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Wireless World
Steve Morgenstern
From the Print Edition:
Air Sick, Jul/Aug 02
(continued from page 2)
First let's doff our caps to the now-venerable RIM BlackBerry devices, both the pocket-sized Rim 850 and 950 and the bigger-screened Rim 857 and 957. These slender über-handhelds with their funky little thumb-typeable keyboards let you send and receive e-mail from just about anywhere -- and really, isn't that Job One when it comes to wireless information? Recently, Palm retired its own long-standing wireless handheld product, the Palm VIIx, in favor of the sleeker new Palm i705. The key difference: like the BlackBerry, the i705 is always on, so your messages show up in your mobile inbox automatically (with the VIIx, you had to go online and fetch messages periodically).
There are many other wireless e-mail solutions on the market today-antenna-equipped cards that you insert in your laptop and so-called sleds that cradle your handheld organizer to provide a wireless connection. GoAmerica (www.goamerica.com) is a good nationwide source for these add-on devices. What they all have in common, though, is a lack of speed. The tried-and-true data networks poke along at a leisurely pace-somewhere between 9 Kbps and 14 Kbps (to give you a benchmark, a standard dial-up modem communicates at about 40 to 45 Kbps). Now, though, we're seeing the next wave of wireless communication from cellular carriers across the country. I asked industry analyst Andrew Seybold, editor in chief of "Forbes/Andrew Seybold's Wireless Outlook" newsletter, to give us an overview:
"We've got packet data networks coming online from AT&T, Cingular, VoiceStream and Verizon [Wireless], and by the middle of the year, you'll have Sprint PCS up and running," Seybold explains. "Data speeds will run anywhere from 20 Kbps to 50 Kbps. There are going to be lots of different devices on the market -- this is not going to be a one-device-fits-all type of thing. So we're going to see the whole gamut, from a phone that has a Web browser in it (which to me is a losing product) to PC cards that go into notebooks, a number of smartphones, and a number of PDAs that also have voice capability. We'll see more devices that have keyboards on them. So there will be lots of network devices, and here's my caveat -- the networks today have priced data so that it's not affordable by the mere mortal. AT&T's price is $10 per megabyte; Verizon's price is $30/month plus a per-minute charge. Right now, when I stay at a hotel, I use a dial-up connection on my notebook. I did the math on that -- if I were using Verizon, I'd be paying 10 times as much for the privilege of using wireless. Why would I do it?
"The bottom line," according to Seybold, "is we've got the networks, we've got the devices, and then the pricing is too high. I can't imagine one of your readers going out and spending $500 on a device to look up where the nearest cigar store is. We're at a crossroads here: we've got the technology in place and we're going to have to struggle to figure out what to do with it."
But as we struggle to figure out what to do with the new networks launching in 2002, even faster 3G (or third-generation) systems are headed our way. As Tim Bajarin explains, "3G really suggests that you can get to 384 Kbps, and 1x [the technology used by Verizon and Sprint\] actually tops out at 144 Kbps. Initially, as the networks are set up, you're not going to get more than 40 to 60 Kbps, but we do believe they can meet their upper-end limits of 144 Kbps by the end of the year.
"The next step on top of that is CDMA 1xEV," he continues "That's the next tier, which should take you to at least 384 Kbps, and could go up as high as 2.4 megabits [2,400 Kbps]. But we don't see that any time in the next year to year and a half at least. The earliest we'll see the EV networks online is late 2003, more likely 2004, and even then I expect limited coverage, probably on the east and west coasts, at first."
As for me, the Verizon folks were nice enough to lend me an AirCard 555 wireless modem and set me loose on their network in New York. I'm sitting on a bench on 57th Street, reading my e-mail, checking news headlines and filling downtime between appointments by doing research for an upcoming article. I hear a familiar song playing in a store ("Will you still love me tomorrow...") and Web-surf over to CDNOW to figure out who first recorded it (the Shirelles -- of course!). Bolstered by this combination of serious inquiry and frivolous self-indulgence, surfing the Web wirelessly at decent speeds turns out to be fairly addictive stuff. Andy Seybold's right -- I'm not quite ready to pay the freight for the privilege. But one look at what happened to cellular service prices in the past few years gives me hope that even lowly journalists will be surfing on air before long.
Steve Morgenstern, a freelance writer living in New York, writes often on technology issues for Cigar Aficionado.
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