Why mobile broadband is so expensive?

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#857720 16-Jul-2013 21:43

sbiddle:
NonprayingMantis: NZ mobile broadband isn't really expensive by global standards.

But Finnish mobile broadband is just ridiculously cheap.

Which also raises the issue that many people forget about - the destination of the traffic. Finland is a very multilingual country because the small population means not everything is translated so people need to have a good understanding of other languages. I've been there a few times now and find most people to speak better English than most NZers.

If you look at somewhere like Japan as a comparison with such a small % of people understanding anything apart from Japanese a significant % of their internet traffic never leaves their shores.

a large % of finnish traffic probably doesnt go much further than sweden.....

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#857741 16-Jul-2013 22:40

TwoSeven:
freitasm: Mobile broadband has a significant difference to fixed line broadband: airwaves are limited in bandwidth and number of simultaneous connections when compared to fixed line.

A "national WiFi" network wouldn't help either because coverage from each access point is a lot smaller than a mobile cell site, and deployment costs would probably be a lot more than mobile. Also have you tried using a WiFi service these days? It's a lot more expensive than mobile.

I have not tried using one [wifi network] here because we don't have any. However, relatives use the Japanese ones and they seem to work fine. Being that the BT one appears to be free if one is a BT customer.

I don't hold with the airwaves are limited argument because it is only true of the device to the cell tower - everything from there I suspect is cable. It would be odd for a cell tower not to support a bucket load of connections at a time - if it didn't how would they cope with a stadium full of people at half time?

Sure, a cell tower supports a certain number of people. But the way things work, the more people in a cell tower, the smaller is the coverage area. Also the bandwidth in the airwaves is shared by everyone. You might get 40 Mbps if there are a handful of people in the cell tower, but as soon as you have a few thousand people sharing the bandwidth speeds will drop and coverage area will be smaller, requiring either more cell towers in some areas or different bands.

And we all know that a new cell tower incurs costs, environmental studies, licenses - and those NIMBY folks complaining they don't have coverage but don't want the towers either.

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#857796 17-Jul-2013 00:05

1080p: The question is, at what capacity are these finite airwaves at most of the time?

in Dunedin CBD with telecom, 7am 8Mbps down speed
12pm 0.05Mbps down speed

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#857815 17-Jul-2013 06:22

TwoSeven: I don't hold with the airwaves are limited argument because it is only true of the device to the cell tower - everything from there I suspect is cable. It would be odd for a cell tower not to support a bucket load of connections at a time - if it didn't how would they cope with a stadium full of people at half time?

Well you really should do. It's pointless continuing this dicussion if you're not going to accept the fundamentral basics when we try to explain to you why wireless is a finite resource.

The backhaul from a cellsite is a moot point - you can get DMR kit that does 1Gbps so it doesn't matter if it's cable or DMR backhaul. The same restrictions still apply to the PHY air interface.

If airwaves were an infinite resource as you're suggesting cell networks wouldn't implode at big events such as at a stadium.

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