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Can tethering one day replace WiFi?

sfbloodbrother

sfbloodbrother

Extreme Android User
I had an interesting thought. We all know of tethering, where you can turn your smartphone into a WiFi hotspot aBd connect other devices that are only compatible of WiFi.

So what if one day we no longer need a router or modem for internet and instead we connect via tethering. Many companies already offer this but the thing is they all have data plans, and those plans aren't meant for using heavily, for example they have data limits set I.e. 20 GB.

What if one day we could connect every device in our house to one smartphone that is connected to the internet. Do you think that this will one day be a reality or am I just thinking too hard about this. Let's discuss.
 
It's hard for me to see it happening because of the way things are now. It would be very expensive to go this route. Unless carriers offered unlimited, uncapped data (probably 4g or better) for a reasonable price, I can't see the masses ditching their wifi and paying $10 per gigabyte.
 
Nahh never no this will never happen if so ATM machines will be just a money giving thing of the past .
 
sfbloodbrother said:
So what if one day we no longer need a router or modem for internet and instead we connect via tethering.
Click to expand...
The phone is a modem (it converts changes in analog signal into changes in digital signal - it MOulates and DEModulates signals - that's what "modem"means). The tethering app is a router. It routes signals from a single external IP address to multiple internal IP addresses (and that's what a router is). Technically the only difference is that there's no Ethernet connection on the phone, but that could also be done (either wirelessly [there are "routers" now that can pick up the signal from your tethered connection and give you an Ethernet connection] or through the microUSB port).

If carriers gave truly unlimited data we could probably do away with a lot of cable and telephone internet connections. Except for one problem.

The bandwidth available to a cable company (looking from the cable company to the customers - the amount of bandwidth on the internet has nothing to do with how it's delivered) is limited only by the amount of glass we can produce. We may one day run out, but right now, the practical limit for any large cable company is probably in the yottabyte range or more. (10^11 bytes/second) Throw in a few more feet of fiber (diameter, not length) and you can multiply that by another 10. And so on. One company could probably provide enough bandwidth for every single person on the planet to be streaming a movie at the same time. (Which is more than the internet could handle.)

OTOH ... radio bandwidth is limited. It's increasing slowly (I'm more than old enough to remember when "communications" at 400MHz was limited to the distance between two rooftops of a university [anyone remember Brooklyn Poly?] as an experiment), but a couple of large fibers can carry more bandwidth than exists between DC and daylight. So the amount of data that can be carried by cellphone is limited by physics, and we can't "invent" new frequencies.

Right now there's probably enough bandwidth to accommodate the needs of most smaller cities, as far as using only LTE as a means of internet connection. But the amount of data (meaning bandwidth) being used is shooting up a lot faster than we can invent ways of getting around the physical limitations. So we're going to run out of radio bandwidth long before we run out of demand for it. (Even if we lowered power, so there wasa microcell every hundred feet, eventually we'd run out. And remember, cell towers, whether the huge ones you see along the interstate, or microcells mounted on telephone poles, are connected by - you guessed it - wire. So we can't completely do away with wire. The only thing we can do away with is the wire between your device and the cell delivering signal to it. And eventually we'll need a microcell in every house. Oh, that's called a router, except that it talks on 2.4GHz, not 850MHz.)

So there will always be a need for wired internet connections, until we discover (not invent) a new means of communications. Ansible, anyone? (If you don't understand the reference, see the movie or read Card's Ender's series.)
 
I know several people who do this already-- they live in otherwise inaccessible areas and must use a cellular signal to access the internet.

Most times it's only at 3G speeds, which can be cheaper.

That's where the universal access would happen, if at all-- one or two data generations back, just to keep the data flowing.
 
sfbloodbrother said:
Does Sprint not offer "Truly Unlimited Data"?
Click to expand...

Sprint offers unlimited data for phones.

Tethering those phones costs extra. Can't remember off the top of my head whether the $45 or whatever tethering fee is for unlimited data or what the cap would be if not.
 
I spent almost a year with my ISP cancelled and doing all my netting through a cheap 3G and Klink. As I recall, I used about 5GB per month and Sprint never said a thing. It was pokey but cheap.
 
jefboyardee said:
I spent almost a year with my ISP cancelled and doing all my netting through a cheap 3G and Klink. As I recall, I used about 5GB per month and Sprint never said a thing. It was pokey but cheap.
Click to expand...

I also use klink on occasion; I feel put out with Sprint for the amount they charge me-- 4G rates for a phone restricted to 3G.

As it is, I don't move more than a gig a month, whether I am tethered or not.
 
I use about 20gb a month on aio, my soft cap is 7gb, no home wifi.
I play online games an mmo after softcap has been reached no issue with aio wirless.

But no hulu or netflix after softcap.

I would like to see this. I think it will happen, air is cheeper than wire. Just gotta get the bandwidth and the towers there.
 
Which would suggest that your idea will not take hold.

Remember-- someone has to make money on the venture. If you want to install towers and other infrastructure, then there needs to be a lot of money in it.

More realistically, your idea of universal cellular internet would be a result of older technologies being abandoned due to replacement with more robust (money-making) replacements-- fifth or sixth generation, high data throughput machines channeling 4K video or whatever.

All those 3G and 4G towers and infrastructure might be leveraged toward low-cost cellular internet for those people who won't or can't buy the good stuff.

It'll be slow as hell compared to the newer stuff, but anything is better than nothing, right?
 
Accounting for inflation from 1947 to 2012 the first commercial microwave cost $58014.64. These primitive units where gigantic and enormously expensive, standing 5 1/2 feet tall, weighing over 750 pounds.

I hope this shows that as time goes by technology gets smaller, better, and cheeper.

Now I know that their have been vast technological increases in microwaves latley [yea right, sarcasm]

As opposed to the rapid innovation we see with cell phone technology, however eventually it is possible for it to reach a peak. As with minimum cunductor size and the metal copper without causing electron jump. Perhaps other forms of technology will replace said forms in place now and then, perhaps not. And perhaps we will see an increase in speed and a decrease in cost of operations of cell data providers to enable them to compete on a realistic level with lan line opporations like cable and dsl, and perhaps further in the future, fiber, as perhaps the cost of said equivalency could be less than the cost of hardware+line to your home of a lan line opporator.

Simple speculation. But isint that rule number one in any entrepreneurial activity?

I agree there hast to be money in it. I dont mean 20 unlimited wirless internet 4g while the rest of you have 12 g for 80 with a limit.

I mean maybe in the future there wont need to be a limit on that 80 dollar plan because the bandwidth is there and there is plenty of money because everyone uses it for everything, including brodcast television with addvertising dollars and other advertising elsewhere, seeing the vast influx of advertising in mobile apps, a previously unheard of idea 20 years ago.

But again, all speculation, I just see where it could be possible, I can also see where it would not, but I like to be a glass half full kinda fella. And imagine wonderful things.
 
You kind of do answer yourself there, though you try and kill the argument.

Yes, the technology is cheaper to build now; it's part of the 'economies of scale' equation. But the counter-argument is also valid-- given an amount of storage (or throughput), programmers and users will find ways to fill it up.

When handhed devices are sporting upwards of 128GB of local storage, you'll likely find that a lot of common data gets cached locally; in order to speed up internet over-the-air service. New compression schemes, algorithmic shortcuts, and the like will also aid in the increasing throughput to overcome the physical constrictions of OTA data movement.

Meanwhile, 4K and other data-intensive technologies will come along to flood those pipes.

Until someone invents the sub-space transceiver, I'm afraid we are going to suffer from this problem for quite some time.

I am not saying that our individual throughput will not increase, or that our data usage will go static. On the contrary-- you and I, as individuals, will likely be exploiting this increased bandwidth, leaving veritable trickles for those who live at the bottom of the digital food-chain. They will get more than they get now (which is nothing at all), but there will always be that divide-- the communists and socialists can't win the financial war against excess and poverty, nor can they win the digital one for the same reasons: it is in the nature of man.
 
There's still a limit we can't get around. The amount of bandwidth is fixed. It's the same now as it was a million years ago and the same it will be a million years from now. We can make technology with narrower and narrower signals (commercial 2 way radio is facing that now) but there's a limit to that to, and we've known that since Shannon. If you narrow the bandwidth of the signal, you slow the speed of data transfer. I can communicate in virtually zero bandwidth - but at almost 0bps. You can't increase the speed and decrease the bandwidth at the same time (because they're the same thing).

We can kick current services off the air (that's where the 700MHz cellphone band comes from - radio common carrier no longer exists, we took their piece of spectrum), but once every bit of spectrum is being used for wireless data communication, if we need more, there just isn't any. It's not like we can discover some previously-unknown frequency, or we can use ultra-violet light for long distance, free-space (meaning not in a fiber cable) communications. A type 5 civilization may be able to change the laws of physics, but we're still a type 0 civilization, and we may reach type 1 in a few hundred years (but that's really optimistic).

It's like here's a pound of candy, give one ounce of it to each of 30 kids. We can't "discover" a way to do it, it just can't be done. And we can't "discover" more spectrum space - what is always was and always will be, and there will never be any more. Between 700MHz and 701MHz is only 1MHz of spectrum. We can't make the numbers work differently.
 
Interesting perspectives from everyone. I had no idea about all the factors that goes into it. I mean I knew it was all there just didn't know about all its limitations.
 
i am already using tethering as a main internet connection. i had to finally cancel my service with the WISP because it is unreliable and i cannot afford satellite internet. i live in the woods and have only 4G LTE as the option. 12GB is apparently sufficient enough for Weekend use of Netflix, hours of YouTube per week, and web browsing, with 4GB left at the end of the month. without the payment to the WISP the same difference is simply paid for in regards to the extra data.

most 'unlimited data' plans throttle you after the first GB, meaning it's useless for much else other than basic email. Net10 will throttle you to 128KBPS down 15 days into the billing cycle. it doesn't matter if you tether or not. that's how it is with them.

I only used 2GB of my 12GB plan this last week browsing the web and Facebook/Google+ every evening, using Netflix for an hour both Saturday and Sunday, watched two episodes of Designing Women on YouTube one day, one episode the next day (which ads up to 1 hour, 30 minutes of YouTube), downloaded 6 MP3s from Amazon MP3, and one episode of Family Feud this morning on YouTube. once you learn how much data is used by which activity, you learn a pattern that keeps overages at bay.
 
12 GB wouldn't be enough for me, because I'm on YouTube for so long. I don't know how much data but probably at least 50 GB. Not to mention some downloads when I get games and stuff they are like 25 GB for the download. Think one day we can make those downloads on tethering?
 
i dunno, i used Netflix for a few hours daily last month, an hour or two on YouTube, updated some apps on my tablet, downloaded some apps, some MP3s, and still had 2GB left at the end of my billing cycle. i'm paying the same for the data plan as i was paying for my unreliable WISP that only worked three or four months out of the year.

anything large (games, etc) i just do at the public hotspot in town i go to on weekends. Either way it's nice to know that my phone can do so well as a hotspot that i don't see the point in spending the extra coin on an LTE-enabled tablet.
 
nickdalzell said:
Either way it's nice to know that my phone can do so well as a hotspot that i don't see the point in spending the extra coin on an LTE-enabled tablet.
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I'm curious -- are you able to turn on hotspot and then set your phone down in a central location in the house and have it cover everything in your house, or are you just carrying it in your pocket?

Being centralized would let you have it plugged in all the time, no battery drain due to the wifi wakelock. :D
 
Well if they stop capping data...

But I look at a bigger issue and further down the line.. What if there's no need for tethering and everything is done via the air. No router, no modem... Plenty of cities are adopting this, including mine.

Plus if the future keeps looking the way that it is, I.e. a mobile takeover we will be at the mercy of our mobile providers for most usage needs.

I personally only have my desktop/laptop for one video game I cannot get on my phone and a bigger screen for Netflix.

Even Netflix I could just get an HDMI USB/otg dongle and connect to TV for an even bigger display.. Soo what's holding me back from going entirely mobile already?

I think that is what will come of connectivity is entirely mobile.
 
at home it's plugged in (often after a day at work i have it on charge anyway, as the battery low warning has already come on--Galaxy S-phones are bad on battery life) but i can turn on the hostpot easily via a lock screen shortcut, it just acts like a wifi router, complete with its own SSID, passkey and all. it then acts as if it were a router, i am assuming the limit is ten devices? (only have three-five at a time though). there is only one spot in my trailer home that gets 4G coverage (for some reason, 3G is crippled and only has dial-up speeds so video streaming won't work unless you got LTE) and thankfully it's near an outlet.

I hardly carry my tablets out of the house, and my phone does well enough as an e-reader while out due to the large screen, but the few times i do have my tablets with me, it's sufficient to check email, update an app, download a movie for Air View later, etc. in the latter case it's not on all the time. that would indeed eat the battery faster than the 'cell standby' does. but oddly in town, with a strong LTE signal, the battery hardly loses charge at all. it's when i'm in a 3G-only area, with two bars or less that it dies fast. at work i'm alternating between shady wifi and 3G/1X and it only goes 8 hours before i get the low battery warning. Cell Standby is at the top of the stats using like 80-90%
 
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