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Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT

WiMAX & LTE Networks Bringing VoIP into Big Picture

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by Matt Hymel

With the anticipation of new technology, including Apple's iPad or Google's internet-providing experiments, network speeds are becoming more important than ever. Increasing room within broadband has allowed a magnitude of users to obtain fast upload and download speeds.

Here in America, most consumers may be content with their current service. However, around the world, countries continuously pull ahead of the U.S. in broadband speed and network connection capabilities.

In fact, the United States only boasts one city (Seattle) in the top 5 of cities best wired for internet access. The number one on this list, Seoul, South Korea, has established connections of 100MBps with plans to improve to 1GBps (10 times faster) by 2012. In America, Google has recently announced that it will "experiment" with a new fiber network that would (hopefully) supply 1 GBps connections. However, Google will not decide on their targeted locations until late 2010. 

According to Gartner analyst Phil Redman, "If you look at the wired world in the enterprise, voice has mostly moved to IP already. In terms of wireless, cellular carriers don't have enough dedicated bandwidth right now to support IP-based voice. But in future developments of LTE, it will all be over IP."

Even Clearwire, the company that has taken 4G connections with WiMAX deep into consumer mainstream, expects to triple their subscribers in 2010 to a total of 1.2 million.

Although VoIP may be a new term for consumers, it has certainly become familiar with the enterprise industry. Due to the efficiency of bandwidth as well as effectively lower costs, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) is becoming business's solutions to a unified network communication system. Having phone calls, e-mail, and online conferences all running via the internet can assist in cutting back infrastructure costs, no matter the size of the company.

With speeds up to 1 GBps and a universal movement for VoIP as the primary communication protocol, enterprise activity will not only save money to allocate elsewhere but the age of technological mobility will finally align with mobile internet accessibility and speed.

Until next time -

Matthew Hymel

Switchfast Technologies
Chicago IT Support & Consulting
Rochester IT Support & Consulting

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