Internet Service Go Anywhere

Internet service go anywhere? Can we get connected wherever we go? The answer is a resounding “maybe.” Just imagine: Your notebook computer has an antenna-equipped PC card, which enables you to access the Internet anywhere, any time, and what’s more, you’ll get download speeds that are more like those you’d associate with ISDN than with a 56-Kbps modem.

Internet service go anywhere, it’s coming, we’re told. Is it here? As attorneys like to say, “It depends.” In some metropolitan areas, the use of digital cellular telephone services for data transmission is exploding; one survey found that data transfers accounted for more than 60 percent of system traffic. But let’s get real. According to most of the verbiage you’ll read on this subject, the arrival of Internet-ready digital cellular telephony is being held back by two major factors: competition between two major and incompatible protocols (TDMA and CDMA) and the high cost of upgrading existing analog systems to one of the new, digital protocols.

Understanding cellular telephony World War II proved the usefulness of the walkie-talkie, a wireless communications service that enables mobile, two-way communication. (A wireless communications medium uses radio or infrared signals.) But a walkie-talkie signal weakens and finally disappears when you get out of range of the transmitting unit. In 1971, AT&T discovered a way to solve this problem: build a network of automatic repeating transmitters (called a cell site), each of which would broadcast a signal throughout a limited geographic area, called a cell. As a caller moves from one area to another, a new cell site automatically steps in to keep the signal strength strong. All cell sites are connected to a Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO), which in turn is connected to the standard PSTN telephone system.

Originally (and still predominantly) an analog system, cellular telephone service was introduced commercially in 1983. The original cellular telephony protocol, Advanced Mobile Phone Services (AMPS), defines the basic features of analog cellular service, including its 800-MHz transmission frequency. In 1985, only 90,000 subscribers made use of the new service. By late 2000, despite long-standing complaints about the poor quality of AMPS-based services, the number had grown to 102 million; since 1995, the subscriber base has been growing by an estimated 20 to 30 percent per year. These are numbers you’d associate with Internet growth.

Can the cellular phone system deliver universal, wireless Internet service? Although it’s possible to purchase a computer modem that’s compatible with today’s analog cellular services, performance ranges from poor to abysmal. Limited to 9600 bps in theory, actual performance is usually much worse, due to noise and interference—in many cases, you’re lucky to get 1200 bps, which puts you back into the mid- to late-1980s, modem-wise. Universal wireless Internet access isn’t going to happen with analog technologies, and it might not happen anytime soon with digital cellular technologies, either, as you’ll learn in this article – Internet service go anywhere.