3G: an expensive poor man's Internet

Friday night and on the way out to Tokyo to meet up with some friends that I haven't seen in a while. To the left of me, there are two guys talking about stuff that I couldn't possibly care about to be honest, I wish they'd shut up. But alas what am I to do, I'll have to turn up the music I am listening to instead.

So what was I going to talk about? Oh yeah, 3G internet is pretty damn slow. I have taken to reading on the train to pass time and maybe it's just today, but the Internet is really damn slow. If I were to compare it to something, imagine a 28.8k baud modem connected to your phone downloading content heavy webpages.

Going to content light webpages is real blessing because the wait can get rather long. Doing specialized searches like for train timetables seems to take longer than expected. Maybe because it's a friday but I don't have enough experience to make that judgment yet.

Wireless communication with decent bandwidth is still a limiting factor when it comes to the utility of the a smart phone. The interesting thing is that I am paying nearly just as much for this wireless connection compared to my broadband connection at home.

If I had 1/100 th of the speed I have at home (assuming a 2 MB/sec) broadband connection I'd be really happy right now. There has to be a way of making a highspeed wireless cellular network. There has been attempts using meshed wifi routers but I remember that idea getting sued out of existence by an internet carrier once, but if I were to do it then that would be the route that I would go.

What the hell would you want to do with the internet while on the go? Location based search is probably the biggest thing. I can bet you that Apple is working on that. There has been several ventures out there that are doing location based applications. I believe that the field is still immature because the technology still wireless data communication speeds still need improvement. When that happens, expect to see some killer applications to come out-- we are still in the mid early adopter phase.

I've written this much and the guys beside me still won't shut up.