Since I can only concentrate on one thing at a time, like everyone else who Loves America™ and whose vote really counts, I wasn’t able to post a couple of links that I found interesting while Shirleygate was going on. Now that we have begun our long national process of healing, perhaps a few of you may be ready to divert your attention from the tedium of race relations to the fascinating world of technology.
First, the FCC did another cool thing that pisses off the major wireless carriers. They approved a giant “wholesale” wireless network using the 4G LTE (that’s fourth generation, long-term evolution, the new faster communication standard that all US carriers will probably use). What’s given Verizon and AT&T butthurt is the FCC’s ruling that the #1 and #2 wireless carriers in the US can’t use it without FCC approval.
A “wholesale” network is one that sells bandwidth to everyone. The existence of a nationwide, wholesale network could spawn a bunch of non-traditional competitors (like retailers) who lease and resell bandwidth on the network. It also lessens the capital costs of also-rans like Sprint and T-Mobile, who will be able to use the wholesale network in places where they haven’t built towers. (Currently those companies use Verizon and AT&T’s networks, respectively, for roaming.)
Those of you looking for an update on the next generation of nuclear reactors will find one by atomicrod guest posting on the Oil Drum. He examines a few of the new, smaller designs, some of which feature complete passive cooling (no pumps to fail). They are designed to replace existing coal-fired plants.
Keith G
Mmmmm. A D.Q. Blizzard of posts. Scrumptious.
Scott
Hmmm, and my cable internet company has been picking last weekend and this morning to crash frequently. Almost like they don’t care whether I keep using them or not…
On the other hand, the last time I used wireless internet, I wasn’t able to play my online games. Maybe it’s gotten better in the past few years, but…
mistermix
@Scott: On paper, LTE is faster than most wired broadband. I haven’t seen any real-world reviews.
Corner Stone
Good stuff mistermix. But why has The Left failed to respond to these yet?
toujoursdan
These nuclear power plants sound great on paper, but they are still ultimately dependent on the oil economy. It still takes oil to mine and transport the uranium, build the plants and transport the waste. If built, they may help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions (which is a very good thing), but it isn’t going to stop America from heading into an inevitable, serious energy crisis. That crisis will probably stop the construction of new plants as there won’t be the capital left to fund them.
One of the great failures of all the administrations since the 1980s is that they understood that oil is the lubricant that makes our economy work, that at some point it is going to become scarce causing the economy to sputter, yet are unwilling to tell Americans to change our lifestyles to prepare for it. Carter tried to do that and was voted out of office.
p.a.
Easy there cowboy. As a Vz (non-management) employee this sounds suspiciously like the opening of the copper network circa 2000-2001. As a result there was a mushrooming of small to mid-sized ‘carriers’ and ‘resellers’ with little or no experience in the industry. In my area of the country they seemed to average about 4-5 employees covering all of New England and upstate NY. Any customer problem got the response ‘it’s in the big guy’s network.’ Which required us to trouble shoot and when it wasn’t us (>70% of the time by my guesstimate), our response to the customer was ‘it’s not us, here’s your bill. contact your carrier.) Not many of those fellas left now, at least in urban areas.
burnspbesq
And who’s got the capital to build the wholesale 4G network? One imagines pitch books for potential Investors with lots of ponies and unicorns cleverly disguised as Excel spreadsheets.
Alas, where barriers to entry are high, oligopolies tend to persist.
Katharsis
“Passive Cooling” as you call it is nothing new and has been around for quite some time. In fact some of our Nuclear powered Submarines have had it for years now. The real technology to look for is ones that lower the physically inevitable long half-life of radioactive waste these things produce (and have already produced). Just look at the fiasco regarding Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Latest model designs of which I know of have reduced waste holding times to HUNDREDS of years –not decades as the link says. This is down from in the THOUSANDS as generally all reactors currently produce.
Linda Featheringill
The little nuclear power plants are interesting. If they have good safety features, why not use them? Scatter them around to little hamlets in out-of-the-way places.
Yeah. Let’s give all these little corners of the country electricity and broadband and welcome them to participate in the general culture [as they wish].
handy
@Corner Stone:
Don’t start going Mike Kay, CS.
Corner Stone
@handy: Damn. Talk about hair trigger.
Neutron Flux
I looked at the article you linked to from The Oil Drum wrt to small scale reactors. Good stuff.
It is important to remember that even tho NuScale and the others will submit applications to the NRC in 2012, production will still be 7-10 years away. AP-1000 design was approved by the NRC in the late nineties and even with that, site specific licensing will take several years.
I am at work and can’t hang around, but just wanted to say that the post you linked to is not junk. In addition, the comments are well informed.
Martin
I put better than 50/50 odds that Apple uses this to launch an in-house 4G LTE plan. They’ll stick with AT&T and add Verizon, but also add themselves as a competitive option with unlocked phones – higher up-front cost, lower rates, not unlike what they tried to do (and failed) at launch.
Just my investor $.02.
burnspbesq
@Martin:
According to the Q it filed last week, Apple has $24 billion in cash and marketable securities. It could build a proprietary 4G network if it chose to do so.
evinfuilt
@toujoursdan:
They are reliant on oil right now. But then so is solar and wind for the same reasons (there’s no magic fairy that makes windmills out of thin air.)
Don’t let perfection get in the way of curing us of oil and coal dependency.
mclaren
Sadly, wireless isn’t the way to go for revamping America’s shockingly third-world broadband capability.
Wifi is nice, it gives you mediocre speed, but at the end of the day, wifi saturates fast. There are only so many channels in any one access point and only so much bandwidth in any given EVDO cell. The brutal reality is that three slingboxes can take down an entire EVDO cell hard. Four or five people watching YouTube HD will kill any wifi hotspot in America. (Not Korea or Europe — they have decent speed there, but this is shithole America we’re talking about, where the typical wifi hotspot gets maybe 3 megabits to share among 20 customers. in Korea, free wifi typically gives you 22 megabits up, 55 megabits down. In America, free wifi gets you 600 kbits up and 3 megabits down, if you’re lucky.)
Three or four people watching Netflix instant streaming will kill any 80211g access point in America. The theoretical bandwidth on a g access points runs 50 megabits — out here in the real world, you’re lucky if you get 3 or 4 megabits in a real-world shared wireless environment because America has such crappy behind-the-curve low-speed broadband. At one big box store near where I live, the so-called “broadband” has been throttled all the way back to 600 kbits, which doesn’t even quality as true broadband. And that’s typical in shithole America.
B access points are already so numerous in the U.S. they’re stepping all over each other and shutting each other down. Stories about people who can’t use their wireless when the neighbor comes home are legion: the neighbor is using 802.11b too and it’s stepping all over yours.
Hardwired access is what you need for reasonable speed and decent data integrity. Halfway through most file transfers the typical American wifi connection drops out. Hulu regularly freezes and dies on American 802.11b. YouTube buffers like crazy but if you’re willing to put up with that, you can use 802.11b for watching YouTube, but only at the low-res postage-stamp-sized crappy video quality. For reliable HD quality video that doesn’t freeze or spend all its time buffering, you need hardline ethernet broadband.
Ultimately, it’s all futile, since America is now so far behind the rest of the world in broadband that we’ll never catch up.
Brain Hertz
Somehow I doubt that Sprint would be buying wholesale LTE services from anybody, given that they already own half of Clearwire, which has its own 4G wireless network based on WiMAX. Clearwire already sells 4G as a wholesaler, and has quite a few customers, including Comcast.
There seems to be a great deal of expectation that LTE is going to show up any day now with fully debugged product available from day one, but there’s very little reason to expect this to be the case, and plenty of reason to expect this to be quite a few years away. You can look at the deployment timescale of any wireless network technology involving this much of a change and get a pretty good idea of what to expect. Go and look at WCDMA, or GSM, or even IS-95. You could also take a look at WiMAX, since it’s the nearest example.
WiMAX (which is not actually all that different from LTE) has been in place as a live network in the US since what, 2008? Large scale trials were running from at least early 2008 and maybe late 2007 (I can’t be sure without looking it up), and there were demos of a complete network, including multiple basestations doing handoffs and a fully functioning network core as far back as January 2007. Those were, by the way, much more fully featured demos than the one that Verizon recently did in Boston. I know there are a couple of LTE networks in Scandanavian cities today, but it isn’t at all clear how many basestations are involved, and they’re all single equipment vendor based. So why would anybody expect that LTE is going to show up as a large scale US deployment next year? If the necessary preconditions really are in place for that, the big players are doing an awfully good job of hiding it.
Rollouts of network technologies this radical take a long time… LTE is not just a software upgrade or even a basestation replacement; it relies on an all-new core network (which is pretty important, given that existing 3G networks are built on a core that dates from 2G days and is the source of much of the performance issues).
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
I read the description of LTE and immediately thought “I bet Apple does this”.
Think it’ll work? Also, is it true that they tried to launch an MVNO and ultimately gave up, partly because of LTE coming down the pike?
Bill Murray
@handy: No it’s still OK, he didn’t mention John Edwards.
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