Apple and AT&T EDGE Network Cards?

this sounds like a killer idea...

AT&T sucks. I bet they will be trying to bundle this service with their LD service.

Wow! Great! I live in one of the Edge areas, this is a great network!

That's like ~15k/sec isn't it? Why is that considered fast?

it's considered fast because it is a long-range network similar to the cellphone network... dunno, here in europe we have different names for the systems - i think the equivalent is GPRS or something.

too bad the EDGE network sucks at this point. Review here

Quote: "While downloading large files, I had a sustained download speed of about 2.1K"

well, just today, I exhausted cable modem and DSL as a potential high-speed data provider at my new home, and today I was going to order a phone line and a dialup plan. I would never use the phone line for anything but dialup, and hate the idea of a $30/mo phone plus a $20/mo dialup.

So, then, my plan was to take this 56k signal and route it through my 54,000k 802.11g wireless router. How massively sucky.

Originally posted by rabatjoie
it's considered fast because it is a long-range network similar to the cellphone network... dunno, here in europe we have different names for the systems - i think the equivalent is GPRS or something.

Yeah. We have GPRS over here, but that speed is max. around 50 Kb/s.
So this should be faster...

Originally posted by rabatjoie
it's considered fast because it is a long-range network similar to the cellphone network... dunno, here in europe we have different names for the systems - i think the equivalent is GPRS or something.

Actually EDGE is the follow on spec to GPRS. EDGE utilizes 8-PSK modulation as opposed to GPRS's QPSK. Should be double the through-put of GPRS. Realizable throughput may be higher because of how slot's are allocated between users.

EDGE radios actually revert back to a GPRS when they experience weak signal and poor BER at the 8-PSK modulation.

I'm surprised that AT&T has a network build-out issue. When AT&T was installing their GPRS network they could have purchased EDGE ready networks for a small additional cost ( 10%?). Then they would only have to flip the switch and start utilizing EDGE ( it is 100% backward compatible with GPRS ). Seems like they did not take this route.

There are other limitations on receive speed besides what the network can support. There may still be issues on what the card can process ( ASIC/backend processing can limit decoding speeds ). Also, AT&T will probably limit multiple slot ( the only way to get to the 128kbits ) to high paying users.

Wasn't there something faster 3GP? But then, I get allot of cool-sounding acronyms thrown at me, and I have no idea wtf they mean.