Wireless applications need to be very smart about bandwidth. They cannot assume huge amounts of unlimited wireless data traffic. "Unlimited" wireless data plans will have real limitations. Mike Lazardis, co-CEO of Research in Motion (RIM) made this point in a Globalcomm keynote address to wireless carriers:
For example, an average voice plan that includes 500 minutes of airtime uses about 45MB of capacity per user per month, he said. By contrast, a user with an unlimited data plan who watches 15 minutes of video per day, reads at least three articles from a mobile Web site such as CNN.com, and checks e-mail using his company's virtual private network uses about 1.6GB worth of capacity per month. Translated into voice minutes, this amount of data usage would require roughly 20,000 minutes per month. ...
The message here isn't that we shouldn't do new things, but that we need to have incentives for efficient usage. When you have a fiber running into your home, it is its own little universe with dedicated bandwidth, but wireless spectrum is something that we all have to share.
Most wireless application development models still assume arbitrary amounts of bandwidth, constant connectivity, and over the air exchanges of huge wasteful web services XML strings.
Anyone who plans on deploying usable applications, not just toys, should plan on much more constrained resources for the foreseeable future.
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