NAKINA SYSTEMS BLOG

Verizon finally made it official, announcing the availability of its LTE network beginning next Sunday, December 5th. Pricing will start at $50 for 5 GB monthly allowance, with access offered to USB modem users. Smartphones will not follow until mid-2011. 38 metro areas and 60 airports will be covered initially.

Not only is the expected data rate (2-5 up and 5-12 down) comparable to landline speeds, I expect the range of services and devices offered will gradually expand the application areas beyond now-traditional 3G application areas, and begin blurring the distinction between wireless and wireline provinces of the Verizon empire. Note that the “Rule the Air” marketing campaign and rebranding that took place earlier this year erased the “Wireless” from Verizon.

…or at least about on-demand entertainment, what should we be inferring about management and support?

The importance of very low latency is diminishing as real-time voice becomes a smaller and smaller component of demand — at least within certain contexts. 500 milliseconds to get my 30 Rock streaming download to begin is perfectly acceptable, but it makes human conversation virtually impossible (which some see as an advantage). My youngest daughter exchanges something like 2000 text messages a month, but uses only a couple hundred voice minutes in the same period. That works out to a ratio of about ten texts for every telephone minute. Voice, in this context, is becoming a ’special purpose’ application. I’m not saying you don’t need low latency, just that the range of applications for which it is necessary is shrinking to an ever smaller portion of the value pie.

What’s clear is that the emerging environment is depending ever more on near-instantaneous (by which I mean a few hundred milliseconds) availability of an incredible variety of services with incredibly different bandwidth and service performance requirements. If I want to watch Cliff Lee’s pitching duel against Tim Lincecum in Game One of the World Series, I want to watch it now, and there will be hell to pay with my service provider if there is any interruption or degradation of service. If my daughter wants to blurt out a three word text to her best friend to get her to come into Javapalooza for coffee, she wants the SMS delivered now, not a minute from now when her friend has already passed by the coffee shop (when I was her age we used to actually walk to the door and shout ‘hey, c’mere.’) If it doesn’t get delivered in time, the phone is broken, the network is stupid, and she wants to switch services.

The emergence of LTE is going to complicate the support requirements for this even more as it further erases the distinction between wired and wireless services. No one is going to care (or often even know) what the final delivery method is (wifi hotspot? 4G over the air? 3G picocell? 4G mifi?). They’re just going to want it. Now.

And if it doesn’t work? Louis C.K. has that figured out.

Bandwidth management provider Sandvine has released a report on global bandwidth consumption trends that makes for interesting reading, and gives some insight into the kinds of management imperatives that will drive operations software in future carrier networks. Sandvine anonymously aggregated a collection of data from its own customers to produce the analysis. While there’s no precise information on the sample size, it covers millions of subscribers over a global geography of mobile and fixed service providers.

Some of the more interesting tidbits:

• In North America, Netflix streaming video accounts for 20% of primetime download traffic;
• Real-time entertainment is unquestionably the largest component of demand growth for internet bandwidth, whether mobile or fixed. Entertain me. Now.
• In Asia, household bandwidth consumption is running at 12 gigabytes, versus only 4 in North America.

Worth a few minutes to peruse, and downloadable here.

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