Sprint's Xohm WiMax Network Debuts In Baltimore, Works Well 86
bsk_cw writes "Sprint's newly launched Xohm service is now offering America's first WiMax network. Computerworld's Brian Nadel went to Baltimore to try it out, and he reports that Xohm delivered data smoothly to a car moving at highway speeds, played YouTube videos flawlessly, and on average, pushed through more than 3Mbit/sec., compared with 1.3 Mbit/sec. for the AT&T network Brian used as a comparison. But right now, coverage is only planned in a few US cities; if Sprint isn't able to ramp up its coverage quickly, it may lose its advantage."
Woo hoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Xohm delivered data smoothly to a car moving at highway speeds, played YouTube videos flawlessly
Awesome!
Talking on a cell while driving is illegal, so I may as well watch YouTube!
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Some people are actually trying to minimize their carbon footprint using carpool, passenger mothers entertain their children, teenagers on the back seat explore Second Life (not really sure what to do with their first life yet, but nevermind)....
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Some people are actually trying to minimize their carbon footprint using carpool
And god forbid you have a conversation with your friends or colleagues in the process...
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Hey, If you play in the team, you have to communicate. ...Noob! ;)
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Really? Do you have a reputable source to back that up? There are many reputable sources that completely contradict your statement, so I'm understandably curious about your sources.
Still not worth it (Score:5, Funny)
It'd take quite a bit more bandwidth to get me to visit Baltimore.
Re:Still not worth it (Score:4, Funny)
Most Sprint customers don't know the half of how hypocritical and money-driven Sprint really is as a whole.
I strongly disagree with this statement. We know.
Re:Still not worth it (Score:4, Interesting)
are other U.S. carriers any better?
i'm sick of U.S. ISPs & telecoms' charge more for less business model which is getting the U.S. left in the dust by Europe and Asia. enough is enough. personally, i'd rather see most of the UHF spectrum appropriate for WiMax use being reserved for the deployment of open public wireless networks. there are so many potential applications for ubiquitous public wi-fi once the infrastructure is in place.
the first thing to go will be the cellular networks. with all of the telecoms except for T-mobile, Verizon, and Qwest cooperating with NSA spying, i'd much rather make calls over an encrypted VoIP connection. heck, with open wi-fi access handset makers would finally be free to implement more advanced mobile features like video calls using VVoIP. and with municipal wi-fi, the public would actually have a say in how the network is run. instead of overselling and then throttling user connections and using packet shaping to manipulate usage, the infrastructure would just be upgraded to meet demand.
right now we have an opportunity to break free from the monopolies held by the telecoms and ISPs. if we don't seize this opportunity and simply let the UHF spectrum be bought up by the telecoms & ISPs, then we'll just be stuck in the same situation all over again. communication networks are a natural monopoly; that cannot be changed. but that doesn't mean that consumers have to keep getting shafted by the telecom & ISP companies. we purport to be members of a democratic society, so its our democratic prerogative to make sure the government serves public interest. in this case it means collectively taking control of a limited public resource like the UHF spectrum rather than let it fall into the hands of selfish commercial interests who would exploit it for profit without consideration for public good.
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too late for what? the last auction was for the 700-MHz band. ever used a wireless router? standard Wi-Fi protocols use the 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz range. WiMax has licensed spectrum profiles for 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz, and 3.5 GHz, though it can technically be implemented on any frequency below 66 GHz. so what does the 700 MHz auction have to do with anything?
and spectrum licenses can be revoke by the FCC, or just purchased back. ultimately, if the public decides that they don't want private corporations to control a p
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I'd rather pull my car over to the nearest 7-11, and use a pay phone to connect to the Internet through a 300 baud acoustic modem than get 3mbps through a Sprint product.
I made the HUGE mistake of switching to Sprint 18 months ago. I've regretted it ever since. Their customer service is 100% atrocious. Their policies are horrible (and deemed illegal in California*).
Sending photos to another cell phone is ridiculous (via e-mail?!?! WTF? Tons of phones are capable of receiving SMS with media, but not near
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You should try T-Mobile. I've been with them for 8 years, and you can pry their service from my cold, dead hands.
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Bandwidth is nice, but what about latency?
I have a Verizon data card that I use in my laptop from time to time. I get about 1 Mbit download speed which is pretty nice, but since most of the time, I work by xterm over SSH, the latency is very important.
For a YT video, 100 ms is fine. But for remote sessions, cellular latencies can be maddening. Yet somehow, wifi manages to be imperceptibly slower than a wired network. Honestly: why is cellular so bad? (And what's WiMax like?)
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Cellular sucks for latency the same reason satellite sucks. There's a huge path the packets have to take. With satellite, you have to go from your dish, to the satellite, to the ground station, to the net destination, and back through that whole mix back to your dish in your yard. Light only travels so fast. With cellular, the data is sent from the card in your laptop, to the tower, which is then tunneled back to the distribution center for the carrier, out over the net and then back again (hence, the horri
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Most access points in public that aren't operated by a carrier are connected right into a routable net connection, so your packets don't take as nearly as long a route as cellular/satellite.
But even this makes no sense.... When I connect to a server hosted in the same city I live in (Chico, near Sacramento, California) my home DSL line packets go from my house through Portland, OR before turning south through San Fransisco, CA and finally to the destination in Sacramento, California. It's a fairly long rout
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DSL and Cable work by providing a continuing stream of packets. Cell phone networks can't offer that though so there is times where they may delay delivery for 200MS or so while tower is busy doing something else before delivering all your data to you in on massive chunk. Mbit/s isn't only measure of network connection.
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Add to that the fact that the radio sleeps after a certain amount of idle time, which causes an added delay when the radio wakes back up and does its thing.
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Disclaimer: this is from the point of view of a traditional voice/data network, I don't know some specifics of WiMax..
There should have been simulations run before the network went live. The loads created by the simulations are a prerequisite for the network going into service.
The big test is the day the network actually goes live. Most if not all problems occur on the first day, or at least within the first 36-48 hours. If it's still up now, you don't have much to worry about; to cause a significant proble
Flawless with one user? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, you can deliver 3Mb/sec wirelessly. But can you deliver 30,000Mb/sec?
See, the problem is that what I (and a good portion of the tech-using community) would like is to be able to access this bandwidth on demand, anywhere. Do you believe there would be 10,000 users in a wingle WiMax coverage area? If so, they are going to need 30,000Mb/sec to keep everyone working at this speed.
Microcells work for cell phones, but the rules are different.
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You're right, I hope it scales.
With my AT&T card though, I got much lower speeds when I was moving than when I stayed in one place.
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They do, however, have a 6mb pipe to your house.
With wireless, everyone's sharing the same "last mile." A LOT of everyone. Not like with cable where it's just everyone on your block.
-:sigma.SB
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The size of the last mile pipe is meaningless as long as it is not the bottleneck. That is assuming facts not in evidence.
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You actually share the bandwidth with everyone on your node, in a standard hybrid fiber/coax network. That's roughly a square mile -- probably a couple thousand units, and more if it includes a lot of apartment buildings. I -think- the standard estimate in the industry is selling 12 times the available bandwidth, as most people barely use their available bandwidth, but I really can't remember. However, compared to wireless technology, coax can hold a LOT of users. I really wouldn't expect more than about .5
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Not every single one of those 10,000 is going to be using 3Mbps at the same time.
Not unless they're all watching YouTube videos while driving. Maybe they'll want to merge without looking. Rumsfeld!
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You still overpayed, though. T1's are archaic. You can get 5mbit fiber these days for sub-$1000. ;) (Depends on your location, I suppose, and how long ago you were talking about.)
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Do you believe there would be 10,000 users in a wingle WiMax coverage area?
10,000? I don't believe you could fit more than 20 people in a wingle. [infomotori.co.uk]
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Sure, you can deliver 3Mb/sec wirelessly. But can you deliver 30,000Mb/sec?
See, the problem is that what I (and a good portion of the tech-using community) would like is to be able to access this bandwidth on demand, anywhere. Do you believe there would be 10,000 users in a wingle WiMax coverage area? If so, they are going to need 30,000Mb/sec to keep everyone working at this speed.
Microcells work for cell phones, but the rules are different.
Audio Calls are 64k, much less then 3Mb/sec for digital transfer. So.. Your right. I know for WIFI there is no QoS either. I'm not sure 4G / WIMAX has QoS built in. (wants to strangle IEEE, even if I am a full member)
Ugh, more Slashdot commentary in the post (Score:4, Insightful)
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The folks who paid billions for the 700MHz C-block (Verizon) are required to do something "open" with it, and soon.
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They are going to "openly" lobby, sue, and whatever other legal wrangling they can pull to get out of any conditions of sale they don't care to implement.
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My guess is they'll just do what they want with it, while saying that they're complying with the terms of the license, and the FCC will let them get away with it. Then Google or EFF or somebody will sue over it, and 3-10 years later maybe something will be opened up.
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The likely competition comes, not from some other WiMax buildout; but from other cellular data services. Most are inferior to Sprint's offering in terms of price, longterm contracts, and in many cases speed; but computers and phones with the necessary hardware built in are pretty common, and you can get at least dialup speeds virtually everywhere(yes, I know, there are e
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So Sprint looses the edge when ATT and T-Mobile upgrade their networks to support HDSPA.
Sounds like an ad slogan. Sprint: Loose the Edge!
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I think the more appropriate term is perceived technological lead... If Sprint's venture takes too long to gain coverage and market acceptance, they will fall victim to all the WiMAX providers being subsidized by the USDA to bring broadband to rural areas.
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It's not quite so bad as all that. With directional antennas, you can increase the number of users almost arbitrarily, depending mostly on how close you expect them to be and how fast you expect them to move.
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"Almost arbitrarily" is not my experience with wireless data, you hit a limit based on number of available frequencies (how many independent/non-interfering channels there are) and how close you can place sectors that use the same frequency band.
For mobile wireless, there is also the issue of seamless handoff between sectors/stations.
WiMAX is a lot better than old 802.11 (the .11 MAC layer was really only designed to handle home wireless networks), but I'd need some hard numbers if you want to convince me t
We'll see ... (Score:2)
Clearwire: am I missing something? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Clearwire: am I missing something? (Score:4, Informative)
Clearwire deployed a proprietary broadband wireless access network based on Nextnet's technology [cnn.com]. Nextnet was later bought by Motorola, who is a major infrastructure vendor for WiMAX, and Clearwire, as part of their merger with Sprint Xohm, will be switching to WiMAX.
WiMAX has two major variants: those based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard (called 16d or fixed WiMAX) and those based on the newer IEEE 802.16e-2005 (called 16e or mobile WiMAX) standard. There have been some small, limited build-outs of 16d, but 16e is destined to be much bigger, and that's why this is a big deal.
Sprint has been the primary backer of 16e because they acquired a lot of 2.5 GHz unpaired spectrum from their Nextel acquisition. With the launch of Sprint's Baltimore network, they've proven that a large, citywide network can deliver on the promises of WiMAX. This is a huge step forward for mobile broadband wireless access.
It's not loaded yet (Score:2)
Wireless networks with all the infrastructure running and no users have really great bandwidth. What's it going to be like under load?
Horrible, horrible technology (Score:4, Insightful)
I've browsed through the WiMax standards, and they almost make ATM look elegant. A connection-base technology with no less than three incompatible encapsulations. Disconnected operation is simulated by establishing connections to a back-end server and running bridging software there.
I'm looking forward to the day when multiple implementations of WiMax are available and the interoperability issues start showing up...
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I wouldn't count on that, as most operators are going with LTE [wikipedia.org], not WiMax.
first in... America? (Score:2)
in Mexico City we have had Wimax since 2002, with a smallish ISP now called E-go. I used it in 2003-2004 at work, and this year it was my main access for several months. Quite comparable to broadband, if you are in well covered areas.
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802.16e-2005, the standard that Sprint is using, was ratified in 2005. So you certainly weren't using it in 2003-2004.
How many simultaneous users? (Score:2, Informative)
While wireless broadband is cool, I'm not convinced yet... With wireless everyone in connected to the same base station shares the available spectrum and bandwith. There's no way around that, ever.
I like 3G (live in Helsinki). I can open up Google Maps or check when the next bus leaves on my mobile. But for anything more serious I prefer a short range wireless tech (WiFi) or good old RJ45.
So will these technologies work well with hundreds of simultaneous users? Personally I still think there's a long way to
VOIP is allowed. (Score:2)
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Given their desire to become like Australian ISP's (Score:2)
...I'm going to wait for a flat-rate option for data that isn't meant for carriers.
Make sure to avoid these spots: (Score:2)
Great for non-mobile users too (Score:2)
A lot of posts here are listing why Xohm is good/bad compared to other cell networks but that's not even half of it. Xohm is also trying to enter the home user market, and I think they're going to do well.
I've used Xohm (briefly, at a demo last weekend) and will likely switch to them because although their service is slower than cable (the only option for us Baltimore residents is Comcast), it still plays Youtube videos faster than they play, which is pretty much all I ask for. The best thing about Xohm i
What happens when it gets popular? (Score:2)
One thing I've wondered about the idea of wireless internet access for the masses is, what happens when you have 2000+ people in a single city block (think of places like NYC, LA, Chicago, etc) trying to use a wireless Internet service? Does the system get completely bogged down with lag?