Sidecut Reports

Looking back, it’s clear we didn’t do justice to Sprint’s introduction of its Overdrive mobile hot spot product — such is the problem of holding a late-night event at CES, when your audience may be distracted from blogging or writing in the moment, as they say.

Overall, it was a boffo product announcement, hitting all the big-time notes (silly comedian Frank Caliendo, star turn from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, over-the-top after-announcement party food from celebrity chef Mario Batali) but most importantly it delivered a shipping-now, easy to use and understand product in the form of the Overdrive pocketspot from Sierra Wireless, which combines 3G and 4G connectivity into an in-your-pocket package. At $99 for the device and $60 a month for the data plan — same as most standalone 3G aircards — the Overdrive is a no-brainer decision if you are a road warrior who spends any amount of time in Sprint’s already operating 4G markets.

In our brief bit of hands-on testing at CES (the Sprint folks were kind enough to lend us an Overdrive for evaluation) we found the Overdrive incredibly simple to operate — just push one button and BOOM, as Caliendo would say in his trademark John Madden imitation, your WiMAX-enabled Wi-Fi hotspot was up and running. And even in the challenging airwave atmosphere of the Las Vegas Convention Center, we were able to live-Tweet the FCC chairman’s talk, via the Overdrive sitting in our suit jacket pocket. Nice.

Not to be outdone, pocketspot veterans Cradlepoint were showing their latest wares in a suite in the Wynn — while not yet available the company’s “Project Tablerock” mobile hotspot with docking station will likely be an extremely attractive choice for Clearwire users, since it features a portable WiMAX modem that becomes your home modem when you drop it into its two-antenna charging/docking station.

According to Cradlepoint folks who showed us the Tablerock unit, the docking station antennas give the unit a significant reception boost — never a bad thing when it comes to wireless connectivity. Look for the Tablerock and maybe more (!) pocketspot modems for Clearwire and its partners as the first quarter of 2010 comes to a close. (Bad phone-cam picture of Overdrive and Tablerock side by side follows.)

Sprint’s Overdrive by Sierra Wireless, left, and Cradlepoint’s Tablerock, in the wild at CES.

P.S.: Our always reliable pal Maggie Reardon covered the Sprint event for C/Net, tapping away at her laptop while everyone else ate Batali’s food.

At CES, there is a somewhat standing tradition of having the incumbent FCC chairman show up for a Q-and-A chat. In the recent past, this has mainly amounted to CEA chairman Gary Shapiro lobbing fairly meaningless softball questions to Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, the two FCC chairs during the Bush administration. Anticipation was high last week in Las Vegas for something more substantial, given that Shapiro’s politics are definitely not typically aligned with the current FCC chair, Julius Genachowski.

Instead of the usual puffball session, Shapiro asked some admirably tough questions — and Genachowski gave as good as he got, never appearing nervous and in the end (at least on this judge’s card) winning the impromptu “Brawl in the Hall” by having an well-thought answer to each of Shapiro’s queries.

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LAS VEGAS — Though you may hear some breathless reports about the splashy Long Term Evolution demonstrations from Verizon and its partners here at CES this week, don’t be fooled into thinking that any of this stuff is going to surface anytime soon. While we certainly believe Verizon intends to launch commercial services sometime in 2010, end-users will have to be satisfied with big desktop modems or chunky USB dongles at best — leaving the LTE cameras, cars, homes and other whizzy devices for delivery at some undetermined future date.

If you take WiMAX as an example — and since it is largely comparble to LTE from a pure radio standpoint it seems fair — two years ago at CES WiMAX proponents Intel and Motorola were staging live driving tests of the technology, a real-world element still missing from any of the LTE demonstrations we saw here Thursday morning. Since live WiMAX service only emerged this past year, you can do the math on the expected time frame from live CES demos to commercial services and products.

The Ericsson LTE suite here — an impressive setup of an imaginary medical team that used LTE-enabled devices to make health care an on-demand application — actually used wires to connect most of its “LTE” devices… just to show you what was possible. Same with the Alcatel-Lucent setup, where I got my picture taken… with a Wi-Fi camera. “See, this is how fast it would be if it were using LTE,” the demo rep said. Not particularly impressive.

And the one demonstration in the Alcalu suite that was really using over-the-air LTE? The modem from the laptop (used for a multi-player game app) was tucked in a drawer. “I’m not allowed to open the drawer,” the demo rep said. But the two big antennas on top of the monitor were a giveaway: Most of LTE gear is a long way from prime time availability.

I’ve got some pictures here of a “not production” LTE desktop modem from LG, as well as a plastic shell that will apparently be the size of the LG LTE dongle, both expected out… sometime later this year. The coolest of all the demos was a handheld LTE-enabled camera from Samsung, which showed streaming video to an LTE-enabled picture frame. But given the faux state of the other demos, we’re not quite sure it was really running on LTE; and given the non-committal answer about when such products might ship — “next year, maybe?” — we’re not hopeful we’ll be able to stream our photos via LTE to distant family members anytime soon.

With all the activity and marketing bucks being spent — the side-by-side suites took up a whole wing of meeting rooms here at the Venetian — it’s clear the momentum behind LTE is indisputible. The delivery dates for LTE products and services? That’s still indecipherable.

(bad photos below. Want good ones? Go see Engadget.)

This is the big (about the size of a netbook) LG prototype LTE modem.

This is the plastic shell that will be the size of the LG USB dongle modem… so they say. I creatively put a pen next to it to show the size scale.

Two years ago, Sidecut Reports began with a modest mission: take a look at the world of wireless communications, and explore and explain the details behind technologies at the “cutting edge” of innovation. At CES in 2008, we took a ride in a WiMAX-enabled car and were suitably impressed, and then started waiting for the service to become a commercial reality.

Finally, we’re there!

It’s Wednesday Jan. 6, 2010, and we are sitting in West Las Vegas — far from the Strip and the CES madness — outside a Clearwire “Clear” store (actually outside the nearby Whole Foods store, since they have coffee and cookies for sale) and we just got connected with a Clearwire loaner USB card — and the bits are flowing, megabit-style.

More thoughts on WiMAX and 4G later on, after the big Sprint 4G event tonight. But for now, we’re happy to say that WiMAX is a reality here in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS — Even as AT&T publicly dodges responsibility for the well publicized iPhone congestion woes, the company Wednesday spelled out in detail how it is trying to alleviate the problem: By massively beefing up its “backhaul” to cellular towers, putting in 13,500 new T-1 lines and 238 DS-3 optical connections in New York and San Francisco alone.

AT&T Chief Technical Officer John Donovan also said the company added 2,000 new cell sites over the past year, with 900 of those in New York City and another 850 in San Francisco, two cities where iPhone woes were felt the strongest. AT&T’s “aggressive backhaul project” is ongoing, Donovan said, and will target Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Charlotte, N.C. and Miami in the coming year. While the T-1 lines can bring fast relief in the form of approximately 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth in each line, the DS-3s are workhorses, adding 45 Mbps or so with each fiber connection.

Donovan’s comments were part of Ma Bell’s developer summit held here at the Palms Resort Wednesday, where AT&T also announced plans to add a wide mix of new smartphone handsets including Android-based devices from Motorola and Palm OS devices, alongside plans to make it easier for developers to build web-style apps and widgets for midrange or “feature” cellphones. All that pending activity, however, means that Donovan and AT&T’s technical crew will be working overtime to get the network in shape for the expected continued expansion of mobile data use.

By adding to backhaul — the description for the bandwidth being brought from the core network to the cellular radio towers — AT&T should be able to alleviate some of the iPhone congestion problems. But AT&T still has some concerns about its available wireless spectrum, which Donovan said is at a premium.

While AT&T will be able to use its recently purchased 700 MHz spectrum assets for its planned move to Long Term Evolution (LTE) in 2011 (where he said AT&T will also use its dormant AWS spectrum for LTE uplink traffic), for the next year or so Donovan must make AT&T’s 3G network stable on its existing holdings, which range from about 25 MHz to 50 MHz in most markets. Upgrading its 3G network to HSPA 7.2 technology will help some, though not much since the balance of AT&T’s devices aren’t compatible with the newer, faster service that will be coming online soon.

“If you do the math [on the cell site expansion] we’re burning through spectrum pretty quickly,” Donovan said. “I’m restless about it, but I’m not losing sleep… yet.”