A Qualcomm exec who toured Europe and the US trying out cellular data service and WiFi hotspot service wrote a damning internal memo on the relative inferiority of WiFi to $80/month 50-80kbps cellular-based data-service. The memo raised some good points, but mostly attakced a bunch of nonsensical strawmen. Glenn "WiFi Networking News" Fleishman has posted an excellent rebuttal to the memo.
Belk notes on a Hotspot service, ALL Wi-Fi connections speeds are limited by the backhaul (i.e. the way the Access Point is connected to the Internet). Likewise, however, backhaul can be easily increased. If a location has 512 Kbps fractional T-1, they can, for a fee, generally easily upgrade to full 1.5 Mbps T-1. Cell data is highly limited by spectrum availability, cell locations, number of simultaneous users, and other factors. He can get tens of Kbps right now, and generally will be able to, but cell data will be highly susceptible to non-point-to-point backhaul/carrying capacity factors.
Because he's vaunting the 50-80 Kbps speed of his 3G subscription, anything that's wireless-to-backhaul has to offer him a significant improvement, in the hundreds of Kbps to over a Mbps to anchor him to a specific location. That's perfectly reasonable.
But he starts to fall down when he says that hundreds of Kbps is what he gets from hot spots not 11 Mbps. I agree that hot spots may advertise 11 Mbps networks, and that's overstating the case. But 512 Kbps is not 50-80 Kbps. It's 10 times faster. For many people, working on 512 Kbps is like working in an office, while 50-80 Kbps is sucking at a straw. It changes your behavior, which is why broadband users don't act like dial-up users.
