Columbia?s Eli Noam says mobile is no substitute for wired broadband

In a recent report, Eli Noam, the highly respected Director of Columbia University's Institute for Tele-Information (CITI), demonstrates that wireless broadband will never be able to meet consumers' insatiable demand for video and data-rich content. As the summary of “Let Them Eat Cellphones: Why Mobile Wireless is No Solution for Broadband” says clearly:

“Rural mobile broadband will never be a satisfactory substitute for wired (fiber or coaxial) systems for meeting foreseeable needs for increased throughput, creating a new ‘digital gap.’ It is at best a temporary Band-Aid for addressing the increasingly uneven distribution of broadband quality.”

Noam has good words for the FCC’s National Broadband Plan (NBP), but zeroes in early on its major shortcoming. The plan came up with what many agree is a stopgap measure to address our nation's broadband gaps: buildout of wireless.

Noam admits there’s a certain plausibility to freeing 500 megahertz of spectrum, auctioning it off to 4G providers, and using the proceeds to create wireless connectivity in rural areas. But this plan, says Noam, is economically insufficient and technically obtuse.

According to Noam, promoters of the 4G wireless scheme are claiming that “it would reach speeds of up to 300 Mbps.” However, “more sober projections speak of 13 Mbps,” and “even this number is unrealistic,” he says. In any case, the goal is misplaced because “fiber and cable are 20 to 100 times as fast as optimistically projected 4G rates, and DSL is about twice as fast – and they have decent headroom to further raise their speed…”

Moreover, “The problem with wireless is that it has negative economies for speed, i.e. to add speed becomes progressively more expensive, while wireline has positive economies for speed. If one doubles network speed for wireless one needs more spectrum.”

And that’s a real problem. If rural people were willing to confine their broadband desires to email and the occasional photo, wireless would be fine. But they, like people everywhere, want video, and for that they need fiber. As he says, “If it takes one minute to download a movie over cable or fiber, it would take mobile wireless, at a speed that is slower by a factor of 100, one hour and 40 minutes.”

Not only that, but people are increasingly using broadband as their conduit for not just phone and computer screens, but for TVs as well. And TV is not staying static, but is becoming more complex. “Thus,” he writes, “we should not expect rural areas to sit quietly and use their little 4G mobile screens or tablets while their metropolitan brethren enjoy 2-way, 3D, 4K, 5.1 sound, and 6-foot screen televisions.”

Exactly why planners have chosen wireless as a goal isn’t clear, because “…most rural households are not dependent on wireless for broadband. A majority of such residents are passed by cable TV which enables much faster speeds, and still more rural households have a phone connection.”

The wireless solution “…would also be more expensive than DSL for large parts of the country,” especially “for the western and northeastern parts of the country, closing the broadband gap by means of DSL would be cheaper than doing so with 4G.”

So, in the end, “wireless as a strategy to spread broadband is a short-term strategy.”

Let Them Eat Cellphones: Why Mobile Wireless is No Solution for Broadband (Eli Noam, Journal of Information Policy, 2011)