@Charlie Clark, well, yes and no. There's certainly more spectrum at 2ghz to give out, but if you get say 20mhz of spectrum, that's 20mhz of spectrum if it's at 2.1ghz or at 600mhz, either way.
Good article. I should point out, in the US most 3G is EVDO Rev A (3.1mbits/sec down and 1.8mbits/sec up). Going from EVDO Rev 0 to Rev A was a software update at the sites so there's not much EVDO Rev 0 left. EVDO Rev B and EVDO Rev C, Qualcomm's got them ready, but no carriers have plans to deploy them -- Sprint's deploying Wimax, and most other CDMA+EVDO carriers here are planning to deploy LTE (NO, I repeat, NO legacy GSM -- just LTE using a pure IP backbone.) In cases where they need more capacity, they are just turning on additonal EVDO channels. UMTS here is really not worth mentioning -- AT&T has like 20% of their network upgraded to UMTS, T-Mobile has it only in a few markets; as a bonus AT&T's UMTS is reportedly quite flakey and slow. In contrast, Sprint has about ~60% of their network upgraded to EVDO, Verizon was nearly 100% pre-Alltel buyout, Alltel was about 60%, and even the regional CDMA carriers (US Cellular, Cellular South, Bluegrass Cellular, etc.) have extensive EVDO buildouts. It's normal here for these carriers to have "free" data roaming off each other too, so if I go to Kentucky for instance, I could roam off Bluegrass at full speeds.
I thirdly must LOL @ UK 3G coverage. As much as the US is generally slogged on about cell phone sophistication, etc. etc., in this case the tides have turned -- look at Verizon Wireless's 3G coverage map and see what I mean. I can go to my grandparents, a 950 mile trip, and have EVDO for about 940 of that 950 miles (about 8 miles are the 144kbps 1X data, and about 2 miles "no service").. It should be less than a year for Verizon to finish the EVDO upgrades (on the remaining non-upgraded Alltel coverage), but even as it is I should be able to go from here to the *west* coast (~2000 miles) with about 1800-1900 miles of EVDO coverage.. And (despite having an older EVDO Rev 0 card) I get over 500kbps almost all the time and 1mbit pretty regularly. (Forget loading web pages and e-mail, I can stream youtube and hulu pretty reliably.)
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Post: EVDO and US 3G situation
Henry Wertz 1
EVDO and US 3G situation →
Posted Wednesday 15th July 2009 09:13 GMT
In Cutting the cord: future mobile broadband tech
@Charlie Clark, well, yes and no. There's certainly more spectrum at 2ghz to give out, but if you get say 20mhz of spectrum, that's 20mhz of spectrum if it's at 2.1ghz or at 600mhz, either way.
Good article. I should point out, in the US most 3G is EVDO Rev A (3.1mbits/sec down and 1.8mbits/sec up). Going from EVDO Rev 0 to Rev A was a software update at the sites so there's not much EVDO Rev 0 left. EVDO Rev B and EVDO Rev C, Qualcomm's got them ready, but no carriers have plans to deploy them -- Sprint's deploying Wimax, and most other CDMA+EVDO carriers here are planning to deploy LTE (NO, I repeat, NO legacy GSM -- just LTE using a pure IP backbone.) In cases where they need more capacity, they are just turning on additonal EVDO channels. UMTS here is really not worth mentioning -- AT&T has like 20% of their network upgraded to UMTS, T-Mobile has it only in a few markets; as a bonus AT&T's UMTS is reportedly quite flakey and slow. In contrast, Sprint has about ~60% of their network upgraded to EVDO, Verizon was nearly 100% pre-Alltel buyout, Alltel was about 60%, and even the regional CDMA carriers (US Cellular, Cellular South, Bluegrass Cellular, etc.) have extensive EVDO buildouts. It's normal here for these carriers to have "free" data roaming off each other too, so if I go to Kentucky for instance, I could roam off Bluegrass at full speeds.
I thirdly must LOL @ UK 3G coverage. As much as the US is generally slogged on about cell phone sophistication, etc. etc., in this case the tides have turned -- look at Verizon Wireless's 3G coverage map and see what I mean. I can go to my grandparents, a 950 mile trip, and have EVDO for about 940 of that 950 miles (about 8 miles are the 144kbps 1X data, and about 2 miles "no service").. It should be less than a year for Verizon to finish the EVDO upgrades (on the remaining non-upgraded Alltel coverage), but even as it is I should be able to go from here to the *west* coast (~2000 miles) with about 1800-1900 miles of EVDO coverage.. And (despite having an older EVDO Rev 0 card) I get over 500kbps almost all the time and 1mbit pretty regularly. (Forget loading web pages and e-mail, I can stream youtube and hulu pretty reliably.)