There have been some positive developments recently.
A number of things have hurt my business, chief among them my own mental state however, another thing that has been a major problem is dial customers moving to broadband connections and not being able to provide the latter in most locations.
Recently that has changed, a company we had used to provide DSL connectivity in the Western Washington 206 LATA was bought out by a larger company and while initially this resulted in total confusion with us not knowing what high speed services could be provided in what areas, this has been resolved.
We are now able to provide DSL in any part of Qwest and Verizon’s service area that they have equipped to provide DSL (where DSLAMs are installed and qualified cable exists).
What is more the pricing on the higher speed circuits is favorable relative to what it previously was. Now I just have to figure out how we are going to price and re-work the DSL web page.
A second thing that has happened is that we are also looking at some high-speed WiMAX based wireless solutions and I believe at least one of these is likely to be viable.
In the long term it is my belief that most end-user connectivity will be wireless. The only thing that has really prevented this in the past was the unavailability of adequate bandwidth and affordable coding technology. These things are rapidly becoming historic.
I can’t imagine people settling for being tied down with wires when they can flip open a laptop or turn on a pocket PC or PDA and be connected at high speed, affordably, anywhere.
Anywhere deserves some qualifications, there probably won’t be WiMAX service on the top of Mt. Everest for a while. However, owing to the deep reach of WiMAX, I expect that it will eventually cover more footprint than cellular or PCS service. WiMAX can reach as far as thirty miles from the base, which makes it practical to cover larger rural areas, and to reach areas that would have been prohibitive for cell service because of difficulty of placing a cell tower closer.
What has made much of this technology possible is new modulation schemes. These modulation schemes aren’t actually totally new but only recently have digital signal processors become sufficiently powerful to allow them to be used for high speed data transmission.
I’ll cover this more in the near future on my Radio and Wireless blog.
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The one thing that has made hi-speed wireless viable is the development of sufficiently high speed digital signal processors.
These make it possible to effectively utilize orthogonal frequency division multiplexing which is a modulations scheme in which available bandwidth is divided into many individual low bit rate carriers.
Because the bit rate of each carrier is low, each bit is integrated over a long time frame giving this scheme a great deal of noise immunity. It is in fact possible to transmit data with a noise to signal ratio.
I believe ultimately everything will trend towards untra-wide bandwidth COFDM because of the ability to transmit high bit rates with high noise immunity and share the same spectrum with other users and the available bit rates will continue to increase and cost decrease as digital signal processors continue to improve.