December 17th, 2004
Forget 3G. I'll take 4G (aka: Why WiFi is dead)
While the world waits for all of the existing CDMA (ie: Sprint, Verizon) and GPRS-based (ie: Cingular, T-Mobile, most European carriers) networks to be upgraded to broadband-like speeds (a.k.a. "3G"), the folks in the labs at NTT DoCoMo have successfully pushed "cellular" (wireless wide area networks — WWANs) data rates to 1 Gbps — otherwise known as 4G. Such developments always bring me back to the same theme.
If you take a skin-deep look at how cellcos are in the business of providing both Wi-Fi and WWAN services, it often looks like they’re hedging to see which one survives the long run. After all, if Wi-Fi is everywhere (for example, in all these municipalities that are installing city-wide Wi-Fi access), then data networks-cum-voice networks (by virtue of technologies like Skype) present a real alternative as well as a threat to the voice-networks-cum-data networks (for example, CDMA, GSM/GPRS) run by the cellcos.
But, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see how when the traditional cellcos offer Wi-Fi services, they’re really just reselling another wireless Internet service provider’s (WISPs) services. For example, Wayport is the real WISP behind many of the hotspots offered by Sprint and Verizon. This arrangement allows the cellcos to offer both types of services (WWANs and Wi-Fi hotspots) without having to invest in the infrastructure for both. As can be seen from Sprint’s recent acquisition of Nextel, and its announcement that it’s moving forward with a nationwide, $3 billion, 3G-rated CDMA EV-DO network, the cellcos are still fully committed to their wide-area voice and data businesses.
Now, here’s the question. If you had your choice of a hotspot the size of a country as opposed to one the size of a city block — one that had security baked in, which as opposed to Wi-Fi isn’t quite so simple — which would you take? This why I continue to ask "Why bother with Wi-Fi when CDMA (3G, and now 4G) can do?"
