Not Ready for Prime Time... Player.

[Lester]

(The following is a copy of my post on NCRADIO.net... we have a few folks that think the world of radio is already over due to Wireless Broadband. I beg to differ... it's Clear Channels fault. )

It started off sooooo good. I already had great visions, recipes galore for the crow that I was *SURE* I was going to be eating. As a pie? Maybe a casserole? It might even be good in a pita...

Then 10 minutes later it came to a halt...

Let's backtrack.

I have, on more than one occasion, said that wireless broadband is NOT going to be the death of radio, at least not in the foreseeable future, and others have disagreed. I decided to walk the walk.

On my trip to visit family in Ohio, I fired up the wireless broadband card, pointed my web browser at a couple of sites, and cranked it to 11.

Test setup:

Dell Lattitude D630 Laptop (WinXP SP2, 2ghz, 4gb RAM (3.5 available), nVidia graphics)
Sierra Wireless Broadband Card (USBConnect 881) on AT&T Wireless.
And a Belkin FM Adapter to pipe it in through the radio.

Sites:
Pandora.com
TheRadio.com

I fired the rig up outside Greensboro, while heading west on I-40. After several attempts and two browsers, Pandora still failed to load. TheRadio.com had no such problem, and fired up after installing an Active X control through IE7. I tuned the radio to 88.1, the player to CRUSH, and the tunes were blasting. I headed back onto I40w.

(Keep in mind, kids... I was truly excited. The possibilities are AMAZING!)

My mouth started to water, thinking of all the delicious ways I could enjoy crow... the music sounded at least as good as satellite, no drop outs, and I was hauling ass (within the bounds of safe driving of course). As I rolled up to Winston-Salem, it all came to a halt. The connection said it was still active, although nothing could be reached, and the player had froze up... although it said "buffering" (no connection means it wasn't buffering shit. Even after I disconnected and unplugged the broadband it continue to "buffer"... apparently from the twilight zone.) I re-established the connection, hit refresh, and swerved enough times to swear I wasn't going to do that again. (A simple refresh did recover the TheRadio.com applet, but I had to dig down to Crush manually.) Things continued on smoothly until about a mile from Pilot Mountain off of highway 52 (15 minutes after restart). Buffering became the name of the game with 5 seconds of audio followed by 10-15 seconds of silence. About a mile later, it was done.

I let it sit for awhile... but nothing happened. I had already decided I wasn't firing it back up, as the average user wouldn't. Let's be honest... I'm jamming to internet radio in my Chrysler*, it drops terminally dead, I'm picking up the cell and cussing out the salesman that sold me the piece of shit. But I'm not that customer... I'm a computer nerd... I balanced the steering wheel off my knee, quickly hit REFRESH, and the player returned again... for about 5 seconds.

For the next 3.5 hours, 5-10 seconds of music would be filled with 3-15 minute gaps of dead air. The connection was still live, and the TheRadio player was struggling to play it, but it just was not happening. This went from Mount Airy, NC through to Charleston, WV. During that time, there was only about 1% actual audio, and 0% of it was worthwhile. (Later on during the trip, I opened up a persistent ping (PING -t http://www.ncradio.net) to monitor my AT&T connection.... very few drops on AT&T's end, although I suspect it was a serious issue of "not enough pipe" to get the bits to the proper place.)

Once we hit Charleston, the music was loud and clear until Huntington. Once outside Huntington, it was sketchy (slightly worse than your average satellite radio), but still a lot better than what i experienced in the deadzone.

Sorry kids... Wireless Internet is not ready to relieve you of your radio worries... and if it does, it won't have any more impact on terrestrial radio than XM/Sirius has (not much). It's not live, it's not local, and it's not available on 3.5 hours of a 6.5 hour trip.

Have we progressed in the 3 years since i last tried this? I'll leave that up to you... using a Cingular Broadband Card, I was able to hear a shitty sounds like AM stream of 100.7 The River all the way to the Big Walker Mountain tunnel on I-77. This time I got near CD quality streams that stopped at Mount Airy. You decide.

That said, I've stayed away from Internet radio for quite some time... However, Crush has made me a fanboy. It's the station we should have had in Raleigh years ago.

Comments welcome... but haters can prepare to hear "then try it your damn self" as a response.

* - Keep in mind, if you try streaming radio or video in your Chrysler, I can *PROMISE* you that Chrysler's tech support (if it exists) will tell you that it is for casual internet surfing, and not streaming content. Just be prepared.

[Clay JD Walker]

I've done this a few times just for s&g's with my nTelos phone...I'll crank up the station streamer on the MotoQ and plug the output of the phone into the direct box in my trailblazer. I do it to blow my dad's mind in the driveway back in Buckhannon...

sayeth Dad:

"You musta got a damn good antenna on that Trailblazer to get The Wolf all the way up here"...

no Dad, it's on my cell phone...

"What the hell?"

But while moving, especially down in the triad (cause the whole nTelos thing sucks balls in North Carolina) I get lots of drop outs...

More reason why radio is a brand, not a signal...get people to use your online product as well, and next thing you know, you're getting broadband and broadcast listeners...just sayin'

[Cameron]

In our area, the 1x and 3G (HSDPA/UMTS) providers are "bursty". Right now downstream maximums on ATT 3G is running a max of .9 to 1.8 Mbit per second.
Sprint (Ntelos) is up with EVDO Rev A in this market with downloads up to 2-3 Mbit/s second and upload of 700+. Continuous streams can flutuate dramatically - especially in a hostile RF environment and while moving. "Ready for Prime-Time" will be around 3rd qtr. 2010. That's when the telcos like Clearwire, Sprint, and Google - yes Google will integrate WiMax and the existing cellular-protocols into devices that aggratate bandwidth from a larger group of available frequency ranges and sources. (IE the large chunk of analog TV frequencies they bought). The best one can do is purchase a cellular amplifier for their car and, at least, try to overcome some of the RF losses to optimize the data streams available.

I bet the ip streams are, at least, holding-on as well as an HD-2 stream.
(...sound better too.)

[cgarison]

The tough part is maintaining a 3G connection with AT&Fee/Cingu-hell while traveling. In the suburbs of Philly, I cannot use the GPS feature of my phone with a Google Maps satellite overlay because I cannot download the information fast enough to update the screen at 35 MPH on Edge. 3G coverage is sparse even in major metropolitan areas and I expect the ability to get a reliably 3G signal will diminish even more with the rollout of the new iPhones in less than 30 days. I can lose the 3G connection in the middle of downtown Philly and NYC which are two of the better areas for this service in the US.

Have we progressed? No, because with the older Edge technology and my MotoRazr with MotoTools software, I could set my phone to attach to more than 1 Edge cell and increase the bandwidth to download. I could go to as many free cells on the local towers, but AT&T would back me down to one when I reached anything over 512MB. Safest bet was to use no more than 4 cells (if available) for a connection which was about 256 KBs down if not much traffic was on the tower(s). Not too shabby when compared to standard DSL.

I have to admit that I nearly threw out my Comcast connection at home this year for Verizon or Sprint EVDO, but did not make the move after I learned of the new 5 Gig data caps on the service.

[Dr. Loomis]

I've been using Orb to stream MP3s from my PC on my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry Pearl for a few months now. It works flawlessly, as long as you're in an area with EVDO coverage. I have it set to 320kbps and it runs smoothly. The Pearl has a standard size headphone jack, so playing it in the car is easy.

[Lester]

Which is exactly part of the problem. The front end is so splayed in support, methods, and providers, this is never going to work. "As long as you have EVDO coverage" is like saying Google works great, as long as you're own a Cisco router. Until I can hop in my car and drive, while listening, regardless of carrier, Internet radio is DECADES away from impacting terrestrial radio.

Hell, TR is going to kill itself before anyone else gets a chance.

[AmpedNow]

Until I can hop in my car and drive, while listening, regardless of carrier, Internet radio is DECADES away from impacting terrestrial radio.

I wouldn't say decades... But definitely a few years away.

The tech to take the wires off the internet is finally here, but the wireless infrastructure is still well behind the curve. When you get into rural areas like WV, the problem is even worse, with terrain issues and outdated or nonexistent networks.

But the long-term trend is definitely going in that direction, ever so slowly. The day will come when we won't see how we went without portable internet access.

All of these new options are definitely competition for terrestrial radio, but instead of fighting it, it needs to join it, and figure out ways to monetize it. Now's the time to do it. When high-speed wireless networks are ubiquitous, it will be too late.