Internet Connections of the Future

You remember when your neighbor was the first person in town to get cable TV? To be sure, the neighbor received clear pictures and received five more channels than you did! Who would be dumb enough to PAY for the privilege of watching a television channel when the other channels are all free? All you need is rabbit ears. The neighbor pays HOW MUCH for those extra channels? I'll never do that!

Everyone knows that television will always be broadcast on the airwaves while telephones will always connect via wires.

Some years later, many of us decided that Ted Turner must be nuts when he announced a new television channel would broadcast nothing but news twenty-four hours a day. No sit-coms? No game shows? He'll go bankrupt within a year!

Then there was a rumor of still another TV channel that would only broadcast music videos twenty-four hours a day. Naw. That can't be. NOBODY would watch that!

Computers? I agree with Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Company (DEC) who stated in 1977 that "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."

I was showing my wireless Internet connection yesterday to a person at a genealogy conference in San Luis Obispo. Unlike the normal "Wi-Fi" connections, I use a long-range wireless connection that communicates with most any cell phone tower within a few miles. I get high speed wireless connectivity most anyplace, even while riding on a commuter train.

I mentioned that I pay $60 a month for the connection and receive unlimited usage. The person I was talking to exclaimed, "That's outrageous! I bet that very few people will ever pay for a wireless connection. The cell phone companies will never have many customers for that service!"

Comments

[W. David Samuelsen]

laughing....

just a month ago, a friend was using his laptop plugged to his blackberry to get Internet connection to show contents on Internet in a church meeting. The church has no Internet connection, only a restricted phone connection to church headquarters mainframes.

[Athena]

The actual cost of your mobile broadband is probably more like $100/mo ($40 cell phone subscription + $60). For those of us who do not have a monthly cell phone plan, that is indeed "outrageous".

My DSL service includes nationwide WIFI hotspot service and I would be more than willing to participate in some sort of prepaid mobile broadband for traveling. I'm not going commit to $100 month though for the few days a quarter I would use it. Until the service providers come up with some sort of prepaid plan for mobile broadband, don't expect to see a lot of consumers jump on the bandwagon.

[Dick Eastman]

No, the actual cost of the wireless high speed connection is $59.95 per month. There is no cell phone coverage in the plan; it is high speed data only. I have a separate cell phone that is on another plan from a different cell phone company.

I travel a lot. If I was restricted to Wi-Fi networks at hotels, airports and other such places, it would cost much more than $59.95 a month. Most places charge $10 to $12 a day. I typically travel 7 to 10 days per month (and about 15 days this month). At $59.95 a month for unlimited usage from almost anywhere, the Verizon wireless card saves me money.

Obviously, that is not true for people who do not travel often.

- Dick Eastman

[Sandra Quinn]

I bought a wireless card for my son and manager of my ambulance company. Not only can he access business related info while working from any hospital location, or while traveling to and from, but he can take it home in his off hours and plug it into his modem and run all the home computers off it and the wireless laptop at the same time and all get the benefit of unlimited internet. That way he is always connected and the family gets some benefits from it too and another internet service is not needed. Not bad for 70.00 per month through sprint.

[Billie Walsh]

We have a S____ [ probably shouldn't mention brand names ] broadband card. It is awesome. We can do streaming video or voice chat at seventy mph down the interstate on a trip. If we are out on a storm watch we have near live radar on our computer in the vehicle.

[Barbara Hall]

All of this sounds wonderful, but I hope that those of you who are doing "streaming video or voice chat at seventy mph" are RIDING, not DRIVING! Multi-tasking in the office or on the train is fine, but when operating a vehicle, we all need to keep our full attention on driving.

[Audrey Collins]

How apt that I should be reading this message while sitting on a train just outside Edinburgh - making use of free Wi-fi, courtesy of the train operator, National Express.

Well, it means I can surf the net while we wait for the faulty signal up ahead to be fixed. Ain't technology wonderful (when it works)

[Margaret]

You'll have a laugh, but my husband, whom I call "Mr. Techno-Geek" because he installs our computers, VHS, DVD players, video editing equipment, GPS devices, etc., refuses to get cable for our new HDTV. He bought a booster for our 42-year-old antenna, which he will install when the weather warms up.

We aren't sports watchers, get Netflix via computer; so far we are happy, happy, happy campers.

I do understand how business people, especially those who must travel frequently, would want and need more sophisticated and expensive services.

[Diane]

You don't have to be a big time traveler to want Internet access with you. I can't count the number of times my husband and I have said we would like to have wireless Internet in the car when just on a short errand in town. We will see something that sparks a conversation and/or a question to which we don't have an answer, but if we had "wireless", we could look it up. Too many times, by the time we are home and can look something up, we have forgotten what the question was in the first place.

When we do travel long distances, I do the driving while Hubby, in the passenger seat, is either playing with the GPS, the radio, or whatever else has buttons and whistles. The "wireless" then would really help him fight the boredom that accompanies being in the passenger seat. That said, we aren't equipped for it -- yet. Because this would only be for pleasure, in our case, we are waiting/hoping for a price reduction that generally follows the announcement of great new technology.

Well, I didn't mean to get into all that. What I really wanted to say was the way Dick presented this topic was very well done. Love reading these newsletters.

[vaduchess]

For those of us who live in a rural area with no hope of any high speed access our only options are satellite or cellular. Our neighbors tried two satellite services, Wild Blue and DirecWay (Hughes Net) with less than satisfactory results.

Six months ago I got a Wireless USB Verizon modem and it has been wonderful. I can use it on my laptop or my desktop. The speeds were blazing compared to my 56K dial up service and it was reliable – no dropped connections, no delays in uploading or downloading. I could get more research done in less time, especially graphics files.

Verizon just put in a new tower 4 miles from our home business and now we have full broadband access. It's worth every penny of the $59.95 we pay. In fact, we liked the product so much, we purchased one for our business. For those of us without the amenities of city and suburban life, we have to pay extra, just like using more gas to travel for the things we need.

[Doug]

If wireless is unlimited at around $70 you could use Skype for internet phone service and eliminate the need for you cell phone if you are a minimum cellphone user as I am

[Jon]

Wireless internet is great for certain things, but for genealogy research I still have to give props to the cable modem. I really dont notice the speed difference when checking my mail or doing other light browsing activities, but if I'm spending an afternoon on Ancestry.com, or researching one of my Scandaniavian ancestors at Digitalarkivet.no or svar.ra.se, those big images are really going eat up the bandwidth. With C-----t providing my landline I can sometimes get upwards of 5 MB/s, while on my wireless internet card, I normally get closer to 700kB/s, about 1/5 the speed!!! Maybe its just that I'm in the computer industry and have gotten accustomed to the blazing fast throughput that seems to get faster every year, but until wireless internet gets a little faster (or Wimax comes to my neighborhood) I'll stick with cable internet, and wi-fi for the coffeeshops.

[Jason Presley]

I'm still waiting for the standard 10Mbps connection via cable that most developed countries have had for 6-7 years. It's a crime the FCC lets the carriers in the US drag their feet on providing REAL high speed access and try to placate everyone with as little as 768kbps downstream and still call it "high speed". Cable companies should be "upgrading" to 5 & 6Mbps, they should be standardizing on at LEAST 10.

[James W. Anderson]

There is another big development just down the road that will make things much faster than just Wi-Fi but act just like that as far as using the Internet on the road. It's called 'WiMAX' or 'Wireless Interoperable Microwave Access'.

This promises connections 7 times faster than any cable provider does now, and 100 times faster than satellite or some DSL products. Towers may still need to be closer together although not as close as present cell towers to get maximum speed, a test in Chicago recently showed reliable connections steady at 2mb to 4mb. That top speed by the way? 70mb.

The FCC is holding a spectrum auction right now for some old TV space in the US above channel 51. Bidding on one block has hit the target that will trigger open access to all kinds of devices yet to be developed, no matter who makes it, unlike the current exclusivity of cell providers. Most of these services and devices though will operate at higher frequencies, but the lower end will allow longer distances, like possibly up to 50 miles from a tower, the equivalent of picking up your favorite big FM radio station right now. Again that hasn't been proven for sure, all of this is going to take a couple years to sort through, news on this is going to come fast and furious in the next few weeks, and it will take another two years for much of the hardware and access solutions to emerge nad the marketplace to develop.

[Ron Johnson]

It was Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction and science fact writer, who said of people who do not see the future clearly: Some people have a "failure of the imagination" and ""When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong" and "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

I don't remember who the scientist was who stated flatly in the 1950s that man would never get off the face of the earth and into space because the amount energy required to lift an object off the earth was equal to the amount of mass of the object being lifted - or something like that.

But then again, there was the Edsel!

[David Reed]

Call me a troglodyte, but I don't own a cell phone and my landline is a rotary phone. There are no shows on TV that could justify my paying for cable, so I use rabbit ears. I live in Toronto where availability is not an issue. On the other hand, I have had a computer at home for 15 plus years, internet access for almost as long, and currently use ADSL via a local area network.

How you use or pay for technology is really a matter of priorities and need.

[David T. Robertson]

Dick,

Framingham just got a federal grant to install WI-FI in downtown Framingham so anyone can just plug into the net.