Verizon tiered plans charge $10 to $100 per GB for data overages

Now that Verizon has released its tiered data plans for tablets, smartphones and USB modems, you're probably wondering what the company will charge you for data overages. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that it all depends on what data plan you're using.
Verizon tiered LTE plans fuel "bill shock" debate
Data plans for tablets, mobile hotspots, netbooks and notebooks offer the least-expensive data overage fees, clocking in at $10 to $20 per extra GB consumed. Smartphone users, on the other hand will pay around $51.20 per extra GB consumed, although it's far less likely that smartphone users will consume as much excess data as tablet users. The most expensive overage charge will be for Verizon's 250MB 3G USB modem plan, as subscribers on that plan will have to pay $102.40 per extra GB consumed. Verizon also offers a 5GB 3G USB modem plan that charges $51.20 per extra GB consumed.
The wireless industry has recently started moving away from all-you-can-eat wireless data plans and toward tiered service plans. AT&T got the ball rolling earlier this year when they announced they were dropping unlimited data plans for the iPhone in favor of plans that offered between 200MB and 2GB of data consumption per month. Verizon shortly followed suut by saying it would implement a similar pricing scheme for its 4G LTE services that are due to launch later this year. Verizon COO Lowell McAdam hinted earlier this year that LTE plans would give users a certain amount of data they could consume every month before they would have to pay overage fees.
Not all U.S. carriers are on board with metered wireless data consumption, however. Earlier this year Sprint 4G Vice President Todd Rowley explained that Sprint would be reluctant to implement 4G data caps after it experimented with 5GB data caps on its 3G EV-DO Rev. A network. Rowley said that the company found many customers becoming worried about using data after implementing the cap, meaning there was less consumption of data on the network overall.

Verizon announces release date for iPad

Verizon Wireless recently announced it will begin selling Apple's iPad in retail stores on October 28. The move is causing some to further speculate the partnership paves the way for a Verizon iPhone.

But the iPad will not be offered to run Verizon's 3G network. Instead, the company is bundling the tablet with its MiFi mobile hotspot modem.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Verizon Wireless to get iPad into the hands of even more customers this holiday season,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer.

According to the Washington Post, customers can purchase the iPad with the hotspot bundle for $629.99 for the 16GB model, $729.99 for the 32GB model and $829.99 for the 64GB model. The company will also offer the tablet without the MiFi bundle for those who choose to use the device with personal or public wireless networks.

Rumors of a Verizon and Apple partnership picked up steam at the recent Cellular Telephone Industries Association conference in San Francisco. There, reports resurfaced of iPhone coming to Verizon in early 2011. Some believe the provider may offer the iPhone following the deployment of its LTE 4G network, set to begin at the end of this year.

Verizon Tiered Data Plan Starts Oct. 28, Runs Through Holidays

Verizon Wireless will offer a 150MB smartphone data plan for $15 per month starting Oct. 28, a source with knowledge of the plans confirmed Monday.

The tiered pricing option is part of a holiday promotion and will continue through December, the source said.

Verizon's $29.99 unlimited monthly data plan will still be available.

News of the new data plans first surfaced Monday morning on Engadget. The blog said users on the $15 data plan will incur $0.01 overage charges for every additional MB consumed. It also said Verizon will ditch its $9.99 25MB option for feature phones but keep the $1.99 "pay as you go" per MB plan.

Last week, Verizon announced that it would start selling the Wi-Fi version of Apple's iPad at its retail locations starting Oct. 28. The tablets will be bundled with the Verizon MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot in pricing packages that range from $629.99 to $829.99.

Users can purchase 1GB of data for $20, 3GB of data for $35, or 5GB for $50, according to a FAQ about the iPad promotion. Users on the 1GB plan will be charged $20 for each extra gigabyte they consume, while those on the 3GB and 5GB will be charged a $10 overage per gigabyte. Engadget said Tuesday that Verizon will also offer 10GB for $80, also with a $10 overage fee.

For MiFi, FiveSpot, and integrated notebook and netbook modem owners, Verizon will offer 5GB for $50 and 10GB for $80, with $10 overages per gigabyte, Engadget said. USB modem prices will stay the same.

In June, AT&T revamped its data plans and introduced two tiered pricing plans: 200MB for $15 per month and 2GB for $25 per month. Tethering is also available for $20 per month. Existing customers with unlimited data plans, however, can keep them for now.

Verizon Details LTE Launch Plans

—Verizon Wireless took the lid off plans for its nationwide LTE network launch Wednesday at the CTIA Enterprise & Applications show, unveiling 38 cities and 110 million people the network will cover by the end of the year. That's 70 percent of the U.S. population. Lowell McAdam, president and COO of Verizon, didn't specify what device or devices will be offered at network launch but did say there would be USB modems, tablet computers and handsets announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show in early January. There have been reports a USB modem will be available for the initial launch.
The 38 initial markets, which include most major metropolitan areas as well as some medium-sized markets, are more than what Verizon had initially hinted. Earlier this year, the carrier said the LTE network, which uses 700 MHz spectrum, would cover 25 to 30 markets with 100 million people by the end of the year.
Detroit is one of the metro areas not initially covered. McAdam said that's because of cross-border interference that needs to be resolved.
As an introduction to his LTE announcement, McAdam said he thinks the wireless industry finally is "on the cusp" of a wireless data revolution. He said LTE will enable a rapid expansion of wireless data that will transform smart offices, transportation and "billions of smart connections" with machine-to-machine communications. Verizon's LTE network, he said, will have a major in-building penetration advantage that will "connect people, places and things in ways that are much richer and multi-dimensional."
In addition to the 38 metropolitan areas, Verizon's LTE network also will cover 60 commercial airports, McAdam said. The carrier also has been working with rural operators to make its spectrum available for their shared use, he said, and has reached agreements with five of these rural operators already. Discussions are underway with a dozen more rural operators, with about 200 rural operators interested.
"This is a significant shift for the industry," he said.
In a nod to the future, McAdam also said Verizon Wireless will scratch its "walled garden" approach because "in a 4G world, we need to turn that guarded model inside out." The operator will transform its business model, he said, because it realizes that innovation in applications and use will come from outside the company.  Verizon will open its network, applications and location technologies to outside developers, he said, although not specifying exactly how that transformation will take place.
He cited partnerships Verizon already has developed with companies like Google, Skype and others as "the building blocks for the future."
Verizon's trials with LTE has shown "amazing performance," McAdam said, including average throughput of 5 to 12 mbps on the downlink, 2 to 5 mbps on the uplink and latency of 30 milliseconds. "Those two things make LTE so transformative," he said, by providing near-real time response for gaming, commerce, surveillance, dispatch and response to natural disasters.
In a news conference, McAdam declined to say if Verizon Wireless will soon launch the Apple iPhone, but said a device like that could benefit from the kind of data rates LTE will offer.
McAdam said the LTE network will cover 200 million people in 2012 and 285 million in 2013, which would equal the current 3G network coverage. "The exciting thing about the C-Block (700 MHz) spectrum we bought is that it covers virtually the whole country," he said.
At the news conference, McAdam said pricing for the LTE network will be announced closer to the network launch. But he did say Verizon likely will shift its pricing away from unlimited data plans because spectrum is a finite resource.
The executive also said the 39th market will be West Lafayette, Ind., the home of Purdue University. That's because Purdue is working with the operator to have a fully integrated wireless campus, including new applications for its faculty and students. Other universities also likely will work with Verizon on campus LTE networks, he said.

Verizon Announces ZTE Fivespot

Verizon has announced the Thursday launch of the ZTE Fivespot with GlobalAccess support.  The modem features EVDO Rev A support for domestic access along with quadband GSM/EDGE and tri-band US HSPA support with built-in Wi-Fi radio for sharing the connection with up to 5 people.  The unit will cost $199.99 after a new 2 year agreement before an additional $100 mail-in rebate, bringing the total to $99.99.
Verizon has also announced prepaid and postpaid service plans for the modem/router starting at $39.99 monthly access for 250 MB of monthly access with a $0.10/MB overage, $59.99 monthly access for 5 GB monthly access with a$0.05/MB overage, prepaid access at $15 for 100 MB (one day of use), $30 for 300 MB (one week of use), $50 for 1 GB (30 days of use) or $80 for 5 GB (30 days of use).
International access starts at $129.99 monthly access for 5 GB of monthly
access in the United States and Canada at a $0.05/MB overage and 100 MB of access in select countries at a $0.005/KB after the first 100MB and $219.99 for the same domestic 5 GB allowance for the United States and Canada at $0.05/MB overage with an increased 200 MB allowance in select countries at the same $0.005/KB after the first 200MB. GlobalAccess Pay Per Use for occasional use must also be purchased with a $59.99 Mobile Broadband service plan. The Pay Per Use rate is $0.002/KB in Canada, $0.005/KB in Mexico, and $0.02/KB in more than 200 other destinations.

Samsung Galaxy Tab Will Be on Every Major Carrier (There's a Wi-Fi Version Too)

Samsung's Galaxy Tab—which still sounds more like a horrendous soft drink with a movie tie-in than an Android tablet—is coming to every major carrier this year. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.
It's "arriving in time for holiday shopping," according to Samsung. What they're not talking about is price: How much the Tab is going to cost, and how much it'll cost after the carriers knock off a couple hundred bucks in exchange for tying yourself to them for two years.
They're calling it a "premium" device though, so expect slightly 'spensive, even if you go with the Wi-Fi only version. Dear God, let the Sprint version have 4G (Update: Nope. Boooo.).

This is what Samsung's Media Hub looks like on the Tab. Media Hub is like their version of iTunes, but for video—you can rent or buy movies and TV shows, and share them with up to 5 other Media Hub devices (right now, other Galaxy devices).

Okay, some fresh impressions. It's more like a tall, skinny Kindle than it is a small iPad. (It's like half an iPad, and weighs half as much too.) It's widescreen, with a relatively pixel-dense screen versus the iPad, since it's cramming about the same amount of pixels into a tighter space. So, as a straight reading device in terms of the screen, size and portability, it's probably going to be a better experience. (Thank you Kindle app.)
The size works well enough for the Tab insofar as it's scaling up Android 2.2 and that the relatively small jump from, say, a 4.3-inch phone to a 7-inch tablet means everything pretty much works without having to use a whole new UI. So, a lot of Android looks the same, just bigger. And it works, usually—in Gmail, in the Android Market, in the home screen, the Kindle app. (However, the Weather Channel app refused to scale up, so it looked like an iPhone app running on the iPad, with a black border around it.)
The UI itself, Samsung's enhancements work better here than I think they do on a phone—like the iPhone-like app screen, with pages of apps, versus the standard Android infinite scroll. The Media Hub looks pretty crappy and third-rate, on the other hand. It's pretty quick too, about as fast compared to fast Android phones as the iPad was relative to the iPhone. Android 2.2 is a lot of the reason why—I think Android 2.1 could've got painful, quick.
It's definitely got the potential to be something, if nothing else.

T-Mobile HSPA+ to hit 19 cities with new modem

T-Mobile's HSPA+ service should get a major expansion in just over a week, including a new netbook to match, if a tip this evening is accurate. The 21Mbps access would reach 19 new coverage areas on July 21, ranging from major cities in Ohio and Texas to the island of Hawaii and cities such as Baltimore, Kansas City, Portland and Washington, DC. It would represent one of the largest expansions of the faster 3G since it launched.
BGR hears the new network's activation would be met by the new webConnect 2.0 modem, which improve the overall design and add Mac support. Dell's subsidized Mini 10 will also make an appearance, although here it would come with a USB webConnect modem rather than have HSPA+ built-in.

T-Mobile currently has the fastest available cellular Internet access in the US as Sprint's 4G doesn't peak beyond 10Mbps in real conditions. AT&T is only just starting its HSPA+ deployment and will top at 14.4Mbps, and Verizon's 4G will be faster but won't be commercially available until the end of the year.

http://adf.ly/3x0j

Nokia to Fight Back in Smartphones, but Without the Android OS

While Nokia continues to struggle in the US mobile market, the Finnish-based company has voiced plans to "fight back" in the smartphone space, and it won't be adopting Google's Android OS for any of its phones.
"I am committed, perhaps even obsessed, with getting Nokia back to being number one in high-end devices. Achieving this will require performance and efforts over and above the norm," wrote Anssi Vanjoki, head of a newly created Solutions unit at Nokia, in a recent blog post called "The Fightback Starts Now."
Despite the widening popularity of Android as an alternative application development platform to Apple's highly successful iPhone , the Android OS is not part of Nokia's roadmap, according to the new appointee.
"Symbian and MeeGo are the best software for our smartest devices. As such, we have no plans to use any other software. Despite rumors to the contrary, there are no plans to introduce an Android device from Nokia," he wrote.
Wireless Modem Deal Another Sign of Nokia's Urgency
Only days after Vanjoki's post, Nokia raised $200 million by selling off its wireless modem business to Japanese semiconductor manufacturer Renesas. The deal with Renesas calls for 1,100 Nokia R&D staffers to be transferred to Renesas, in addition to an undisclosed number of patents around wireless modem technology.

This deal hardly represents the first time that Nokia has switched gears over the years. Originally established in 1865 as a paper mill, Nokiia has also played in myriad other industries, including cable, rubber, TVs, aluminum, and even footwear. Yet the selloff of Nokia's wireless modem arm seems to be another sign of the urgency of Nokia's intentions around catching up in smartphones.
Nokia Strives To Do Better in the U.S.
Although Nokia continues to dominate the world cell phone market, the Finnish company has kept lagging farther behind in the U.S. In one recent survey, for example, comScore ranked mobile phones based on their share of usage by current mobile subscribers aged 13 and over. For the three-month period ending April 30 of this year, Nokia fell 1 percentage point from January of this year to an 8.1% U.S. share, behind Samsung at 22.1%, LG at 21.8%, Motorola at 21.6%, and Research in Motion (RIM) at 8.4%.
Some analysts place the blame on Nokia's long-time refusal to go along with the desire of U.S. carriers for control over how cell phones look and behave. Nokia lost out before, for example, by clinging to a candy-bar-style form factor when U.S. consumers and phone companies started to prefer flip phones. Also, most Nokia phones have been designed to operate on the global standard, GSM, instead of the dominant U.S. standard, CDMA.
In recent years, Nokia has been singing a somewhat different tune, opening and maintaining offices in the U.S. to be close to the offices of AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile USA have all been selling Nokia feature phones.
New Nokia Smartphones
Yet Nokia has had little success bringing its best smartphones to U.S. carriers. Among the few exceptions to this are the Nokia E73 Mode recently released by T-Mobile and the Nokia E71x from AT&T.
These models include an HTML Web browser; GPS turn-by-turn voice navigation; e-mail and messaging; video sharing; and downloadable tools, games, and other apps.
For the most part, though, U.S customers interested in Nokia's smartphones had to buy them directly from Nokia, either at a Nokia retail store or over the Web, at unsubsidized pricing that might amount to $500 to $600.
In his blog post, Nokia's Vanjoki said that Nokia plans to release the Nokia N8, the first Nokia smartphone based on the Symbian 3 OS, over the coming months. "We also plan to deliver our first MeeGo device this year," he noted. Vanjoki did not say if or when these new smartphones will be offered through U.S. wireless carriers.

http://adf.ly/3tWk

Sony Adds MiFi Feature to Notebooks

The MiFi revolutionized sharing 3G data connections with other devices by combining a Wi-Fi router with a 3G modem in a little form. Sony has not ignored the popularity of the MiFi and is adding the capability to its VAIO Y and Z series of laptops. This new feature effectively turns select VAIO notebooks into very big (and expensive) MiFi units that share the integrated 3G connection with up to five other devices over Wi-Fi.

Dubbed “Share My Connection” by Sony, the feature will be available June 20 on select VAIO Y and Z notebooks. Activating 3G service with Verizon will be required to take advantage of this new feature.

So Long, Unlimited Data: Verizon Wants Tiered 4G Plans

Yesterday, Verizon Wireless big boss Lowell McAdam told investors that when 4G hits, unlimited data plans won't make sense anymore. Instead, buying "buckets" of data—where you'd purchase a set number of monthly megabytes—is the model of the future.

Just to be clear: segmented data plans like that might be ideal for Verizon Wireless, but they're the opposite for consumers who'll have to shell out overage fees. Especially when McAdam also conceded that the cost of carrying 1MB of data over LTE will be half to a third that of 3G data transfer.

Some brighter news came out of the talk: Verizon's expecting three to five 4G handsets on their network in the first half of 2011, with calls originating from LTE phones being carried over VoIP by 2012.

But the main message: a shift in networks means a shift in billing policy. I guess tiered data plans have been inevitable for some time now. I just didn't know it would be quite this depressing to see them looming on the near horizon. [Financial Times via Engadget]

Verizon Wireless announces LG Ally

Watched Iron Man 2 already? Well, you would probably have seen LG made an appearance early in the movie when Tony was facing off with Senator Stern, where he hijacked the rest of the video transmission system using his touchscreen, translucent LG handset from the future. Well, many of us won’t mind toting one of those, but too bad it is just a concept at this point in time – perhaps in a decade, we could see an equivalent hit the market. After all, we’re pretty sure that many of us were amazed at the multi-touch interface seen in Minority Report a few years back, and it is nice to know that technology has caught on recently, with a plethora of devices going the multi-touch way. Back to the topic at hand, the LG Ally will arrive at Verizon Wireless Communications Stores from May 20th onwards, making it the first Android device from LG in the US. For those who can’t wait, pre-orders can be placed from today onwards.

What can you expect from the LG Ally when it arrives next week? For starters, how about a stunning ergonomic silver-and-black outer case that holds a large 3.2″ tempered glass touch screen display with touch vibration for tactile feedback? Apart from that, you might be more comfortable churning out that long awaited document by the boss while you’re on-the-go thanks to the full slide-out QWERTY keyboard that will work in tandem with touch screen capabilities at the same time. Need more storage space? Not a problem, since the microSD memory card slot can cater up to another 16GB of memory. Apart from that, you can also stay connected to the Internet thanks to its Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) connectivity, while Bluetooth 2.1 capability lets you play nice with a bunch of devices and functions without missing a beat. You can also use the LG Ally as an MP3 player, while enjoying speaker-independent voice commands when the situation calls for it.

Apart from that, you can also access the Android Market and access up to 38,000 apps, while its luminous sensor was specially designed to adjust LCD backlight brightness depending on light conditions, helping you save battery power in the process. A proximity sensor will make sure the touch screen remains locked if it hasn’t done so already while talking on the phone, and A-GPS support will enhance location accuracy in addition to turn-by-turn directions from Google Maps. You can snap 3.2-megapixel photos with the Ally or shoot videos with it. Expect the LG Ally to retail for $99.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate and agreeing to a 2-year contract.

Press Release

Why Streaming Video Over 3G Sucks

The thing about wirelessly streaming video to millions and millions of phones is that it's, like, hard.

Wireless vs. Wired

Why is it, you might be wondering, that wireless speeds can't just zoom zoom, faster faster, the way that Verizon or Comcast seem to press a button and magically, new, faster internet speeds appear. Well, for one, it's not that magical—even cable and fiber optic "wired" broadband costs billions of dollars per year for new internet pipe, with plenty of griping from carriers about videos and torrents and other bandwidth hoggery, hence all the buzz about net neutrality.

But there are more demanding constraints when it comes to wireless broadband:

• Speed: No matter what happens, wired technologies will be faster than wireless, because electrical impulses guided upon a wire, or optical impulses running through fiber, are more efficient than radio waves scattering themselves into the air in the hope of getting picked up.

• Reliability: Even when you can consistently pick up wireless signal, its strength may vary, not just because of how close you are to the cell tower or Wi-Fi hotspot, but because radio is blocked by the foliage on the trees, or the water in an aquarium.

• Cost: Delivering the same bandwidth wirelessly will always be more expensive, because radio waves—due to the above constraints—require massive amounts of power to work well. As we'll see, there's also a matter of paying for the right to use radio waves, a privilege that is only granted after payouts in the billions of dollars.

If that sounds a bit remedial, it's supposed to: Wireless always, always lags behind wired. Think of how much faster gigabit ethernet is compared to Wireless N. It's just how the world works. But people want wireless connections, in their pockets, for obvious reasons. What we're talking about is why it's so hard to pull off well.

What's Coming

See that chart up above? That's the growth of data traffic on AT&T's network over the past four years. Despite all the email, photos, music, tweets, apps and voice data traveling across the network, the single largest type of traffic is video. Funny thing is, the true video explosion hasn't happened yet.

What do I mean by that? Well, take Netflix's Watch Instantly streaming video service, for example. Right now, the only mobile device it's available on is the iPad, with an iPhone app promised by the end of the year. But Netflix's vision is to be on basically every device with a screen. Imagine a world where every phone, millions and millions of them, can stream nearly any movie over the air. Where phones with bigger, better, higher res screens demand serious quality video to take advantage of the extra pixels. Multiply that by apps current or future apps for Hulu, SlingPlayer, ABC, CBS, NBC, HBO, Vimeo, and oh yeah, YouTube.

Not to mention streaming video from phones, which are on the verge of universally breaching HD quality recording. Today, Microsoft's Kin phones—running on Verizon's 3G network—automatically upload every 5- and 8-megapixel photo, every 720p video you record, to the cloud. They're just the first, to be sure.

Two years from now, that bar at the far right of the chart may appear as tiny as the one at the beginning, compared to the traffic that's coming.

There are three major constraints on streaming video to a mobile device over the air: wireless spectrum, backhaul, and the device itself.

Need More Spectrum, Dude

Wireless spectrum, while invisible, is not an infinite resource. In fact, it's pretty damn constricted, at least in crowded urban areas.

To radically simplify it, an easy way to think about spectrum is kind of like a highway, divided into lanes. In the US, the FCC designates who and what's allowed to travel in each lane. (Check out the FCC's spectrum dashboard to see who owns what spectrum where.) The FCC typically divides the spectrum into "blocks" (stick with the mixed metaphor here) that are 10- or 20-MHz wide (so a carrier would get, say, a slice from 700MHZ to 710MHz). A standard configuration is for a carrier is to use half of each block to send a signal, and half to receive (outbound and inbound traffic). Each lane/block can only carry so much traffic. So when you get a ton of people pumping a ton of stuff over the airwaves in a small area, you run into issues.

The solution, though, is not simply to build more cell towers for a given frequency ad infinitum—it doesn't actually create more wireless spectrum in the universe for signals to travel on, and in fact, if you crowd too many towers too close together, you get bunch of noise and interference. Basically, you don't paint extra lines on a freeway in order to make way for more cars.

The best solution, from a carrier perspective, is to get more spectrum allotted from the FCC. Typically the rights have to be purchased for billions of dollars, as you might've noticed during the frenzied devouring of the 700MHz block by AT&T and Verizon for their upcoming 4G LTE networks. The thing about 4G is that is uses really fat channels—really wide lanes—which is why they can transfer data really fast.

As a side note, not all spectrum is the same: If you remember your high-school physics, lower frequencies travel farther with less energy, and penetrate buildings better too. As such, they are better suited for sharing massive amounts of wireless data, hence the popularity of the 700MHz block, for carriers who generally deal with spectrum from 1700MHz to 2100MHz.

No matter how many FCC auctions, limited spectrum availability for carriers dealing with a data tsunami is going to continue to be an issue—Clearwire says a 120MHz-wide slice of contiguous spectrum is what's needed for legit mobile broadband. The wireless industry association CTIA says the whole industry needs about 800MHz of spectrum total, as opposed to around 400MHz currently allotted. That's why part of the FCC's national broadband plan is to reallocate 300MHz more for mobile broadband in the next five years.

Need More Backhaul, Dude

Next up is backhaul, which is basically the connection between cell towers and the rest of the network. Even if a carrier had a virtually infinite amount of spectrum to carry all of that data back and forth between phones and towers in a fantasy world with exceptional signal strength and no interference, they'd still need fat pipes running from each and every cell tower.

Without decent backhaul, cell towers will run into the same kind of congestion problems you run into at home when you're trying to torrent more than your internet connection can handle. Everything slows down, and it sucks. The problem is that a huge portion of the cell towers in the country are still connected using slow copper lines, and running fiber backhaul to them is expensive. (No carrier will reveal how much of their backhaul is actually fiber for competitive reasons.)

There is also the option of a wireless microwave backhaul, but it requires cell towers that are in the same line of sight, and at some point the data still has to go wired.

The Phones, They Are Puny

The final constraint on delivering streaming video over the air? The phones themselves. Sure, the chips inside of them may technically support wireless broadband speeds of 3.6 or 7.2Mbps, or even faster, but actual speeds tend to be about half of their theoretical maximum, in part because running full blaze would kill their batteries that much faster. And remember those phones with the antennas you had to yank out? Tech may have gotten better, but those antennas went away for mostly cosmetic reasons—we'd be better off with big old metal wands sticking up out of our Droids and iPhones.

Let's Talk About the Video

Okay, so let's talk a bit about the actual video, and the ways it gets it to you. As it turns out, there are actually special standards in place for mobile video that are a bit different from the more familiar standards for the general internet, since they're designed specifically for phones. But, with phones getting better and better at handling the real web—since they're just very personal computers—a shift is happening, so that mobile standards are more like the real internet.

Some of the most standard, um, standards are defined by the 3GPP and 3GPP2—the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (roughly, GSM stuff, so in the USA, T-Mobile and AT&T) and 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (roughly, CDMA stuff, concerning Verizon and Sprint)—which lays out standards and specifications for telecommunications things, including mobile phone multimedia. In fact, they even have specified container formats for audio and video (the file candy coatings around the codec center, like h.264 or MPEG-4 or MP3) called 3GP (defined by the 3GPP for GSM phones) and 3G2 (designed by the 3GPP2 for CDMA phones) that most 3G phones can play.

More importantly, though, is the 3GPP's specification for a packet-switched streaming service—explained in great detail here (PDF)—and its protocols like Real Time Streaming Protocol and the Real Time Transfer Protocol (RTSP and RTP), which define one of the major frameworks used to stream video to mobile phones. The main thing to know about is that they're designed to be global standards, and they're built to adapt to wildly varying network conditions, adjusting bitrates on the fly. And if a carrier or service is serving 3GPP video to mobile phones, they need special servers to do it.

But because of wirelessly connected netbooks and devices like the iPad, more and more video comes over mobile networks in the form of good ol' HTTP. The hyper-text transfer protocol—the basis of all web browsers—comes in two general flavors. There's non-adaptive HTTP streaming, which is incredibly simple, just a stream pumped out at a given bitrate, no matter what the network conditions. Trouble is, it's so simple, you're apt to see plenty of stutters and freeze-ups if your network connection suddenly goes south.

HTTP adaptive streaming is what it sounds like, a smarter take on HTTP streaming that it adapts in real time to network conditions, switching to different bitrates depending on what the current bandwidth situation is like. It doesn't require a special server, either. It's actually what Apple uses as its standard for streaming video over-the-air to the iPhone and iPad. (They call it HTTP live streaming.) Microsoft has its own spin, called smooth streaming.

A quick word on codecs. Just like much of the internet has anointed h.264 as the standard for internet video, so goes mobile video. Verizon and SlingPlayer, for instance, both currently use WMV for their streams, but without promising anything, Verizon says "h.264 looks like it's got a lot of promise," while Sling says they're definitely moving to h.264 (as they already have on the iPhone), since it's a "tighter codec" that'll help them use a little bit less bandwidth and support hardware accelerated decoding. Of course, Apple's HTTP live streaming only supports h.264, so if you use an app that streams video over 3G, it's coming via HTTP live streaming, and it's encoded in h.264.

(In case you were curious, most of the 3GPP video is encoded in h.263 MPEG-4, with AMR audio, but it's gradually shifting to h.264, too.)

An Alternative Approach to Streaming

So, there are two broad approaches to get video to you—unicasting and multicasting. Unicasting is what I mostly described above, and what you're probably most familiar with, actually. When you look at a YouTube video, pull up a Netflix stream, watch a video on a site, or any kind of standard internet video, it's probably unicast—it's going to you on demand, from start to finish. Multicast, on the other hand, is basically broadcasting—it's being pumped out there continuously for any number of people to pick up. It works best for live events, like news or sports, but if you don't jump in at the start of an event, you'll miss something.

The most prolific of the multicasters in the US is Qualcomm's MediaFLO, which exists as a separate service, and is offered through Verizon's VCAST and AT&T's Mobile TV. It requires specific phones with MediaFLO-support, since they need the MediaFLO receiver and decoder chipset. The basic flow, if you will, is that Qualcomm takes content from a broadcaster, sends it out to its own national network of broadcast towers, and phones can tune in—just like broadcast TV, but beamed using the FLO protocol.

The advantage of multicasting is that it's extremely scalable: For crazy live events—say, the Super Bowl or World Cup—it's no more demanding to serve video to a million phones than it is to ten thousand phones. And since MediaFLO uses Qualcomm's own setup, it takes strain off of the main cell network for the carriers. That's why Qualcomm sees MediaFLO as complementary to the growing availability of streaming on-demand internet video.

The Current State of Video

What kind of video are we actually getting today, anyway? Does it actually look decent? Well, here's a brief assessment.

Verizon's VCAST service adapts to the device—meaning they have to encode a single video several times at varying quality levels—so at the top end, a phone like the HTC Incredible would get a stream at around 256kbps and 15fps and Verizon is exploring going higher, up to 400kbps with 30fps. AT&T still prefers 3GPP video, since most of its phones support it, streamed at bitrates between 64-200kbps. Qualcomm's MediaFLO broadcasts a single stream of 320x240 stream. And Apple's HTTP live streaming specs for cell networks—which every video streaming app for iPhone and iPad has to use, from Netflix to Sling—run from 64kbps to 240kbps. All of them are a long, long way from HD.

Netflix over 3G is actually impressively watchable today. But with 4G networks—LTE and WiMax—and new devices with faster, more energy efficient processors, a near-future where we're all streaming near-HD video anywhere and everywhere isn't so far away, if you squint hard enough.

You know, unless we really do explode the internet.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about streaming video, sprinkling, or squirting here, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

The FCC's New Plan for Broadband (and Why Nobody's Happy About It)

The FCC was told fairly bluntly it doesn't have the power to mandate net neutrality. So! Time for a new plan.

The problem, as FCC Chairman Genachowski sees it, is that the FCC can keep trying to regulate stuff using indirect authority (which sucks because it doesn't go far enough, as the chairman sees it), or they could reclassify internet communications, so that the FCC has direct authority, but that would mean ISPs would have crazy new regulatory requirements (which sucks because it goes too far down the regulatory road).

Hence, the third way, which tries to neatly slip between the two extremes by breaking broadband up into different components, subject to different regulations, giving the FCC what the chairman says is "modest authority" over broadband, shoring up the shaky legal ground its internet powers sit on following the Comcast decision:

• Recognize the transmission component of broadband access service-and only this component-as a telecommunications service;
• Apply only a handful of provisions of Title II (Sections 201, 202, 208, 222, 254, and 255) that, prior to the Comcast decision, were widely believed to be within the Commission's purview for broadband;
• Simultaneously renounce-that is, forbear from-application of the many sections of the Communications Act that are unnecessary and inappropriate for broadband access service; and
• Put in place up-front forbearance and meaningful boundaries to guard against regulatory overreach.

The main point being that under this plan, "the transmission component" of broadband falls under the FCC's direct authority—not any of the actual content on the internet, or how much it costs—which the FCC says wouldn't change much for ISPs, since it's narrowly targeted (it "would not give the FCC greater authority than the Commission was understood to have pre-Comcast"), but at the same time, it would let the FCC move forward on the things it needs to do, like work on the national broadband plan. The upshot is that while broadband wouldn't be regulated as tightly as say, telephone service, the FCC is interested in applying a limited form of net neutrality, limiting the ability of ISPs to discriminate against particular services or applications or websites.

Broadband providers hate it, as the NYT and WSJ show, because they think it goes too far, with Verizon saying it's "legally unsupported," and Republicans apparently passing around proposed legislation from a year ago that would ban the FCC from regulating the internet. And so do the hardcore pro-net neutrality groups, thinking the FCC isn't grabbing the authority it really needs, like Public Knowedge. Well, you know, you can't make everybody happy.

Though re-watching this clip of Al Franken reaming Comcast's CEO is still pretty entertaining. [NYT, WSJ, Broadband.gov]

Droid's Android 2.1 update going to 'a small number' of users tomorrow

Possibly confirming those leaks suggesting that the first volley of Droid updates to Android 2.1 would be limited to just a quarter million folks, Verizon just shot out a statement to let everyone know that the over-the-air push is "being deployed to a small number of Verizon Wireless test users tomorrow afternoon." Beyond that, no dates are given for the rest of us to get in on the action -- probably because Verizon and Motorola need to see how the first group manages before sending out the remainder -- so for the moment, just hope that you're one of these incredibly blessed "test users" and stay tuned.

Verizon

Nexus One shipments headed to Verizon, Vodafone soon?

Not much here in the way of verifiable detail but we're hearing that a CDMAified Nexus One is en route to Verizon (or Google's warehouses, anyway) from HTC's factories. The Economic Daily News (EDN) adds that Verizon will begin to "market" Google's superphone this month or in April at the earliest which lends some credibility to that March 23rd date tossed about previously. As for the Vodafone branded handset; EDN says HTC will ship it "soon" -- something we've been hearing since January.

DigiTimes

First Verizon Wireless 4G Phone Could Appear Mid-2011

Nokia was rumored to be building it, but according to the WSJ Verizon Wireless' first 4G handset will debut mid-2011, running on the LTE network that's launching end of this year after Boston and Seattle guinea pigged the service.

According to the WSJ, Verizon Wireless' first LTE phones will use dual chipsets so they'll still be compatible with the current CDMA network. This will come months, even a year, after Sprint's first WiMax phone, which Palm is supposedly building. [WSJ]

Eternal optimist Verizon calls iPad launch 'an opportunity' to sell some data plans

That's the "glass is half full" attitude we like, Verizon -- always looking for a way to sign a few more of those lucrative data contracts, no matter the circumstances! Turns out Big Red is tipping off its staffers on how it can encourage customers to go with the WiFi-only version of the iPad and pair it up with a device like the MiFi rather than shelling out $130 more for integrated AT&T 3G and waiting a few extra weeks. As usual, Verizon's keen on playing up the anti-AT&T sentiment it's cultivated in its recent ad campaign by openly calling its biggest competitor's 3G network "overloaded," but we see one big hangup: 5GB of data on a Verizon MiFi is going to run you $60 a month, twice as much as AT&T will be charging for its dedicated, unlimited iPad plan. Then again, AT&T's own boss thinks WiFi's a bigger deal than 3G for this thing, so who knows -- maybe this is a zero-sum game for both of these guys.

[Thanks, Mark]

Our 2010 12-City 3G Data Mega Test: AT&T Won

Given carrier reputation and our own iPhone call drops, we were pretty surprised to discover, through careful testing in 12 markets, that AT&T's has pretty consistently the fastest 3G network nationwide, followed closely—in downloads at least—by Verizon Wireless.

Let's get this straight right away: We didn't test dropped voice calls, we didn't test customer service, and we didn't test map coverage by wandering around in the boonies. We tested the ability of the networks to deliver 3G data in and around cities, including both concrete canyons and picket-fenced 'burbs. And while every 3G network gave us troubles on occasion, AT&T's wasn't measurably more or less reliable than Verizon's.

It was measurably faster, however, download-wise, in 6 of the 12 markets where we tested, and held a significantly higher national average than the other carriers. Only Verizon came close, winning 4 of the 12 markets. For downloads, AT&T and Verizon came in first or second in nine markets, and in whatever location we tested, both AT&T and Verizon 3G were consistently present. If you're wondering about upload speeds, AT&T swept the contest, winning 12 for 12.

The Cities

Last year, we did an 8-city coast-to-coast test, and called Sprint the big winner. This year, we have results from 11 cities coast-to-coast, and even got to test (during what was otherwise vacation time) on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Also, unlike last year, we were able to test T-Mobile's new 3G network, active in all the markets we visited (except, at the time, Maui). For being such a latecomer, T-Mo did well, and the numbers show even more promise from them.

We tried to spread the love around this year, geographically, hitting cities we didn't get to last year (at the cost of losing a few from '08). Besides Maui, we hit Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco/Bay Area and Tampa.

The Methodology

Our testing regimen was based on the same scheme as last year: We picked five locations in each city, including at least one "downtown" location that was considered a suburb. The selections were arbitrary, or fixed but logical—landmarks, residences, etc. (Note: Due to timing constraints, Chicago and Maui only had three test locations.)

Our hardware consisted of two identical stripped-down Acer Timeline laptops running Windows Vista, and four 3G wireless modems requested from the carriers. We allowed them to make the choice of hardware, simply asking for their "best performing" model. Once up and running, here are the tests we ran:

• Bandwidth & Latency: Speedtest.net - Reports upload and download bandwidth in megabits per second, as well as ping latency in milliseconds. We performed this test five times at each location on each modem.

• Pageload: Hubble images at Wikimedia - A 4.42MB web page with 200 4KB thumbnails, it was fully reloaded three times, and timed using the Firefox plug-in YSlow. The three time readings were averaged.

• Download: Wikimedia's Abell 2667 galaxy cluster photo - This single 7.48MB JPEG is a clear test of how fast you can download stuff from the cloud, and again, we hard refreshed this file three times, and measured time using YSlow for an accurate human-error-free reading.

This was a test of 3G performance. Even though Sprint and its tech partner Clearwire have intrepidly released 4G networks in half of the tested markets—Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Maui, Portland and Seattle—we only tested Sprint's 3G network. The reason should be obvious: While we performed the test with laptop cards on PCs, it's supposed to serve as a test of the network's ability to deliver service to all devices, including smartphones, dumbphones and laptops. Show us a Palm Pre WiMax edition—better yet, sell 100,000 of them—and then we'll switch it up. And while you may argue that this 3G test still doesn't adequately reflect your experience with your iPhone, at least it's the same network, and may serve to rule out AT&T's data pipe as the independent cause for all those infamous dropped calls.

(On a side note, when multiple carriers release 4G networks, we'll definitely conduct a comparative test of them all, using new parameters, and focused around laptop use.)

The Results

Now that you know how we ran the test, here are the top finishers in each market, plus some pretty bar graphs showing you how bandwidth compares.

Though we tested for uploads and downloads, we focused our additional tests on the downstream, as it's the more important direction, in the minds of most consumers and most carriers. The anomaly there is AT&T, which has dramatically good upload bandwidth, even when its download bandwidth doesn't keep up. Fast uploads are a priority for AT&T, and will soon be for T-Mobile, which recently turned on faster uploading in NYC, which you can see in our test results. Meanwhile, although Verizon technically came in second in uploads as well as downloads, it doesn't seem to treat this as a major priority.

When it came to downloads, though, the competition was markedly stiffer:

Atlanta - AT&T, followed by Verizon
Bay Area/San Francisco - AT&T, followed by Verizon
Chicago - AT&T, followed by Verizon then Sprint
Denver - AT&T, followed by Verizon
Las Vegas - Verizon, followed by AT&T
Los Angeles - AT&T, followed by Sprint
Maui - Verizon, followed by AT&T
New York - AT&T, followed by T-Mobile
Phoenix - Verizon, followed by T-Mobile
Portland - T-Mobile, followed by Verizon
Seattle - Verizon, followed by T-Mobile
Tampa - Sprint, followed by AT&T

Is That The End?

No. We've compiled the following gallery with all the data from each test location in the 12 markets, so you can see on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level who won what. This also includes latency, pageload and download numbers, so you can track the performance in several ways. (The data above is bandwidth, though as you'll see, that was generally representative of the overall performance. If a carrier was tops in bandwidth, it was usually tops in download time.) These tests are all just "snapshots in time," as the carriers like to say, so feel free to bitch about where your experience doesn't reflect our results. We stand by them, but acknowledge that network performance is changing all the time, and experiences very regular hiccups.

Regarding latency, you'll notice it didn't appear to affect actual user experience—3G isn't really up for Modern Warfare 2, if that's what you're thinking—we will gladly show you latency averages, as well as pageload and file download averages, broken out for every market on the test.

Special thanks to all of the excellent testers we enlisted, Mark Wilson, Chris Mascari, John Herrman, Kyle VanHemert, Dan Nosowitz, Matt Buchanan and Rosa Golijan from our own team, along with Tamara Chadima and the indefatigable Dennis Tarwood. You guys were troopers, and I'm pretty sure FedEx either loves you or hates you. Thanks to John Mahoney for helping develop the initial tests that we've continually refined, to Chris Jacob for mapping all the locations, and to Don Nguyen for the mad number crunching—you truly are a spreadsheet pimp.

Note: Some of you may have noticed that San Diego is among the cities highlighted on the top illustration—and that Maui is not. The reason is that while we did testing in three great San Diego locations, one of the locations didn't get any Sprint or T-Mobile service, and the already fairly thin dataset was rendered too compromised for any kind of usable report. As for Maui's absence, Maui's just too far out in the Pacific to make for a pretty map shot.