A quick refresher: Net neutrality is, simply, the principle that all data gets treated the same by an ISP or service, whether it’s incoming email or HD videos of dudes getting socked in the nuts by a four-year-old on YouTube. A real-world example of very non-neutral behaviour would be what got Comcast slapped by the FCC: specifically sabotaging torrents.

Theoretically, this could go beyond policing piracy, for instance if, say, Time Warner competitively blocked or slowed down YouTube, or if Verizon struck a deal with Google to give its data priority over traffic from Bing, so people using Google would get a way better experience than people using Bing. Streaming video is a not-so-coincidental theoretical example, since the explosion of video traffic is what the ISPs say is swallowing up all of the internet.

The end result of the threat of government-mandated net neutrality regulations for ISPs was a mixed “win” for consumers: AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner all responded with monthly data caps on their internet service.

As for the FCC telling ISPs to be more explicit about network management practices, Comcast started straight-up telling people heavy internet users would have their entire connections slowed down. While they suck for consumers, these are all “net neutral” practices, since no particular kind of data is discriminated against. The net neutrality debate fizzled down, though in some ways people were worse off than before.

With a new president, comes a new FCC chair, Julian Genachowski. Unlike his predecessor, who regularly reamed the cable industry but was a little too snuggly with the telecoms and against “hard and fast” net-neutrality rules, Genachowski is all about rules for everybody. Including the wireless carriers.

As you’re probably well aware, mobile broadband is treated way differently than the internet that’s piped into your house. It’s considered fragile. There’s far less of it to go around, with a less developed infrastructure and limited wireless spectrum to use. The rules for using it are tighter, like dating a nun. Restrictions abound, like no p2p. You don’t want the network to break, after all. That’s why, for instance, AT&T previously blocked Skype and SlingPlayer from running on 3G on the iPhone—and continues to block Sling—and why Apple rejects every torrent app that even tries to cross into the App Store.

In the past weeks, Genachowski has made it clear that he thinks that should change, that openness should “apply to the Internet however accessed”. He’s not saying they shouldn’t be able to manage the network to make sure it runs smoothly, to be clear. But if you were scratching your head about why AT&T conceded and opened their network up to VoIP on the iPhone, look no further than this nugget from Genachowski, from a speech he gave three weeks ago:

We’ve already seen some clear examples of deviations from the Internet’s historic openness. We have witnessed certain broadband providers unilaterally block access to VoIP applications (phone calls delivered over data networks)…”

AT&T very much does not want the government to tell it how to run its networks, particularly the mobile one. AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega this week responded pretty clearly to the FCC’s plans:

“Before we begin ‘fixing’ what isn’t broken, we need to be thoughtful about the consequences. We believe the marketplace today is vibrant, and there is no need to burden the mobile Internet with onerous new regulations.”

So what’s going to happen?

Well, the FCC is clear about what it thinks. This week, at a wireless telecom conference, Genachowski reiterated that net neutrality should apply to mobile broadband too. If those regulations pass, we’ll likely see the same thing we saw with the landline providers: Caps and “transparent” network management. Goodbye unlimited mobile broadband. You will pay for every ounce of data that you use. And if you’re “crowding” the network by downloading a bunch of stuff, you’re gonna get slowed down because that’s the easy “net neutral” way to keep users in check. How much better is that, really?

Pay-per-byte data—for both wired and wireless broadband networks—may well be the road we’re going down. Verizon is the last major landline broadband provider who has held back from capping or throttling its services (looove my FiOS), but even its CTO says that eventually, “we are going to reach a point where we will sell packages of bytes.”

Hopefully those packages will come cheap.

According to Grahame Lynch at Commsday, the CSIRO technology is still in the prototype stage, although it has been patented to the hilt already. The tech would be able to offer 100Mbps to the consumer (yeah, right), would operate of 30MHz of the analogue TV spectrum (once that gets switched off in 2013), and the backhaul could provide 10Gbps throughputs over 50km distances.

But despite being in the prototype stage, this new wireless tech would be cheaper to roll out. In Griffiths NSW, for example, only two base stations would be needed to give the whole town high-speed internet, whereas Wimax would require 23 and LTE would need 31.

While we’re all for shiny new technologies here at Giz, it seems that if this needs the analogue TV spectrum, it’s probably still a few years off being a real competitor to LTE or even Wimax…

[Commsday – Thanks Kevin!]

LTE has become the chosen standard for 4G—major carriers like Verizon and AT&T have already jumped on board. Others are sure to follow as the movement towards faster 4G networks picks up steam. [Digitimes via Unwired View]

Specifically, Melone told reporters:

The licenses we bought in the 700MHz auction cover the whole US… And we plan to roll out LTE throughout the entire country, including places where we don’t offer our CDMA mobile phone service today.

Because Verizon’s LTE (Long Term Evolution) will operate at the 700MHz frequency—as opposed to the 2.5GHz used by the competing Sprint/Clearwire WiMax network—it could possibly have greater range with fewer towers: The lower the hertz, the farther the signal travels under the same power.

However, as some wise nerd commenter from one of Om’s 700MHz stories pointed out a couple years back, the tradeoff with lower frequency is that because it travels so far, fewer users can use the exact same chunks of bandwidth, so there’s a capacity issue. (Explanatory metaphor: Say you’re on a ship and three people fall overboard. Instead of having three shorter ropes to throw to all of them at once—which may not reach—you get one really long rope to throw to each of them, one at a time.)

These are just some things to think about as the great 4G train starts to pick up steam, and the WiMax vs. LTE battle—characterised for no particular reason as Love Boat vs Fantasy Island—heats up. CNet has more from Melone’s news conference, so hit the link.

AU: The whole 700MHz thing also means that there’s a potential issue for Australians travelling to the US – there’s a limited number of handsets doing 850MHz (NextG) at the moment, and Optus is going 900MHz for their national network. Obviously things will change in the future, but hopefully Australian handsets will have multi-band chips capable of the 700MHz spectrum for global travellers as well.

[CNet]

AU: Obviously this one’s all US, but it’s interesting to see the performance of the next generation of wireless technologies – NB

It’s hard to conceive of harnessing that much bandwidth wirelessly while sitting outside a shopping centre, enjoying an unseasonably warm March day. It’s almost a joke, being able to watch Jon Stewart ream Jim Cramer—streamed via Hulu—while sitting in the backseat of a Lincoln Navigator doing 60 on the freeway. Having reviewed gadgets for almost a decade, I sometimes have to fake excitement that I may not truly feel in my loins. But this is different—real, honest-to-God wireless broadband made me freakin’ giddy, even if it didn’t deliver peak speeds at every spot where I parked.

If most of what we review is a chunk of the present, WiMax is from the future. Thankfully, it’s the near future.

The Test
Clearwire is a wireless data service now majority owned by Sprint (but with Comcast and others holding stakes). Currently it’s got the Clear WiMax service in both Portland and Baltimore. In Portland, it sells mobile and home modems that can pull down up to 4Mbps, but you know from reading Giz Explains that WiMax is already capable of a lot more: It’s the first 4G network that’s actually up and running in the US.

Clearwire gave me a chance to see what WiMax was like without any throttling: I got a USB dongle that could pull down whatever was out there. That turned out to be, in some places, nearly 13Mbps downstream—the current speed of your typical cable modem, and about 10 times what wired broadband delivered just a few years back.

I trekked around Portland, OR for a couple of days, testing the boundaries of the WiMax network, and spot testing in different locations around town to see what I got. I used the Motorola USBw25100 WiMax dongle, connected directly to a very sweet, very pimped-out HP Pavilion dv4 notebook that I borrowed for the occasion. (At the moment, there’s no Mac driver for the WiMax modem, but as you can imagine that’s in the works.)

As a helpful comparison, I used a 3G dongle from Verizon Wireless. I want to be clear that this isn’t to be read as a test of Verizon’s Portland network. However, that little USB modem held its own amazingly well, 3G beating 4G on a few occasions—at one point reaching a top speed of 3.3Mbps—so good on you, Verizon!

The tests were fairly simple, and resembled the ones we used for our Coast-to-Coast 3G Test last fall. I ran the Speakeasy Speed Test a minimum of five times in each location with each connection, then averaged those results. I loaded a very heavy page—the Wikimedia Commons Hubble Images page—at least five times, timing the pageload with the YSlow plug-in for Firefox. And I pinged local servers in three sets of 10 to determine latency. I chose locations based on their overall geographic variety, throwing in some locations that just made sense for me to visit, like my in-laws, and the family of my buddy Tom.

Here are the locations, neatly marked on the map, followed by a chart of test results:

View Larger Map

Hot Spots and Cold Spots
As you can see, though I got the kind of awesomeness that blisters during three of my stops, I saw some mediocrity in three more, and in one location, smack in the centre of town, I got nothing at all. When I checked with Clearwire, they not surprisingly told me I had accidentally chosen four locations that were slated for improved coverage, the two downtown locations set to get lit up in the coming months.

The up side of the experience was exciting enough that the downside didn’t bash my spirits. You’ll notice in the chart that even when the connection wasn’t that great, latency tended to stay low, and even when the connection was shabby, the download speeds tended to stay at or above 3G levels. I mean, before now, when was 1.2Mbps wireless considered a bad thing? Uploads were consistently just below 2Mbps—a far cry from the 10Mbps I can get with hard-wired cable, but pretty much on par with 3G.

Clearwire has to lease all of its cell towers just like any other wireless carrier, and not having a legacy network in place does keep it from automatically having a tower everywhere it’s needed. Also, the fact that WiMax runs in the 2.5GHz band points to a need for more towers. 3G is in the 1.8 to 2.1GHz, and the proposed LTE operates in the 700MHz spectrum. Though WiMax’s higher frequency may guarantee a more stronger signal closer in, it also has shorter range with the same power. WiMax doesn’t feel like Wi-Fi—it can handle smooth handoffs from tower to tower at high speeds—but the Clearwire coverage map of Portland does look a bit like a tightly packed collection of hotspots.

This can be good news: Clearwire knows every inch of the city, and can look up any customer’s home, workplace or favourite hangout to see if getting the service even makes sense. But it also means that if you’re not covered—depending on how a school board votes about what happens on their rooftops, or what the local port authority has to say about radio antennas—it may be a while before that changes.

Rockin’ Down the Highway
Like most carriers, Clearwire takes advantage the many tall cell towers that line the highway, meaning you get WiMax’s sick bandwidth pretty much unbroken as you fly down the road at 60 or 70 miles per hour. In the following video—in 90 quick seconds—you’ll see the following:
• Speakeasy speedtest showing roughly 13Mbps at 60 miles per hour
• Skype voice call (sorry we didn’t do a video conference)
• Slingbox video that’s being uploaded via WiMax at Clearwire’s office, and downloaded via WiMax in the car
• Hulu, where we load up and begin watching a full-screen episode of The Daily Show, at 70 miles per hour

In Summary:

It’s easy to reach download speeds that are four times the peak of today’s best 3G networks

Power demand does not seem to be any greater than other wireless connections

Most available Clear services now are capped at 4Mbps, though uncapped plans may be available sometime this year

Only a handful of cities will have this service in 2009, with more to come in 2010

Wide fluctuations in bandwidth feel weird: 12Mbps upside makes 3Mbps feel like a disappointing trickle

Within Portland’s city limits, there were plenty of dead zones that will hopefully be filled in soon

[More information on Clearwire service]

Though AT&T seems to be talking excitedly about its own LTE network—a technology that derives from the GSM networks that AT&T and T-Mobile run, and not the CDMA networks of Sprint and Verizon—Verizon really will be first, and at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, Verizon CTO Dick Lynch made a point of letting the world know it. Most of the chatter was stuff we’d published before, but the coolest part of the released statement, about the current and upcoming trials, was new:

Utilizing their existing spectrum, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone have been field testing 4G LTE networks in Minneapolis, Columbus, Ohio, and Northern New Jersey in the United States, as well as in Budapest, Düsseldorf, and Madrid in Europe, with a variety of network infrastructure providers. These field trials have demonstrated download rates of 50 to 60 Mbps peak speeds, though actual average download results will not be determined until the commercial launch of the new Verizon Wireless LTE network. Utilizing its recently acquired 700 MHz spectrum, Verizon Wireless will expand trials this summer, and Lynch said the company will commercially launch its LTE network in 2010. Once the initial rollout is complete, plans are in place for aggressive deployment throughout Verizon Wireless’ entire network, including areas not currently covered by the existing Verizon Wireless footprint.

WiMax is already here, and Sprint has proven to be adept at rolling out next-generation data services, but still, I can’t help but think that between Verizon and AT&T, LTE will definitely be the 4G technology of choice in America. [More Mobile World Congress 2009 Coverage]

So here’s what the Twister mat looks like, as astutely laid out by Ars’ Julian Sanchez: Verizon has nearly $US10 billion tied up in the floaty airwaves that’ll be abandoned when analogue broadcasts are turned off, on the promise they could rev up work on their superfast next-generation wireless network, LTE.

AT&T, however, joined the Consumers Union and some Congressman supporting the delay, that would, completely coincidentally, keep Verizon from speeding past them with their LTE deployment. You know, just like AT&T was concerned about the public when they asked the FCC to block the Clearwire WiMax merger over the summer. WiMax company Clearwire needs as much time as they can get to roll out their network and would also benefit from a delay—which is something of a conflict of interest, since a Clearwire exec has been a generous Obama supporter and met with Obama tech advisors.

But the delay might not happen: A proposal in the House would dump another $US650 million into the bankrupt converter box coupon program, which was the most substantial issue provoking the delay. The FCC also approved a “night light” measure that would broadcast a notice about the switch from Feb. 18 (the day of the shutoff) until March 19 and how to get a converter box. It won’t be broadcast on all stations, but stations can opt in—though it’s not cheap, with one station estimating running the broadcast will cost at least $US7000 for power alone.

A delay would totally cause consumer confusion. No matter when the transition happens, someone, somewhere, will see their TV go black and wonder why. The nightlight is solid compromise, and something that should’ve been in place before. Besides, when you try to delay the progress parade, it doesn’t really slow it down, it just makes the route more screwed up. [Ars, PC Mag]

The original timetable called for initial rollouts in 2010, with a wide commercial launch in 2011 and true mass availability in 2012. An IDC analyst says that Verizon’s shift to a more aggressive schedule was likely sparked by Japan’s NTT DoCoMo announcing last month they’d offer LTE service commercially in 2010, showing that “the race is on.” That’s right, people, Verizon is throwing down for the good ol’ US of A—Japan won’t beat us on mobile phone tech ever again.

After launching LTE, Verizon’s planning to offer femtocells through partners like Best Buy that won’t just make the signal actually decent in your house, they’ll have built in Wi-Fi, so you won’t have to have a separate box for it. Your move, AT&T. [Yahoo]