NTT DoCoMo in Japan recently did a successful test at 5Gbps.  Yes, that's five times the speed of a wired Gigabit Ethernet network.  That's pretty impressive.

Now, I don't think the generation can be labeled until it's in the past and can be defined.  However, that's not really the issue here.  The issue here is:  What can we do with 5 gigabits of data moving every second to the mobile?

I say that there is a ton of stuff that we can do with that amount of bandwidth.  But really, what's that come out to?  Maybe 500 megabytes per second after protocol overhead?  Then you factor in the mobile reality factor, which is that current  2.4Mbps networks operate at an average of 500Kbps.  So, we can bring this number further down to a mere 100 megabytes per second.  That's so sad, isn't it?  What, that's only about 157 times the speed of my current DSL line.  Uh...

This is some amazing amount of bandwidth available.  As long as the latency is low enough, this could enable some very interesting applications.  It's nearly as fast as some of the fastest desktop hard drives available today.  So, anything you could do from a super fast hard drive, you could enable on a handset like this without having it's own local storage.  This brings data and applications from the entire web to the phone in on-demand time.  That is, you get what you want when you ask for it.

Think something like Google Earth, but with no waiting time for bringing in the data while you zoom around. Imagine being able to play full HD video of any movie available without having to wait for buffering and never having it stutter.  All applications available by just launching them without a need to copy them locally or install them.

Don't forget about all of things that we (as a whole) haven't thought about yet. There will be new media, new applications, and new uses that will be able to leverage this sort of bandwidth.  Let's also not forget that this is just the next step up.  There will be more steps as big or bigger than this. What will they enable? 

Sure, thinking about that is like thinking about the uses for the 2.4Mbps networks we have now back in the early 1980s.  If you were sitting on a 300 baud modem back then, you probably didn't even dream of watching movies over it.  After all, why would this even be a consideration?  You could rent tapes and you could see TV over cable.

Following by example, what do we take for granted now as something that we can't do on the web?  This would be something that you would normally think of as taking too long to do on the web or maybe that the interface isn't right or something like that.  For example, if you calculated out the size of what a movie might have been and then calculated how long it might take to transfer it over twenty years ago, you'd come up with a number on the order of 30 years.  Remember, part of why we can even do it now is because of the modern compression being applied to the size.  Even a highly compressed, low resolution DVD contains 2 or 3 gigabytes of video and audio.  Even audio wasn't really downloaded much until it was reduced from around 15 megabytes a minute for high quality audio to only a megabyte a minute.

Here's a final thought: If your mobile is working at that rate, how fast will your wired home Internet connection be? If it's that fast, imagine how fast your local storage will be? I could go on, but I won't...

Posted by Shane on February 12, 2007 7:53 AM | Permalink