ExtremeLabs, Inc

So what is it, this broadband stuff?

Once upon a time there was baseband and broadband. They were electrical characteristics of network data transmission. Now, the term is whatever anyone wants to make it.

My sense of broadband is something faster than a megabit per second in data transmission payload. This means that a lot of connectivity posing as broadband today is actually just slow data. This means you, DSL, UMTS, EV-DO, 1xRTT, and all forms of ISDN. It also likely means that the venerable T1 is slower in payload than what should be minimum broadband speed.

But marketing twits across the planet will disagree. Fancy that.

Hanging from my pocket (a tailor should scream) is my Treo 650. I bought it on eBay. It was in ‘new’ condition, ostensibly, but I had to mess with the charger’s connection to the phone to get it to charge. It wasn’t that fun.

The Treo, in turn, is supposed to talk to my Mac via the infamous Palm Desktop. After installing the Palm Desktop, I had to remove it as it simply buckles my old PowerBook G4, causing the syndrome known as the Spinning Ball of Death. Between it and Growl, my machine seemed to have all of the turtle-like performance of a Pentium II. Both apps had to go.

Verizon, my venerable (cough-cough) carrier, sees the Treo as a money-making device. All of Verizon’s nice services can connect to the Treo 650 for additional prices. These nice services amount to one of two degrees of data connectivity, one is VCast-like, the other is full-on EV.DO. One is $30, the other $60, if I correctly recall, per month. Not in a pig’s eyes. I can’t get even the 1xRTT speed data connection for my currently exorbitant monthly fee, even though it’s the basic infrastructure that Verizon sells. Nope, no data.

And the Treo can’t be tethered for no cost in any event, to my Mac, or a PC, or anything else save a bluetooth headset. Drat. It’s a nice PDA. Synching it with my iCal contacts? Not yet. Syncing it with my old Verizon phone contacts? In a pig’s eyes, as Verizon’s backup service won’t provision transfer of old phone contacts to a newly added PDA. Out of luck– type them in one at a time.

Verizon, your monopolistic attitude is a waste. I wish there was better.

Baltimore ostensibly goes online with WiMax, so the press release says. The hype surrounding this wireless ‘broadband replacement technology’ has been long and thick and essentially empty. Although Intel wants to sell lots of WiMax parts, the ability to deploy WiMax and have it adopted has waned dramatically. Once seen as the technology to replace WiFi (IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking), WiMax suffers from far more ills than even the over-sold WiFi components.

There is no inherent security to WiMax. There are few unlicensed radio bands that will be used. WiMax is about as useful as CDMA/EV.DO as a public carriage of broadband data. Will any of this eventually become popular? I don’t think so. I’d like to see WiMax work, but it suffers from even more problems than WiFi, and the phrase ‘WiMax Hotspot’ is an oxymoron. But the concept seems moronic now, too.