Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Making Wireless like Wired

October 27, 2010

Users are being lured to new mobile technologies with the promise of being able to do wirelessly all that they can do on a wired connection. But as bandwidth demand soars for applications such as streaming video, the wireless industry is having trouble delivering.

Video services, such as Netflix, are helping drive demand for more bandwidth.

When a wired network becomes congested, the phone or cable company can add more physical connections. But wireless providers can’t do the equivalent–allocate another radio channel to a network–because they are licensed to use fixed portions of the radio spectrum.

While the next-generation networks being built today (see “Feeding the Bandwidth Beast”) will allow much more data to be transmitted over a given chunk of the spectrum, it is unlikely that they can keep pace with demand, which is growing at 55 percent annually in North America, according to ABI Research. When people get access to more bandwidth, their appetite grows commensurately. For example, users of Sprint’s first WiMax-capable phone, the EVO 4G, typically increase their data usage by a factor of three to three and a half.

An even bigger strain on the network will come from broadband modems used by larger devices like laptop, tablet, and even desktop computers. The research firm Infonetics predicts that by 2013, more North Americans will be connecting to the Internet with mobile broadband than with any other technology.

Wary of suffering a version of AT&T’s “iPhone problem” (users of the Apple device overwhelmed the network, leading to dropped calls), carriers are investing in techniques to predict and dissipate data congestion. Sophisticated models of what happens when, say, fans at a ball game all try to access the Major League Baseball website can be used to stress-test network infrastructure. Companies that sell hardware and software to manage heavy wireless traffic report growing interest from worried carriers.

Options include hardware that can switch data streams from an overloaded connection to less busy circuits or even gently slow video downloads to prevent calls from dropping during a usage spike. Many in the industry believe that these same techniques will eventually have to be used to reduce demand by bandwidth-­hogging applications. Rather than preserving the flat-price model of wired connections, companies may charge customers different amounts for service, depending on the kinds of applications they access–more for streaming HD movies, less for making ordinary calls. That could run counter to “net neutrality” legislation that would require networks to treat all data packets the same; the desire to preserve the possibility of a multitiered plan was one of the motivations for Verizon’s recent and controversial “pact” with Google advocating different regulations for wired and wireless connections (see “Should the Airwaves Be Neutral?” and Q&A). For users, this pricing difference may ultimately become the biggest practical distinction between wired and wireless.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.