Good stuff on the horizon for wireless internet gamers

[matt]

And now for a solid dose of reality:

This is a _pilot_ project. Meaning a smallish number of people hooked up to a massive fiber pipe via a fairly clean frequency spectrum.

Once they start loading actual customers on there both speeds and latency take a nose dive, so enjoy while it lasts. Sorry.

While wireless has its uses, I don't see anything replacing a good old wired connection in the foreseeable future. Crossing fingers though that "wired" = FTTH soon.

Very true, as with any new tech like this, we'll have to wait till it has a big user base before we can expect realistic performance figures. But it's easy to get excited about any potential alternative to Telkom. Look how excited people were about Neotel...

[Neo]

I for one will never ever rely on Telkom to provide me with proper service. Although FTTH is a great outlook on the future of what home users can expect, it still seems that in most areas you have a better chance of impregnating male horses than get your hands on that technology.

What, MTN for example, have shown is that the technology is being brought to us much quicker than what we thought.

And yeah, for sure, once you load a site with more devices and start sharing some of the resources you'll more than likely see some difference in the speeds and such. But the points has been made that LTE is LOADS better than current 3G/HSPA offerings, and to be honest, my current HSPA service at my house is on par with my 4mb ADSL line on the download side of things. The only thing stopping me from cancelling my ADSL line is latency - and that has been proven to be remedied with LTE.

Resource sharing always lowers speeds, and that goes for Telkom as well with their fixed line products. I cannot even get proper 4mb speeds on my ADSL line because my exchange is "overloaded" with users. So once again, when comparing LTE wireless technology with fixed line technology you'll find it very difficult to make even a single case in favor of fixed line products.

As consumers (and the usual hard-to-impress gaming community) we'll obviously take the "wait and see" approach. While that might be fair enough, I'm still here today to tell you all that there IS something to look forward to and the future for wireless data and gaming is looking extremely positive.

[HavocXphere]

the points has been made that pilot LTE is LOADS better than current congested & real-world 3G/HSPA offerings

FTFY.

I don't doubt that LTE is an improvement on 3G. Its just that I feel pilots provide little to no indication of what the end experience will be. Hell even iBurst was impressive when it first launched.

you'll find it very difficult to make even a single case in favor of fixed line products.

Aside from not having to RICA here is a rather convincing one:

ADSL: <0.65c per meg
Cost of 3G: 10c per meg *
8ta 10+10gb offer: 1.4c per meg (i.e. Miles below cost) *

^ Rough data points only, calculated on 75gb.

* Before LTE infrastructure costs.

On a side note, I'd be interested to know what the jitter is on that fancy connection of yours.

[iOverflow]

Sounds like LTE is the way of the future, just waiting to see what it really becomes later on and how it's prices will be, cause I have heard of a similar hype before, and that was with iBurst

[MOnk]

Wireless for me has always been a convenience product which you use when it's not practical to use wired solutions and it's never been something I would consider for it's performance aspects. That being said I am excited to see what LTE brings but I'm not holding my breath.

[wheunis]

Pricing, data plans and coverage, all things I would consider more important than pure performance.

No point having a super fast wireless technology which costs you more than your car and can only use for 5mins per month because you're still sitting on a 500mb data cap. Even when it comes to actual performance I always have doubts about wireless considering most of the time you're lucky if you get even 10% of the advertised speeds for HSDPA.

Well said, sir.
Pretty much sums up my view on the matter as well.

It helps absolutely nothing to have good internet, when said internet chews its own cap clean in 3.8 seconds...