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Benson's Avatar
Posts: 4,930 | Thanked: 2,272 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#282
Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
You don't understand. If the cell is only serving you, your figures are correct. In real usage, and more so if everybody tries to use voip, umts (or hsdpa, which really is umts with a better modem) degrades. You won't get that upload.

What is so difficult to understand? Radio is simple: you have one medium and it has a maximum capacity. Whatever tricks you use, when the capacity is exhausted, that's it.
A couple of details nobody is bringing up: a typical phone cannot consume the whole bandwidth of the tower, so you can have several phones maximizing their own bandwidth before you saturate the available bandwidth and start losing. And I'm not sure what's normal in terms of design standards, but it's quite possible to choke the backhaul before you run out of radio bandwidth, if more users are using data than expected.

You don't have that problem with wires, because it is not a shared medium. When some users bog down their connection running p2p clients like mad or having skype relaying the traffic of half the planet, it is not a problem for the rest of the users. You have a problem with data over air, because when one user abuses the cell, everybody's connection goes dripping. And building additional cells costs money.
No, it is the same; with some types of last-mile, that's not shared (though with cable, it is), but from your ISP's local node out, it is. And fiber costs money, too.
 

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