The WorkShop

I happened to read an article about the state of broadband in the US a couple of months back . Here are a few excerpts.

Verizon’s new broadband service, FiOS delivers a super-fast connection by replacing the old copper phone line to each home with a fiber-optic cable, offering Internet downloads as fast as 30 megabits per second, vs. the 1 Mbps to 6 Mbps of the typical cable or DSL broadband line .

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts recently demonstrated a new technology called DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) that promises to give cable modem users speeds as high as 150 Mbps .

And this more recently from a Swedish news website

“Sigbritt Löthberg’s home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link “.

Sadly life in Bangalore is not as good , I have to pay $23 for a 256kbps line , It took me 3 days to download Fedora core 7 . All this after the former I&B minister declared 2007 as the year of the Broadband (read fraudband). There are plans for speeds upto 2mbps but they come with a download limit of 1Gb .

Probably the government doesn’t understand that from an economic growth standpoint, broadband is crucial for India’s future .US based venture capital firms are investing huge amounts of money in Web startups and India seems to have stalled on the broadband front. There is no dearth of a fibre backbone for providing better service as Reliance and the Tatas are in control of huge bandwidths. Reliance Communications, Bharti, BSNL, Gail, Railtel and PowerGrid and VSNL have their own fibre networks. Reliance Communication has a 60,000-km network and VSNL over 40,000 km.

BSNL and MTNL are mostly to blame as the two state telecom operators refuse to share their last mile networks with the private sector and instead are hell bent upon providing third class service on their copper based networks .

I think its high time that the government woke up to this reality. For a country which has the highest number of young people in the world this is absolutely pathetic .

Nokia recently announced its plans to release phones featuring WiMAX in 2008. The current iteration of WiMAX is only able to connect when a receiver is stationary, but a new mobile revision is expected to be released by the end of 2007 . Intel spoke about mobile WiMAX evolution at the Beijing IDF , and Sprint also has plans for Mobile WiMAX.
The WiMAX technology, based on the IEEE 802.16 Air Interface Standard has already proven itself as a cost effective fixed wireless alternative to cable and DSL services. In December, 2005 the IEEE approved the 802.16e amendment to the 802.16 standard. This amendment adds the features and attributes to the standard necessary to support mobility. Mobile WiMAX is a broadband wireless solution that combines mobile and fixed broadband networks through a common wide area broadband radio access technology and a flexible network architecture. The Mobile WiMAX Air Interface uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) , I wont go into the details of it but generally it is a multiplexing technique that divides the available bandwidth into sub-carriers which are of multiple frequencies . Initial Mobile WiMAX profiles cover 5, 7, 8.75, and 10 MHz channel bandwidths for worldwide spectrum allocations in the 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz, 3.3 GHz and 3.5 GHz frequency bands. The WiMAX forum lists many advantages of this technology of which a few are
> High Data Rate :DL data rates up to 63 Mbps per sector and peak UL data rates up to 28 Mbps per sector in a 10 MHz channel.
>High Scalability and Security
>High Mobility with Optimized Handover Schemes

Many of Nokia’s competitors have opted instead to pursue 4G alternatives to WiMAX. Sprint Nextel is at the forefront of this initiative, along with Orange, T-Mobile, Vodaphone, Motorola and KPN Mobile.

Useful links

The Wimax Forum Website

Information on 4G

Nokia WiMAX Technology

More on WiMAX Technology