CLEAR Sailing for 4G Wireless

You’ve heard that 4G wireless is coming. Well, CLEAR is deploying 4G WiMAX wireless services right now. If you are one of the lucky ones living in an area where CLEAR WiMAX high speed wireless broadband Internet is available, you’ll enjoy bandwidth similar to what you get from DSL or Cable, but without the wires. Various plans are available for home, mobile or both.

So, what’s WiMAX and what is the difference between 3G and 4G? WiMAX is an international standard for wireless broadband service. It’s been described as WiFi with a city-wide coverage area. Technically there are a lot of differences between WiFi and WiMAX, but that’s probably how you’ll use it.

WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. It’s defined by IEEE standard 802.16. You’ll remember that WiFi is also an IEEE standard, 802.11. One difference between WiMAX and WiFi is that WiMAX uses licensed frequencies at high power. WiFi shares unlicensed frequencies with microwave ovens, Bluetooth headsets, cordless phones and other devices that operate at relatively low power levels. This is why you can get WiMAX in your car or at home, while WiFi disappears as soon as you drive away from the restaurant or leave your driveway.

Remember all the hoopla about kicking analog TV stations off the air so their channels could be sold to the highest bidder? Clearwire was one of the big winners in that spectrum auction and CLEAR WiMAX is the service they are offering on the channels they won. With no interference and towers transmitting powerful signals, WiMAX service can go for miles and even penetrate buildings. You’ll need a modem for your PC or MAC. It sits next to the computer on your desk or plugs into your WiFi router just like any other broadband modem. A WiMAX picks up its broadband Internet connection through the air. A smaller version looks like a USB memory stick and plugs into your laptop computer for mobile use. But WiMAX gives you service all over town, even in your car.

Isn’t that also true of 3G cellular broadband? Indeed it is. What WiMAX has to offer is generally higher speeds than 3G. That’s why it’s called 4G or fourth generation to indicate that it is a step up technically from 3G or third generation. How fast does WiMAX run? CLEAR says that the average expected download speeds are in the range of 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps, with occasional bursts up to 10 Mbps. Sustained rates of 3 to 6 Mbps are pretty rare for 3G mobile broadband.

Where is CLEAR WiMAX available? Right now it’s in selected areas of the country with more cities on the way as the build-out continues. The greatest concentration of service is in Texas, in almost a dozen cities. You’ll also find CLEAR in Hawaii, the Seattle-Portland area of the Pacific Northwest, Boise, Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Milledgeville, Georgia, and Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh, North Carolina.

Another advantage of CLEAR WiMAX 4G is cost. Plans start at $30 a month, which is less many DSL and Cable broadband plans and much less than 3G cellular broadband. Being wireless, the equipment is shipped to you and you install and activate it yourself. No waiting around for the cable guys. Plus you can get combined home and mobile service, which is something DSL and Cable can’t offer.

Does this sound like a broadband service you might like to have? If so, learn more and order your CLEAR WiMAX 4G broadband service online now.

Cricket Offers Advantages For Urban Dwellers

Do you like to talk and talk and talk on your cell phone? Or, do you massively text during your waking hours? Do you live in a metropolitan area? How about Internet? Do you spend a lot of time on the Internet away from your home or office? Ah, you might enjoy the cellular service deals that Cricket Wireless has to offer.

Cricket service is quite different from what you’ve come to expect in a cell phone carrier. First of all there are no contracts to sign. Second, most everything you do is on an unlimited basis. There is one notable exception that we’ll get to in a minute. The service bundles start at an advertised $30 and go up to $60 a month. They’re all for unlimited service. What differentiates them is what kind of services you get.

The cheapest service, $30 a month, gives you talk and Caller ID. This is for people who just can’t bear to have a cell phone and not be using it or those who’ve gone totally wireless and don’t even have a landline. Talk is local, not long distance. If you want unlimited long distance and text messaging you move up to the next tier plan at $35 a month.

As you move up the service plan food chain, features get added. These include call waiting, 3-way calling, voicemail, picture mail, Mexico text, Global text, 411 directory assistance and mobile Web. In the top two tiers you also get nationwide roaming.

What’s different about Cricket’s roaming is that it’s a package of minutes, not unlimited service like the usual talk, text and Web services. For urbanites that never venture out to the hinterlands, roaming is not something they need to worry about. But if you like road trips or live in a city surrounded by countryside, roaming is something you’ll need.

What roaming means is that your carrier doesn’t have any towers nearby. So your phone is set up to find a tower owned by another carrier that has agreed to serve your carrier’s customers. Your phone will tell you when you are roaming. If you don’t have roaming service on your plan, you’ll get no service at all. If you do have roaming you’ll be using minutes from that package, but at least you have service available from Grandma’s place over the river and through the woods.

Check the coverage maps for Cricket and you’ll see that they are focused on serving major population centers, with no service at all in states like Montana. Compare these maps to where you spend your time to decide on which, if any, Cricket service to buy.

Another thing you’ll want to do is enter your zip code to check the plan prices. When I did that, all of a sudden the higher cost packages were available for $5 a month discounts for my location. That’s a nice surprise.

You also need to declare your location to see what phones are available. Compared to other no contract cellular services, Cricket has some nice smartphones with full QWERTY keyboards, Stereo Bluetooth, high resolution cameras, music players with external dedicated controls, and streaming video capability. They also offer an aircard that provides 3G broadband to your laptop computer at a monthly fee lower than competing wireless services.

Are you a urbanite or suburbanite looking for unlimited mobile phone service at decent price with no contracts to sign? You should really take a close look at what Cricket Wireless has to offer.

Mobile Broadband Faster Than Optical?

The holy grail of broadband is fiber optic transmission, with it's potentially limitless bandwidth. In practical applications such as FTTH, that backbone bandwidth is divvied up as it is delivered to homes and businesses on passive optical networks. Verizon FiOS, the leader in FTTH, now offers up to 50 Mbps download with 20 Mbps upload in selected areas. That's nearly an order of magnitude above most Cable broadband and DSL, and way beyond the capability of mobile broadband. Or is it?

According to a recent report, cell phone manufacturer Ericsson has tested LTE mobile broadband technology to peak speeds of 130 Mbps with growth possibilities to 260 Mbps. Wow! Wireless broadband in the hundreds of Megabits per second. Where do I sign up?

Well, not so fast. When they say that LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, they mean it. LTE is the 4G or fourth generation wireless data standard intended to replace current technologies such as EDGE or HSDPA on GSM cellular networks. AT&T is a prime candidate and T-Mobile is likely to follow.

Ericsson's proof of concept testing used the maximum of 4 transmit streams received by 4 MIMO antennas over 10 MHz channels. MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna technology improves wireless performance when there is interference present, as there will be in any mobile situation, especially in metro areas. By doubling the channel bandwidth to 20 Mbps, the transmission rate could peak near 300 Mbps.

So what would you do with 130 Mbps, much less 260 Mbps? It seems unlikely that you'll need this capability for text messaging or even Web browsing. Think high definition TV or HDTV video conferencing. Business users will be able to download massive files while on the road and easily run applications remotely. Plus, who knows what the future will bring? So far, technology development has shown that we can quickly find uses for any amount of processor speed, memory, hard drive capability or bandwidth that is offered. It isn't necessarily what you're doing now, but what you might do tomorrow that counts.

Tomorrow is where LTE is targeted. Remember that AT&T has just started offering the 3G iPhone running on its HSDPA network. They're going to need some breathing time before getting their tower sites upgraded to LTE. But not too much breathing time. Sprint's WiMAX is out to capture the early lead in 4G with its Xohm WiMAX network that has just started operations in Baltimore. Ericsson expects LTE to start becoming available in the latter part of next year.

Even so, it will be some time before the 4G networks will be offering 100 Mbps bandwidth to their customers. Right now, affordable 3G technology is available in the 1 to 3 Mbps range using plug-in aircards for laptop computers and built into selected mobile phones. Check out the complete selection of current offerings at Cell Phone Plans Finder now.