4G War of the Worlds

A war wages in the US and battles ensue between 4G network factions WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) and LTE (Long Term Evolution). Both offer faster broadband speeds than 3G, and both stand to revolutionize wireless networking.

Will a winner eventually emerge, or is there room for both?

In one corner, Clearwire (a joint venture between Sprint Nextel, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, et al) is pushing out WiMAX initially in Baltimore, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Portland, Oregon. Clearwire plans to expand in several other select markets throughout the US including San Francisco, but interestingly Los Angeles is not mentioned.

In the other corner is Verizon and AT&T with LTE currently in Boston and Seattle, and plans to start a 4-year nationwide expansion in 2010. LTE offers high throughput, low latency and low operating costs.

History Lessons

In past technology battles, champions rose while contenders fell by the wayside. VHS was victorious over Betamax in the VCR wars. Blueray recently won out over HD DVD.

But in some arenas, competing technologies coexist. GSM and CDMA share the cell phone markets in the US. And of course PCs are split amongst Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.

Will WiMAX coexist with LTE? Certainly, time will tell. The real question might be how these technologies will prosper in a languid economy.

The Specs

The efficacy of WiMAX and LTE might depend on their underlying technologies. How do they differ and how are they the same?

WiMAX, based on IEEE 802.16 standards, comes in both fixed and mobile varieties with a non-line-of-sight range of 4-5 miles and 10 miles for line-of-sight applications. Although the maximum theoretical throughput for WiMAX is 75 Mbps, real world transfer rates are closer to 5 Mbps with the potential for 10-15 Mbps.

LTE promises theoretical transfer rates up to 100 Mbps for download and 50 Mbps for upload. However, real world expectations are closer to 7-12Mbps down and 3-5Mbps up. Optimal cell ranges are 3 miles but could extend to 18 miles.

Both LTE and WiMAX offer faster speeds and more capacity than the current 3G technologies. But which will surface as the preferred 4G architecture?

Deployment and Uptake

One issue is deployment costs. WiMAX uses Sprint's 2.5 GHz frequency band, while LTE uses the recently acquired 700 MHz spectrum. This gives WiMAX a head start since it is using an existing infrastructure, while the LTE infrastructure must be built.

Another issue is user uptake. Which one, WiMAX or LTE, will customers predominately use? Subscribers will probably use the service offered by their cell phone service provider.

Since Verizon and AT&T (and presumably T-Mobile) are backing LTE, this might eventually become the de facto standard, at least for mobile data. However, price and availability will be big factors in user adoption.

Providers are currently taking the "if we build it they will come" philosophy. Let's face it, most users don't know and don't care (the infamous ignorance and apathy duo) about the underlying technologies of WiMAX and LTE. They just want it to work, be fast, and be affordable.

And The Winner Is...

There may not be a winner. Both WiMAX and LTE might peacefully coexist, with one eventually surfacing as the dominant technology.

LTE will more likely be the predominate mobile data service. WiMAX, although used for some mobile applications, might be used primarily for fixed applications such as the "last mile" alternative for bringing Internet service to homes and businesses.

In any event, the ultimate winner will be the customers. Both LTE and WiMAX promise faster and hopefully cheaper options for data network services, especially in less populated areas where wired service is cost prohibitive. So let the battles begin!

By Harry Hiles, HBH Technology LLC — 9 Sep 2009

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Is Google Ready For The Enterprise?

On Tuesday, September 1st, Google web mail servers went down for nearly two hours. Google posted an alert on their Apps Status Dashboard at 12:53 PM PDT stating that a majority of users were unable to access Google Mail.

Of course, I already knew there was a problem since I received the infamous "500 - Server Error" message while trying to access Google Mail with my web browser. I've been using Gmail for years and currently have a Google Apps Premier Edition account, and this was the first time I've been affected by a Google email outage.

Fortunately, the outage only affected web access to Google Mail. After a few quick unsuccessful retries with Google web mail, I launched Mozilla Thunderbird (which I had previously set up to use IMAP to access my Google Apps account) and everything was running fine. Apparently, the outage did not affect IMAP access to Google Mail.

I rechecked Google's Apps Status Dashboard and saw a new message posted at 1:02 PM confirming that users can access their email via IMAP or POP, and that Google was continuing to investigate the web access issue. At 2:37 PM, Google posted a message announcing that the problem with web access was resolved.

On the surface, a two hour email outage might seem like a serious or even critical event. But since IMAP and POP access were not affected, people using Outlook or Thunderbird probably didn't even notice there was a problem.

So, is this a serious/critical event, or even an event at all?

If you or your company had the wisdom to provide both web access and IMAP or POP access to your Google Mail account, this outage might not have significantly affected you. However, if your only access to Google Mail is through the web, you were toast for a couple of hours.

The Bad News Bears

Today the news blogs are lambasting Google for this outage, recalling every email outage in Google's history. Although most of Google's email outages are less than an hour with some as short as a few minutes, news blogs continue to impugn Google's reputation and question if Google is suitable for business customers.

It's absurd. Do the news pundits really think Google's email service performance is worse than any company's internally hosted email service?

Google states a 99.9% service level.1 This means that based on a 365-day year (8,760 hours/year) an "always on" email service should not be down more than 8.76 hours per year. I'm pretty sure Google can meet or exceed that service level.

The difference between the performance of Google Mail and businesses internally hosted email is that Google's performance is public. I don't know of any business that publicly posts its internal email service levels. Even if they did, how could you verify it?

Given Google's campaign to lure corporate customers to its Apps Premier Edition, the bombardment of Google's reputation for its very public service failures could be devastating for Google. This kind of reporting serves no other purpose than to further cloud Google's services with fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Ready or Not

The real concern for using Google services is whether they meet business needs. There are things that Google does very well such as search, email and calendaring. Other services like Google Sites and Google Docs might not be a good fit for enterprise customers, but can be valuable apps for small to mid-sized businesses.

One problem enterprises might have with Google's services is its practice of making frequent incremental changes. While I believe a continual service improvement methodology is an excellent approach and aligns with most best practices, it might not sit well with corporate users who favor stability.

Gmail and its Calendar cousin have been great apps from the start, and certainly Google Search is recognized worldwide as the leading search engine. These apps introduced a new philosophy for providing services, and were simpler to use than their competitor's counterparts. But some of Google's other products seemed to lack the same brilliance and simplicity that dominates Google Search, Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Maps.

Perhaps because Google purchased many of its apps like Sites (JotSpot), Docs Word Processor (Upstartle), Docs Spreadsheet (2Web Technologies), Docs Presentation (Tonic Systems and Zenter), Picassa (Picassa), YouTube (YouTube, LLC), Blogger (Pyra Labs), Voice (GrandCentral) and more, they initially lacked the Google touch. But Google seems to be diligently working to integrate these purchased products into the framework of the Google Apps architecture.

Is Google ready for enterprise customers? Maybe. A better question might be: Are enterprise customers ready for Google? One thing is certain, though, other cloud services vendors are paying attention to Google's traction in this arena. So ready or not, Google is coming!

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1Update:  The Google Premier Edition SLA is actually based on the number of minutes in a calendar month and is not aggregated for the year. For more details, read the Google Apps SLA.

By Harry Hiles, HBH Technology LLC — 2 Sep 2009

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