Any time any place – cheap, quick and reliable – Yes that is the consumer’s version of the holy grail of network research. This week as I was traveling around the Washington DC area, I had none of this on my Treo 650. I wanted information and love KMaps, for its better than a browser tie into Google Maps. But none of that matters if you cannot connect to the internet. I pay a lot more for my GPRS connection with Cingular than for my broadband cable, and the only thing I can say is – it is unreliable, slow and over priced.
I wanted to call up and complaint to Cingular, but really what can the Support team do? There are some fundamental limitation when you try to hack a connection oriented wireless network to play well with a packet switched data network. Even the best overlays don’t work that well. They can’t drop their previous investment and simple start from scrach. But they need to make the transition. To a more on demand data oriented network.
So what do I think R&D should achieve – Over 5mbps links at any place and I mean “any”. Not a easy task, given the challenges of the wireless medium. I am happy I am doing investigating this area.