A number of industry experts have recently said that although wireless phone services are overtaking fixed landline connections it is unlikely that cable and DSL services will be displaced by new 4G wireless broadband technology due to the difference in data demands.
The testing of a wireless broadband technology that will be able to offer connection speeds matching that of cable broadband and beating the speeds available over DSL services is to be carried out by Verizon later on this year in Seattle and Boston. This impending test has raised questions from the local information services in Boston as to whether this fourth-generation wireless technology should be looked at as an alternative to fixed-line broadband connection and if so should users get rid of their current fixed-line broadband connections.
Industry experts are now looking at how wireless phone service are beginning to replace the regular landline and asking if fixed-line ADSL and cable broadband service will soon be replaced by 4G services like the new WiMAX service being rolled out by Clearwire or the new Long Term Evolution (LTE) services that will soon be deployed by cellular carriers throughout the country.
The new speeds of these 4G services have recently been shown in tests like the LTE tests carried out at the Dallas labs of Ericcson, which resulted in download speeds of 150Mbps and upload speeds of 30Mbps being shown, and in real terms this means that the majority of users will be getting average speeds of between 10-20Mbps for downstream traffic and 5Mbps for upstream. Although the real world speeds are far below those given in the lab tests these speeds are still better than most high end cable services that offer real world speeds of 7Mbps for downloads and 512K for uploads.
The main reason that many industry experts are giving for doubting that 4G technology will totally replace wired connection is current data limitations of wireless technology. It has been found that the limitations of the current spectrum used for wireless data transfer is far too small to accommodate the kind of data usage that would appear if everyone stopped using fixed-line connections, although it is likely that once 4G technology has been fully tested and the rollout begins for real it is likely that both the backhauls used for the landline side of the data transfer will be improved drastically and the spectrum that will be available will have increased and therefore be able to handle the huge amounts of data traffic.
Source – Business Week