| The main problem facing the mobile industry is bandwidth. Ensuring that genuine mobile computing is possible requires a lot of bandwidth -- this is really the heart of Chochrain's work. The ideal world would have us with mobile devices (PCs, phones, PDAs) all with fully connected roaming capacities.
We're getting there. A friend of mine works for Vodafone and has a mobile connect card for her laptop. She can go anywhere (in the UK) with that and connect to a network. If she's on a GPRS network, such as in most of London, she's getting broadband like connection speeds; elsewhere she gets closer to ISDN connection speed. Either way, it's pretty funky.
The problem is that GPRS (and G3) is both limited in its coverage and doesn't have a lot of scalability beyond the start-up capacity. The capacity is great with relatively few users, but as you get more users, the network will slow down and lose capacity per user (ADSL has a similar problem). |