The End of Rabbit Ears, a Billion more Broadband users

On Feb 17, 2009, television signals will no longer be broadcast through the airwaves.  A rabbit-ear antenna will not bring television to a set, and to say 'on the air' will be obsolete.

So why do we care about this?

While this will not affect the majority of households that are already subscribing to cable television, this will usher in a substantial wave of technological innovation.  The freed up band of the electromagnetic spectrum has certain scientific properties that can be exploited to transmit new generations of wireless broadband. 

Imagine getting a 100 Mbps signal on your cell phone, fast enough to download streaming high-definition video.  Your cellphone service would include this broadband, and you could even link the phone as an adapter to your home network, and receive this broadband into your network.  This would allow you to consolidate your broadband and cellphone service into one subscription, saving money.

More importantly, the innovations that arise through this will induce leapfrogging to broadband in the developing world. 

The scalability of wireless broadband will result in Internet access spreading to previously disenfranchised markets.  In India, the wired infrastructure is so poor that 99.9% of the population does not have broadband Internet access today, and 90% of households do not have landline telephones.  But cellphone penetration has already overtaken landlines, at 80 million subscribers and growing rapidly. 

Cellphones become the natural vehicle of leapfrogging to broadband deliverence to areas where landline telephones and wired broadband have no chance of reaching in the near future.  This diffusion will be shockingly rapid. 

Prediction : By 2013, Asia and Latin America will jointly have 900 million people exclusively subscribing to wireless broadband services through cellphone-like devices, enjoying speeds of 5 Mbps or more.  80% of these people have no Internet access, not even dial-up, today. 

Comments

[jeffolie]

OT Reversal of Research in Energy Technology...

In fiscal 2006, Congress cut the Department of Energy's budget for all renewable energy programs by more than 35 percent. As a result, DOE, which funds NREL as well as other national labs, has cut the total amount it will give the lab in Golden. NREL does research in wind, biomass, solar and hydrogen technologies.
"We are going to face a very difficult year at NREL," said Bob Noun, NREL's deputy associate director. "This is a real paradox.

[jeffolie]

Broadband without electricity - no way

People Power

The major impediments to economic growth in India are in the infrastructure sector, where one finds glaring shortcomings in the state of roads, ports, electricity, and the like. There is also a crying need to improve the social infrastructure, such as the country’s education and health facilities.

Per capita consumption of electricity in India is 1/20th of per capita consumption of electricity in the United States. Over half of India’s nearly 200 million households do not have electricity. Around 70 percent rely on traditional, non-commercial fuel such as firewood, cow-dung cakes, and other agricultural waste to cook their food. Most Indians experience power outages as routine blackouts, either for a few hours every day or for days at a time.

[GK]

Check out what the rate of improvement in electricity distribution is...

Plus, even if 30% don't have electricity in India, there are still 69% of the population that do have electricity but no broadband. Those are the ones who will rapidly see BB available to them over the next 7 years.

[alzaebo]

A new trend in India is the use of "phone ladies".

They get a cell phone thru microloan programs, and provide phone service to the local village(s).

Better for the farmer to pay her for the call, than to take a daylong train ride to the city, where the brokers would still lie about the price of cotton.

[alzaebo]

also available thru microloans- a solar strip charger or an old car battery and a charger

[Eric]

That is absolutely not true! There will still be over the air TV signals. They will only change form. Rabit ears will still be required to get local digital TV signals. Do the research.

[gaiaonline gold]

A new trend in India is the use of "phone ladies".

They get a cell phone thru microloan programs, and provide phone service to the local village(s).

Better for the farmer to pay her for the call, than to take a daylong train ride to the city, where the brokers would still lie about the price of cotton.

[aion kinah]

That is absolutely not true! There will still be over the air TV signals. They will only change form. Rabit ears will still be required to get local digital TV signals. Do the research.

[Anderson]

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Anderson
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[Geoman]

"Prediction : By 2013, Asia and Latin America will jointly have 900 million people exclusively subscribing to wireless broadband services through cellphone-like devices, enjoying speeds of 5 Mbps or more. 80% of these people have no Internet access, not even dial-up, today"

It is 2019 - 4.3 billion people use the internet. That is 56.3 percent of the world’s population, and a 1,104% growth rate since 2000. Global average internet speed is 17.5 Mbps. So the speed goal has definitely been achieved.

The average smartphone connection in Asia-Pacific now uses around 1Gb of data per month. China has the highest number of internet users in the world, with over 746 million users. India has the world's second highest number of internet users, with 699 million users connected.

China has 378 million broadband subscriptions. Japan 40 million. Korea 21 million, India 17 million. Brazil 28 million. Argentina 8 million, Columbia 6 million. Add them all up and I don't think we get to 900 million. More like 600 million. Still a huge number, from virtually zero in 2006. No doubt 900 million is just a few years away.

By the way - this is changing so fast that even statistics 1-2 years old are incorrect and off by millions. I could be wrong here.

[Kartik Gada]

Hello Geoman,

China has 378 million broadband subscriptions. Japan 40 million. Korea 21 million, India 17 million. Brazil 28 million. Argentina 8 million, Columbia 6 million. Add them all up and I don't think we get to 900 million.

Those numbers are for landline only.

The article focuses on mobile, since that was expected to grow much faster in places where there was never a suitable wired infrastructure. India has only 17-30 million landline broadband subscriptions, but over 400 million wireless broadband subscriptions (a classic leapfrogging).

See here for landline vs. mobile compared side-by-side (even as only a portion of mobile are broadband) :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_broadband_Internet_subscriptions

Here is the smartphone list :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphone_penetration

See here :

https://qz.com/india/1512867/reliance-jios-cheap-data-is-killing-broadband-internet-in-india/

"Despite the slowing growth, India’s broadband subscriber base did breach the 500 million milestone in 2018. "

[Kartik Gada]

Geoman,

Actually, here is the roll-up of total mobile broadband subscribers :

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273016/number-of-mobile-broadband-subscriptions-worldwide-since-2007/

2013 had almost 2 billion worldwide, so Asia + LatAm comprising over 900m out of that is a certainty.

The scalability advantage of mobile was always going to be a factor in its rapid diffusion over landlines, under ATOM principles.