Verizon Wireless and AT&T will both pay billions of dollars for the right to transmit signals over the airwaves that TV broadcasters abandon next year, when they pull the plug on their analog broadcasts. (Don’t worry. You’ll still be able to watch TV over the air. You just need one of those converter boxes you’ve been reading about so much about recently.)
Rather than just using that extra capacity for more of what they offer right now, both companies say they will use the new networks for very fast data transmission. Tests of the experimental technology they will use have transmitted data at speeds around 100 Mbs — about 20 times faster than cable Internet service.
Users probably won’t get anything like that in practice, but they should probably see at least 5 Mbs to start and as much as 20 Mbs as carriers fine tune the technology. The Internet, in other words, will be truly mobile in the very near future. Kids who are just being born today will think it very odd that people once had to wait till they were at home to get information.
Sadly, it won’t happen as fast as geeks like me would like. Both AT&T and Verizon are talking several years out (they don’t even get the new spectrum till next February).
If you can’t wait that long, Sprint is building WiMax networks (which use a competing technology to deliver really fast Internet connections to wireless devices) in many big cities, including Dallas. The company had hoped to roll that out by the end of this year, though there have been delays in its two test markets, Washington DC and Chicago.
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