WiMAX and hungry apps

To most common users of the wireless network services, the issue or topic of BW discussion often is misleading. Take a WiMAX handset holder in the middle of a cornfield around Baltimore (yes, Sprint launched its WiMAX service there today)watching live video on CNN about the congress vote today for example, the WiMAX bandwidth they tell you (1 or 2M download) is only a small part of the entire story.

For a video stream to have an acceptable quality, an average of 500kbps bandwidth allocation is more than good enough. Whether you are on WiFi (802.11g is more than good enough, again), 3G (WCDMA), 3.75G (HSPDA) or 4G (the guy in the cornfield), it does NOT matter. The 2M bandwidth this subscriber in the field is told is only the theoretical value between his WiMAX handset and the nearest radio tower the handset is connected to at the time, but going from the handset all the way to the CNN video server that happens to be serving the stream at that time banwidth varies at every single hop.

It is like you are driving from Manhatan New York to the cornfield in Maltimore you would go through 8-lane highway in and around the city but goes down to dusty village path close to the corfield and everything in between. For starter, there is most likely an "over-subscription" implemented by the service provider at the radio tower. That menas for a 20M back-haul link the tower is connected back to the aggregate layer in the network, there could be 40 users allocated,a 2:1 over-subscription. Once you are at the aggregate layer in the SP's network, you are subject to router packet drops depending on how busy the router is at the time. When you are finally routed out of the SP's network you need to cross the inter-connect between the SP and the next higher up carrier's network to carry you across oceans if not beamed up and in outer space via satellites. Once over there at the destination you would go through similar setups in another SP's networks, this time all wired, but what if the server you are connected to at the time happens to be in Rusia and happens to be hosted in a poor quality data-center only has 10M WAN bandwidth to the rest of the world? And what if the server happens to be just a X86 PC?

In an end-to-end session you face many different bottlenecks, and the last mile close to the handset is only a very small part of the story.

I have a different opinion on the comment of optimization. Optimization, particularly WAN Optimization has its values in overcoming the difficulties when crossing the Internet.

WAN Optimization, as its name implies, normally include technolofies that would mitigate congestion depending on where it is implmented, compensate for packet loss and overcome latency caused by long latency in the networks.

The speed 3G technology provides needs an update and in future you will see the more advance technologies for the data transfer.