I recently received a job offer to sell various wireless broadband services, I would be focusing most heavily on Sprint and Verizon, with a lesser attention on Clearwire.
I wanted to know what you folks thought of these services and whether they seemed like products I could honestly recommend to people. They seem remarkable to me. The Sprint and Verizon services are able to provide cable modem speeds with the portability and near reliability of a cellphone. Routers are even becoming available that can easily use the network cards for a home network.
What seems odd to me is that few folks seem to know about these services and the companies don’t seem to be pushing them at all. In fact there was some controversy with Sprint recently when the CEO was forced to resign. As understand it, it is largely because the stockholders were weary of his focusing on data services to the exclusion of the familiar voice.
Am I wrong in seeing this as a soon to explode product market?
Ever since I moved from Japan to the US, I find I have very little need or desire for mobile broadband. I had a pretty good system in Japan, a 3-lb mini-laptop with a 64kbps wireless system. I could get good reception pretty much anywhere in the Tokyo metropolitan area. And I made heavy use for it because working in Tokyo usually involves moving between different offices/campuses, spending idle time at train stations, etc. On the other hand, most Americans just drive to the office in the morning (same office every day), and drive home in the afternoon. They have broadband at both locations.
So I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t think mobile broadband would be as big as in Europe or Asia. It’ll eventually spread, but not until it’s competitive with cable internet in terms of both price and speed.
One of my customer’s has been using the Verizon service for two or three years, and had six or eight of their laptops equipped with the cards. They’re back down to two now, because the utility they got wasn’t justifying the money. From what I’ve seen, they run a minimum of about $50 per month.
My biggest complaint is that in my experience it isn’t wireless broadband, its wireless “slightly faster than dialup”. Although they constantly say they have speeds over 256 kbps (which just barely qualifies as broadband in my mind), I think the fastest I’ve ever measured in the real world was about 150kbps. It’s been about a year since I measured, maybe things are faster, but I doubt it’s that much different.
That speed is ok, and it beats not being connected at all, but it isn’t fast enough (for me, anyway) to use it as my only connection. So that means it would be $50 per month on top of my normal internet connections costs. With public access wireless becoming more common (coffee shops, grocery stores, restaurants, etc.) it isn’t that hard to get connected somewhere in a pinch.
And I think this is going to shortly become a fairly standard feature on cell phones, and be included in your monthly plan, at least for limited minutes, which could cover those “got to be connected now” emergencies.
All that being said, at the moment there is a market for this. If you travel a lot, and need to be sure you can get connected almost anywhere, this is a good way. Or if you’re not already paying for broadband connection and don’t mind the slower speed, this get’s you connected, and gives you mobility.
I just think it’s a limited market which may be shortly supplanted by other mechanisms.
You have been using the old Rev 0 standard. The new Rev A has connection speeds between 2 and 3 Mbit. I have seen it used with peoples Sling boxes without a hitch.