weak
handset signal from miles away.

From a business perspective, there's a breakpoint between licensed and
unlicensed use - at the point that WiFi's shortcomings have less impact than
the cost of deploying licensed spectrum, it gets used. There's plenty of talk
about small cells in the industry and I think we'll see a hybrid deployment
style emerge over the next few years, with WiFi handling the densest of
deployments. Carriers want to offer plentiful data but they want to do it in a
way they can control, for good reasons - people are paying them and expecting
a service in exchange.

From a good-of-all-mankind perspective, what I'd like to see happen is a
transition to all-IP on the handset, seamlessly decoupling every feature from
the cellular network. Apple showed the potential here with iMessage, which
works well if everyone's on an iPhone. SMS and voice themselves need to be
carried over IP in a device-independent manner. When I can send an SMS from my
Android phone to my iPhone over IP, and call a POTS number over IP, I'm truly
carrier-independent and effectively paying them to be a WISP. That gives me
(and the market) opportunities to build a service tailored to my needs.

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rektide
The tech is not here yet:

 _Passpoint/Hotspot 2.0 is the first step of many that will eventually
integrate Wi-Fi hotspots seamlessly into the carrier’s mobile networks.
Networks will be able to pass subscribers from cell site to hotspot and back
again as Wi-Fi gets incorporated into the increasingly diverse array of small
cells that will make up future heterogeneous networks, or HetNets. That’s
still a long time coming though._

 _Hotspot 2.0 only takes care of the discovery and authentication of carrier-
owned or managed hotspots. If you’re an AT &T or an SK Telecom with tens of
thousands of hotspots under your control, then Passpoint will be a boon, as
certified devices will automatically connect to any carrier access point in
range._

[http://gigaom.com/broadband/wi-fi-alliance-begins-
certifying...](http://gigaom.com/broadband/wi-fi-alliance-begins-certifying-
passpoint-devices/)

When this happens, except "your" FIOS router to start serving data to Verizon
wireless users.

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Spooky23
Early in the CDMA days, there was talk of mounting small cellular antennas on
utility poles to speed up rollouts, especially in suburban areas.

The problem is, managing tons of little leases is a nightmare, and the people
who own telephone poles and streetlights (allowing you to have a few big
leases) want an obscene amount of money to hang stuff on their pole.

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arikrak
As the article mentions, the carriers are focused on cellular because that's
what they control and can get people to pay $30-80 / month to use their
cellular data plans. The carriers' worst nightmare would be if more cities
provided quality wifi everywhere. Few would pay for data plans anymore, and
maybe not even voice plans either.

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iamdann
I'd love to see some statistics from Apple regarding Wi-Fi only iPad sales
versus 3G/4G iPad sales.

~~~
akmiller
Those may be skewed though by the amount of people that simply choose
tethering over getting a 3g enabled tablet/device.

I'm one of those people as I have several devices (kindles and tablets) so I
prefer paying for one data plan on my phone and tethering vs. individual data
plans for each.

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shifeng
agreed

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josteink
Us centric nonsense.

Sent via mobile internet on a bus.

