European Carriers Want Google, Facebook to Contribute to Mobile Data Costs

[svdb]

[citation][nom]jisamaniac[/nom]Thanks EU for not handling your economy properly and trying to make others pay for your mistakes.[/citation]
Yeah, well served! At least in the US people know how to screw up everybody else's economies and make them pay! ;-)

 

[nebun]

that's just messed up...wake up people

 

[sceen311]

The telecoms should be paying facebook, google and the like for providing a reason for people to put-up-with and/or use their shitty service.

 

[TheKurrgan]

[citation][nom]dredg98[/nom]Wireless Carriers should improve there networks instead of making them faster no NEEDS 4g WE NEED BETTER NETWORKS![/citation]
First lets establish something:
US carriers suck. (Cant speak for the EU, never even been there much less used their cell service)
That said, lets go into some technical details...
ALL cellular providers operate inside a very NARROW frequency allocation, pretty much world wide.
lets eyeball AT&T / Verizon
They BOTH operate in these ranges:
Range1: 869.00 Mhz - 894.567Mhz (Dominant in rural areas)
Range defined as: 850
Range2: 1930.00 Mhz - 1990.00 Mhz (Metropolitan areas)
Range defined as 1900 PCS
AT&T uses these for GPRS/WCDMA(3G) as well as Verizon for 1XRTT/EVDO(3G)
Problem: Even if they had full range of the spectrum, they'd only have 25mhz to work with in the 850 range, and 60 mhz in the 1900 range.
But they dont, its split because they obviously cant occupy the same channels.
AT&T has 12.5mhz of spectrum in 850, and 30 in PCS.
Each of their 3G towers operate on a 5mhz (3.84mhz to be precise, but spaced with 5 leaving room for 2 3g channels and the rest per tower allocated to non 3G GSM transmission) channel. This means, they have 2 channels MAX at their current configuration. This creates problems because even with synchronized transmissions, the number of required towers to support large metropolitan areas is enormous, and with the max capacity of active users per sector being in the neighborhood of 256 before time division gets brutal, you need ALOT of sectors. adding such a huge amount of towers in a concentrated area is difficult as well as not totally effective, as the noise created from the other towers interfere with each other, reducing speeds and capacity.
Therein lies the problem: No matter WHAT they do, they are bound physically by the spectrum limitation.
Thats AT&T and most other 3G GSM carriers.
Verizon / CDMA carriers technology varies, which is why they have a higher capacity network than AT&T.
CDMA uses 2mhz channels (1.25, configured 2.0mhz for spacing / deployment) and no need for split spectrum use for 1XRTT/EVDO
Therefore, their capacity is much greater because then can do a little over double AT&T / GSM in the same amount of spectrum. This helps tremendously in densely populated areas as they can utilize the increased channels to "Hop" further with towers before reusing channels in a manner that doesnt interfere as badly. As such, the signal quality is better. However, due to the smaller channel, it is not as fast nor capable of data / voice at the same time, as is AT&T / GSM.. In my opinion this is the most efficient use of spectrum. Also, the narrower channel tends to go slightly farther and deal with obstructions better than the wider channel.
So, while we all gripe about the sorriness of carrier A,B, and C, and at the end of the day it is on them to deal with all these problems, it should be known there there isnt a hell of a lot they can really do about it, especially AT&T.
Moving on to the 4G, it is not simply about the speed, its about the spectrum / efficient use of it. With a 1.5mhz channel on LTE(4G) you can surpass current 5mhz WCDMA speeds, AND there is more available spectrum for carriers to use. Therefore, they can increase capacity per sector to almost quadruple or more, AND have more towers before reusing channels. Verizon keenly moved on this well in advance of AT&T, and as such is going to reap the benefits, while AT&T is still feverishly trying to fix its 3G deployment and make it up to snuff as best as possible.
The carriers on the other hand DO need to take on the financial responsibility of growing their systems to meet their market demand, and while I can see how they would think google/facebook / whoever should help them, I cannot come up with any logic to support it nor much of a compelling reason for them to chip in.
I guess the carriers of the world are staring at the same thing we do with all of our equipment: Its ANTIQUATED!!!!

 

[shin0bi272]

EU = a social experiment with socialist governments trying to become the USA. Annnnnd it's failing miserably (are you listening US liberals??)...

One nation state after another is having to be bailed out etc etc and we all question why they would want google or apple (two liberal run companies themselves) to pay for the bandwidth their customers use? Seriously people come on! When the government runs everything through mandates and regulation or outright take overs (hint hint) things always go badly eventually. Why? because governments dont have to worry about making a payroll because they'll just spend money they dont have to make everyone feel good... but eventually they run out of other people's money and run into huge problems and have to have American companies pay for the cell phone usage on their cell networks. Then there's the entire concept of a cell phone plan in europe... they are subsidized like the internet is in canada... you get great speeds for like 20 bucks a month... because the friggin government is paying for 90% of it! Now when the government runs out of money and dont wanna be seen as the bad guys (just like American liberals) they refuse to jack up the rates to pay for it so they try crap like this... its very simple.. tax and spend doesnt work and eventually we will all uproot and kill the socialists who suggest we have the government run anything.

 

[caparc]

Economics 101. When something has value and is free consumption will increase. The ISP's need to focus on restraining the network hogs. My intuition is there are elegant ways to do that with server side software. I think the ISP's prefer higher prices.

 

[rquick]

You always have to ask yourself one basic question. Where does the money come from? All costs are ultimately passed on to the consumer in one way or another. Why not just let the individual who is using the bandwidth pay for the bandwidth? If European carriers can force content providers to help foot the bill, then everyone, even in other parts of the world is going to get tapped to pay for the infrastructure in Europe. It looks to me, imo, like European carriers need some business lessons from AT&T and Verizon so they can figure out how to charge their customers for what they are using and still also collect enough to pay for new infrastructure and make a profit. Seems like an interesting delimma since Europeans have been bragging for years that they have better, cheaper wireless service then in the US. That was all fine and good as long as they were all carrying simple dumb Nokias and didn't need data.

 

[rquick]

Oh and what I think thekurrgan was trying to say is that LTE IS the better network. At least in the US, the carriers are trying to do something about it without crying that somebody else needs to pay for it. Verizon will have the new hardware in place a little sooner, but it hardly matters since there aren't any handsets for it yet and there aren't that many wireless modem users. AT&T will probably catch up on 4G before the demand is there. AT&T is busy trying to fix it's 3G deployment because that is what it's customers are using and will continue to be using for the next few years. Money wasted? Only time will tell but 4G is irrelevant to me until I can buy my favorite smartphone for it and I bet that will be sometime in June 2012. That is why AT&T's deployment plans make the most sense to me (and several million of my closest friends).

 

[firemachine69]

Did you guys lose sight that this is the net-neutrality issue, but with telcoms involved?

 

[c0decX]

And how do we find the carriers? Exactly... with Google 🙂 So, Google shoud take money from the carriers for each click on their website or what?