Music to our ears
December 2, 2008 — Abigail Hamilton
Great interview with Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff yesterday over at GigaOm. Two things stood out as very interesting and encouraging.
First, Wolff’s recognition that there’s no competition between municipal, white-space, and commercial spectra/networks.
Both consumer and provider are served by overlapping blankets of access that make it possible for people to bring more of their lives online with reliable service and a seamless, good experience.
As with all things, choice is good.
Second, I was impressed that his emerging model for handling network congestion doesn’t include limiting the type of high-bandwidth applications that people are starting to use more frequently.
GigaOM: What about network management such as blocking some traffic or slowing it down when the network is congested?
Wolff: We will have to experiment with how were dealing with network management issues. We won’t ID specific bandwidth-hogging apps and try to restrict or limit those. What we’re going to do is manage the network on a sector-by-sector basis, so if there’s no congestion we do nothing. If it turns out we do have congestion, we’ll manage bandwidth for all users in that segment rather than by applications.
GigaOM: Can a WiMAX network really provide the amount of bandwidth necessary to offer services such as streaming video that can really clog wireless networks today?
Wolff: One of the benefits over 3G is we have much more capacity, and we designed it to have a large number of customers using a large amount of data — including consistent streaming capacity.
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