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From: Joel Koltner on 30 Mar 2010 13:08
"mpm" <mpmillard(a)aol.com> wrote in message
news:b7cdc437-ece6-419f-9f75-94cf2f1da42b(a)y14g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
> Is anyone else worried about what might become of the cellular/PCS
> airwaves now that the iPhone (and other popular smartphones) are
> taking over?

Not really.

> Are we going to turn the airwaves into a morass of SPAM
> and movies, turn-by-turn navigation, and [?? Insert anything else
> other than a simple voice phone call]?

It already is!

> I read once that spam made up more than 2/3rds of all email. Is that
> coming to cell phones next?

Spam is actually a lot better these days than, say, five years ago IMO -- the
vast majority of it gets stopped at the ISP due to much-improved filtering
programs/blacklists/etc.

But sure, whatever spam you do have will certainly show up on your cell phone.

Heck, I've been checking e-mail on my phone since about 2004 -- and I'm not
even a particularly early adopter. I bet someone like Jan was doing it back
in 2001...

> Is it really necessary to take 300 MHz from the broadcast television
> spectrum and give to folks like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile?
> (In the US, I mean).

Nope, although it's not really necessary to not do so either: It's not like
what you see on broadcast TV these days is much better than what you find on
the Internet. :-)

> I submit that the cell phone network is not well-suited to sling-
> boxing your home video surveilance rig to your iPhone.

The Internet also wasn't designed to stream audio or video -- there's many
millions of dollars at play here, and you can bet the protocols and other
changes needed to make wireless video-on-demand a reality will be developed
"as needed."

> Or if it is,
> how soon until the networks are so damn congested, we may as well go
> back to writing snail mail letters to each other?

Again, you could say the exact same thing about the Internet itself -- most
people on this group likely had their first web browsing experiences using a
dial-up and at the time the idea that you could have a 10Mbps pipe coming into
your home for <$100/mo was inconceivable (at the time a T-1 -- 1.544Mbps --
was often >$1000/mo, which is probably more like >$2500 once you adjust for
inflation...)

Wireless of course has the bandwidth problem to contend with -- you can only
make cell sites so small in order to gain capacity and then you just need more
spectrum. It's also manageable by going to higher frequencies -- look at
WiMax, for instance, at 5.8GHz -- but that doesn't propagate through walls
very well.

---Joel

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