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US Lags in Broadband

Today the Washington Post’s Foreign Bureau posted an interesting piece about broadband internet service in Japan and how it has outstripped American connectivity. The median download speed in Japan is 61 megabytes per second, while the average American’s throughput is about 2 mbps. Furthermore, the Japanese pay less for their net connections.

Why is that?

The Future of Mobile Communications?

Among the major mobile networks in this country only Sprint is investing in WiMax. Industry pundits, like Kim Hart in the Washington Post, have cast the move as an act of desperation, but it may turn out to be the next big step forward for mobile communications.

Currently the implementation of so-called 3G services with mobile devices leaves a lot to be desired. Anybody who has ever tried to download a music file directly to their mobile, or browse a web page on their Treo, knows that the experience is reminiscent of the old World Wide Wait as accessed through a 14.4 modem. Using the predominant CDMA networks, it amounts to the same thing: digital information from the web has to be rebroadcast over the cellular network before it can be received by mobile devices.

This is backwards. There’s only one network now: the internet. Locking devices to privately owned cellnets actually impedes the flow of information. Sprint’s move to WiMax is a bold step toward uniting mobile communications with the rest of the net. If it succeeds, carriers like Sprint will see a dramatic decline in operating costs and consumers may finally get mobile communications at a reasonable price.

Google’s announcement two weeks ago that it would support Sprint’s WiMax venture lent some net cred to the whole project. It also suggests that Google may be looking to end-run big telcos, like AT&T, who have been lobbying to institute pay-to-play internet access (see earlier Network Neutrality rants) .

All this remains to be seen, but the Sprint-Google WiMax project presents some interesting possibilities for the future of mobile communications.