Batboard

So, you thought ICOM was cool when they introduced D-STAR that supports 80 kb/s high speed data? Well. Motorola has just shoved ICOM to the floor and is stompin' their little head into the ground! Check out the article below from MRT. You can bet I'm all over my Motorola sales guy Thursday when he's back from vacation so we can get our MW-800's runnin' at 96 kb/s!

Boys, it sounds like the all new Quant replacement is finally here, at least for 800 MHz!

Enjoy!

Motorola offers data improvements for Astro 25 systems

Aug 23, 2005 11:38 AM
By Donny Jackson

DENVER--Motorola today announced it has begun initial deployments of infrastructure that will let its Astro 25 customers realize a 10-fold increase in the data rates inherent in the system!

Currently, a standard Astro 25 provides customers with a data rate of 9.6 kb/s on a standard 25 KHz channel. Those customers can reach data rates of 96 kb/s simply by investing in another base station at each tower site of the 800 MHz network—a reality that makes such an upgrade attractive, said Rich Baids, vice president and general manager of Motorola’s radio systems division.

“Everything else is existing infrastructure that is leveraged—tower sites, lines and the IP network,” Baids said.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the upgrade is that the mobile coverage offered for data is similar to the footprint for Astro 25 voice, so customers generally will not be required to find or develop new tower sites to enable the higher-speed data rate, Baids said.

Greg Brown, president of Motorola’s government and enterprises mobility solutions business, unveiled the company’s plan to offer increased data rates to Astro 25 customers during a March interview with Mobile Radio Technology. Baids said Motorola is deploying the data-upgrade solution with initial customers and plans to make the data upgrade generally available late this year.

Dataradio has had 128kbps systems for some time now, but anyhoo...

Dataradio? Never heard of them, but anyhoo...

They are located in Canada and have been around for a while.

"Dataradio has had 128kbps systems for some time ..."
______________________________________________

I think you will find that is not on a 25KHz bandwidth channel - that in fact their fastest data for a voice bandwidth channel has been about 40 K - so this new technology of 96000 is quite impressive.

Also, this new modulation standard supports bandwidth aggregation for real high speed bursts on multi-channel systems. It is proposed by the FCC as the new standard for data at 700 MHz. The Dataradio guy is REALLY fighting that.

Why? because his sales team has been promising free upgrades to 700 MHz if you buy now as an incentive to get past those who want to wait for 700 to be a baked cake. Changing frequencies for free - that's one thing - but if his existing modulation isn't legal at 700 - WOW - lots of engineering $ to back up their sales strategy!

One thing you learn in life - always look for "the rest of the story"

Just don't be thinking you will get that 96000 "Integrated" with voice on your XTL5000 - or your old VRM - it takes a new VRM - a real monster.

what was the price on that?

"what was the price on that?"
________________________

For the new VRM? I'd have to ask but no doubt we're talking several thou ...

On the other hand - the price for learning to ask more questions? I try not to go there - too painful...

This Motorola breakthrough is more dramatic than one might initially think.

Consider this: ICOM has been touting their brand new, just released D-STAR so-called "High Speed Data" system which was initially advertised as supporting 128 kb/s HSD. Soon after some pre-production systems were tested in the field in the US, they found out that the actual speed was barely 70 kb/s. More importantly, D-STAR HSD requires 130 kHz wide gigantic bloated channels!! As a result, the only band that ICOM could realistically implement for HSD D-STAR is the undesirable and unused 1.2 GHz band, as it has a ton of excess capacity. Problem is, most Hams will be reluctant to use this band.

Contrast this with Motorola's new system that supports 96 kb/s (much faster than ICOM's D-STAR), AND it occupies a normal 25 kHz channel! Heck, the DELTA in data speeds (96 kb/s vs/ 70 kb/s) is a 26 kb/s HSD advantage for Motorola, which is approaching tripple the speed of the current in use Public Safety IVD systems that are running license plates all day long at 9.6 kb/s. The overall difference is a 10-fold improvement in speed!

Why the heck would any Ham want to buy into slow-as-a-dog, gigantic bandwidth D-STAR when Motorola has brought forth this technology?! I predict that D-STAR is DOA. Too bad...

For Hams, this means that if an ICOM competitor, such as Kenwood, Yaesu, or Alinco, wake up and smell the coffee, they could perhaps glom on to a similar technology as to what Motorola is using, and offer 96 kb/s HSD capability on EXISTING 2M and 440 Ham repeaters, via their existing 25 kHz channels.

Unfortunately, it's probably too little, too late as Verizon is now offering guaranteed mobile service at 700 kb/s minimum, bursting to as high as 9 Mb/s, for $49.95/mo, and the price is expected to plummet.

As Donald would say, this is HUGE!

A lot of naysayers here have bad mouthed Motorola at every possible opportunity. This dramatic breakthrough shows you the true power of Motorola! Some free advice: When it comes to Public Safety, big 2-Way radio, end-to-end integrated systems, don't EVER bet against Mother Motorola (assuming you'd like to keep your money!)!

UhYah!!!!

Jesus, Larry. Does Motorola pay you for this crap? Or do you just enjoy [snip] Motorola's press releases?

DSTAR is pretty cool, and not too expensive at $1300/mobile (buy 8, get the repeater free). If I want to run this data, I need, what, an XTL5000 plus VRM? Do you think Mother M is going to sell me an appropriately-flashed XTL5 and a VRM for $1300? Are they going to give me a repeater for free when I commit to 8 radios?

You're talking about a price difference approaching an order of magnitude.

I can already predict your response: "No, but Motorola is better! The hams should pay for it, because it's MOTOROLA!"

I was going to say... for the price it will cost to replace the repeaters (not to mention you now probably need to flash both mobile and portable radios) to perform at this higher data speed, you might as well sign a contract with verizon and use their EVDO service, even their 1xRTT service is faster...

Let say the average department has 20 vehicles that they would like to equip with a secure vpn based network using verizon EVDO. In NYC, it's going for $59.99 all you can drink - and if you think a public safety agency is going to pay the sticker price, they will probably get it for a bit less based on volume discounts, state contract pricing, etc.

Without Tax or price discounts:

$14,397.60 per year.

How much does ONE quantar cost? I bet you it'll probably cost more than that!

And that outfits your fleet of vehicles with internet. You can buy a simple board, flash a 128mb CF card with a linux based router and wireless lan capabilites for probably $100-$200 each, and then your officers can even have PDA's at their side when they do traffic stops. Not to mention, if they really wanted to play, they could put IP phones over the connection and have direct station to car telephone.

Oh the possibilities are endless.

However, some of this stuff isn't plausable in the public safety relm. Keeping in mind that some states that run statewide systems have very strict regulations about the path that their data takes from a mainframe to the terminal the end user is running.

The Verizon option would be a more expensive reoccuring cost in the long run, however, it would probably balance out between the FCC licensing fees, maintence to hardware, etc.

Keep in mind this isn't something that amateurs are going to run out and buy. Yes, there are a number of quantar's in amateur use today, however, I don't see anyone caring enough to spend the $ to buy one of these repeaters for their data features.

DSTAR - who wants to talk over 1.2ghz. The only advantage I can think of is that you can avoid the 3pm medical net. High speed data is great, if you have a good mobile killer application for it. I use SSH to do all my email and port mapping, so with that in mind, there goes the "can't run encryption thing" and throws that RIGHT out the door.

I do like the buy 8 mobiles get the repeater free though... that would be tempting.

-Alex

Alex, I agree with you completely that Hams are not going to go out and buy $5,000 XTL-5000 radios. My thought is that Motorola has shown us that current technology (albeit probably proprietary) can support 96 kb/s over standard 25 kHz channels. My problem with D-STAR is that its 70 kb/s requires 130 kHz wide channels. My hope is that one of the big Ham companies will pick up on this, so we could use existing 25 kHz repeater channels and assignments on 2m and 440 MHz for mobile data. I would think they could price such gear at $1,300, or less, like D-STAR pricing. Even at $1,300, Hams are just about at their breaking point as to "willingness to pay."

But, it's probably too little, too late, as I noted in my post because of what Verizon is doing. I believe the $59.95 price will rapidly fall, too. This outmotes the Ham HSD stuff before it's even here.

I also agree, Alex, that public safety agencies will need to take a very serious and close look at Verizon for their mobile HSD needs. Think about it: Verizon is offering broadband mobile data service, whereas Motorola's IVD is akin to dial up speeds. I would guess the big issue here is security, and such, although I believe Verizon could easily provide AES capability for their data, if they are not already doing so anyways.

It may very well be that the best bet is Verizon. And, the police depts could easily build some extra strategic and hardened cell towers, as needed, to handle hardened sites for disruptions, such as what occured in New Orleans. In this case, they could easily get the construction permits (short circuiting the normal multi year bureaucratic permit approval process) that are so difficult for Verizon to get since they (the city) control those permits!

I think that the celluar folks have prooven time and time again that they can do more with the same amount of bandwidth. Look at how many subscribers they can carry at one site. Can't Nextel handle 6 conversations per channel? EVDO gives you broadband at what bandwidth requirments?

Then again, they are doing this with multiple lowerpower sites than a 110w quantar, and at higher frequencies.

I didn't have any idea that DSTAR required 130k of channel bandwidth to run! That's absolutly a waste of spectrum. It would be nice to see the ham vendors look at someone like M and go - that would be a neat feature for us to offer to our clients. But, I think we've beaten that to absolute death. They won't. Until the average ham starts using computers that could actually send data across the bus on the system to match the speed of the phsical data, this stuff will never take flight.

From what I understand, Verizon is one of the better cell companies who actually has gensets at most of their sites.

I'm sure Cisco and other vendors can secure the data. Keep in mind if you use a software or hardware endpoint at each end that is responsible for encrypting and decrypting the information, you can realisticly use any transport mechanism. Like with radios - change the keys here and there if your worried.

I know of severl VPN devices that support hardware based 256-AES encryption. That's not hard.

-Alex

Alex, D-STAR systems require 130 kHz wide channels to support the 70 kb/s data. This is why 1.2 GHz is the only realisitc way that they can find enough bandwidth for each repeater gobbling up so much bandwidth.

However, digital voice operations on D-STAR equipment use a standard 25 kHz wide channel, whether at 1.2 GHz with the ID-1 or on the 2M/440 bands with the ID-800. However, these 25 kHz implementations only support very low rate data speeds of around 760 b/s (if that) with simultaneous digital voice. They had hoped for supporting up to 2.4 kb/s on these bands within the 25 kHz, but early field testing reduced their expectations to 1.2 kb/s, then to about 960 b/s, and now they talk about roughly 760 b/s, with simultaneous digital AMBE voice, within a standard 25 kHz channel. This is why Motorola's 96 kb/s that only requires a standard 25 kHz channel is so impressive!

My hope is that maybe one of the Ham companies can also deploy a similar technology and support 96 kb/s within the confines of a standard 25 kHz channel, and do this within the $1,300, or less, price window. In any event, I still think D-STAR is DOA. I can't believe they can continue to try to market 70 kb/s at 1.2 GHz only, using 130 kHz of bandwidth, when it is technically feasible to handle 96 kb/s within a standard 25 kHz channel bandwidth.

Agreed. However, the amount of money that Motorola probably had to throw at their division to create that accomplishment is much more than Icom is willing to toss in would be my guess.

Oh well, we may not believe it, but people are buying the technology and going "oh wow, this is cool."

Now where's my evdo card....

My son has the Verizon HSD card and it is WAY cool! He can drive down the freeway at 70 MPH and run HSD at 700 kb/s to 9 Mb/s on his laptop. The really slick thing is that Veizon supplies an optional external antenna that connects to a coax connector on their PCMCIA card. He's got the antenna up on his roof, and the coverage is just as good as Verizon voice coverage across the entire region. It's awesome! As much as I really like Ham radio, I don't know if I'd ever want to dip down to a slow 70 kb/s (with severely limited coverage) once you have used Verizon's mobile broadband service. It's like going back to dial up once yopu've become used to cable broadband: You never want to be hamstrung like that again. It's also pretty convenient to not have to stop at Starbucks to use the PC!

I think when it gets down to the $30-$50 mark, I'll probably get one, and drop my cable modem.

It's already at $59.99, and it has just been introduced, so I'd guess we'll see monthly all you can eat HSD prices of $40 to $45, or so, by this time next year. I agree, Alex, that if it gets down to this sort of range, I'd also dump my cable high speed data service.

Actually, it was $79.99/month for the past year or so...

It's been around for a while, they are just starting to more activly build it out to some of the less-popular-yet-populated places.

Right now, you can't even get an all you can use blackberry for less than $49 a month, unless you go with T-Mobile, and well, we all know how much coverage they have...

Anyway... back to the topic at hand...

-Alex

Even the current price of $59.99 for mobile broadband all you can eat seems like a pretty rightous deal! I pay $45 per month for my HSD cable service. For $15 additional, I could be tetherless everywhere in my market region, with almost as fast a speed. Hummm....

alex wrote:Actually, it was $79.99/month for the past year or so...

It's been around for a while, they are just starting to more activly build it out to some of the less-popular-yet-populated places.

Right now, you can't even get an all you can use blackberry for less than $49 a month, unless you go with T-Mobile, and well, we all know how much coverage they have...

Anyway... back to the topic at hand...

-Alex

One more OT. Alex, you can get Cingular to cough up unlimited Blackberry for $45/mo. if you gripe.

The only trouble with wireless modems is latency. You're going to be hard-pressed to find a wireless service at any point in the near future with latency comparable to a real wired connection.

Good point on the latency issue, tvsjr. I suppose for in home use, we need to keep our DSL or cable Internet connections. As the price of mobile broadband drops, it will be nice to have, though.

Regarding the original topic of Motorola's 96K mobile data - here is a link to a brochure:
http://www.motorola.com/greenhouse/astr ... ro_hpd.pdf

Although they are finally starting to make this widely available - they have been pre-selling it to major accounts since 2002 and have been field testing the technology for five years with the the Greenhouse project in Pinellas County, Florida:

http://www.motorola.com/greenhouse/greenhouse/faq/

xmo, I take it that for the 96 kb/s gear, you use the VRM dedicated radio/modem, while your XTL-5000 (or whatever P25 radio) is used for P25 voice? If this is the case, what happens with voice and data traffic? Is it like IVD where they can go over the same channel, or do you essentially need two channels, with one for voice and one for data, so it is no longer considered to be IVD?

With the 460 kb/s greenhouse, I assume the "magic" there is that you take up 150 kHz of spectrum for each 700 MHz data channel required?

Sorry for the basic questions, but I'm just learning about these new HSD systems. I'm familiar with our old stuff that lopes along at 9600.

Thanks a lot for posting the links, xmo!

ASTROMODAT wrote:Good point on the latency issue, tvsjr. I suppose for in home use, we need to keep our DSL or cable Internet connections. As the price of mobile broadband drops, it will be nice to have, though.

I have yet to play with Verizon's HSD, but Cingular's UMTS is down in the ~200-300ms range provided you have really good signal. EDGE, 1xEVDO, and 1xRTT end up being from 400ms best case to over 1sec. worst case. Unfortunately, the sexier the system, the less the coverage. EVDO/RTT sucks in my experience... EDGE seems to be the most ubiquitous in my area on Cingular's network. That's what I'll be running on the Toughbook in the truck.

200-300ms is roughly equivalent to dialup and is noticable when working with an interactive system (for my purposes, remote-controlling a server somewhere). My business-class ADSL gets me <30ms latency to any of my servers (which are all in tier 1 colo facilities) and usually <75ms anywhere.

From your original post:

"...customers can reach data rates of 96 kb/s simply by investing in another base station at each tower site of the 800 MHz network ...

Everything else is existing infrastructure that is leveraged—tower sites, lines and the IP network,” ...
___________________________________________________________

There is the "integrated" part of this HSD system. Same towers, same antennas, same combiners, same T1 lines, same IP transport[routers, switches etc.].

BUT - not the same RF channel, not the same radio, and not on your voice radio.

The system can be set up for 96000 with one RF channel or up to the roughly half meg @ 150 K bandwidth as at Pinellas. 150 K bandwidth would be the equivalent of 6 standard 25K voice bandwidth channels.

The cool thing about this format is that it can use that bandwidth for multiple concurrent data streams or combine the channels for high speed bursts according to instantaneous user needs.

alex wrote:Actually, it was $79.99/month for the past year or so...

It's been around for a while, they are just starting to more activly build it out to some of the less-popular-yet-populated places.

Right now, you can't even get an all you can use blackberry for less than $49 a month, unless you go with T-Mobile, and well, we all know how much coverage they have...

Anyway... back to the topic at hand...

-Alex

I have had the Verizon High Speed (Broadband Access) Card for well over a year at the 79.95 price. I travel all over the US and World in my real job and this beats the heck out of hotel high speed, at least in price per month. Now that they have a large number of cities set up at the high speed level, it seldom is not on "Broad Band" vs "National Access SLOW".

However, the 59.95 deal now being advertised is not exactly what some may think, at least if you travel. The lower price they advertise on the websites in a very UNCLEAR manner is for High Speed BUT, only in your Air Cards Home area/City. Anywhere else you try to use it and you will only connect at the low speed National Access rate. Ask me how I know, even the sales wheeny in India didn't know this, but when my card all of a sudden went to low speed, I had to sit on the phone for an hour to get someone who finally was able to tell the truth about their new "lower price" and get me back to the nationwide $79.95 plan.

I have tried using the aircard on a notebook through echolink while on a driving trip several months ago. Not much good unless you stay on the same cell site, although this is probably as much an issue from Echolink Software as Verizon. For surfing the porn sites though, it generally works pretty good but during handoffs to another cell site, it often switched to the low speed system and had to be reconnected or refreshed to get the high speed back. Not quite mobile to mobile data ready just yet!

OT:I'm paying 20$/month for unlimited "internet access" through my current cellular phone, GPRS/EDGE ... max rate I've seen so far is about 180k/s, avg is between 100-120k/s ..and since UMTS is launching in the washington/baltimore market by the end of 4Q05, I can expect a hell of a lot more (go cingular!)

Cingular is supposedly poised to launch 3G sometime in 2006, which will completely blow EVERYONE away! This network deployment and preparation of their infrastructure was undertaken primarily by the former AT&T Wireless, which is a BIG reason they bought 'em. The proof will be in the pudding, and only time will tell, but it looks like Cingular may enter the HSD game very late, but then knock the heck out of their cellualr HSD competitors' offerings. Another good example of why Capitalism is so great as it nutures the invisible hand of the marketplace.

UMTS is 3G,AKA WCDMA.. it has been in the "testing" phase for cingular since late '04 ....and everything else will be a JOKE... talking close to 1 meg per sec..FROM A CELLPHONE!.... according to a regional engineering manager,its already in place,just testing and finalizing...

dont forget cingular's PTT which will be launched here in about a month....

but its TOTALLY different than nextel/sprint...

and at launch only Samsung and LG will have handsets....

and NO simplex like the BS "directlink" or whatever that nextel/sprint has....


anyway.... for small departments it would be more cost effective to either hop onto the county's or state's system(if they have one) or go with UMTS.....once its launched

Verizon is CURRENTLY offering a guaranteed minimum speed of 700 kb/s, and it typically runs at 1+ Mb/s, quite often reaching bursts of up to 7+ Mb/s. How is 1 Mb/s UMTS by CIngular consideed to be a big deal?! Seems less impressive than what Verizon has been offering for some time, let alone dropping their price on!

well.. EVENTUALLY... UMTS will be able to support up to 40 mb/sec ..although right now its a pipe dream..most important part is cost....and access... we all know about verizon's wonderful "roaming" and they have like 3 maps.. one with digital voice coverage....one with ROAMING voice coverage..and one with data coverage....

with cingular....where you can talk... you can surf.... 99% of the time....

back on topic....

for a traditional "radio" I guess thats pretty good..as long as there is sufficient method to recover from packet loss .....

if an agency DOESNT have a data network in place already,I would think it'd be pretty cost effective to use a public service,just like they do now.. but with more intensive bandwidth needs.. such as sending accident reports and including pictures... or pulling info from NCIC or a local system with a picture of the drivers license... more "features" ...more bandwidth...

I would actually consider an "open" system such as those provided by a major cellular company more secure than a private data system.... hide in plain sight.. its easy (relatively)to get a radio data modem and an astro spectra...

try snarfing the cellular data stream....cloning the identity of the modem,THEN finding out the encrypted passwords etc etc.....

I agree with you that it makes sense for a police department to use something like Verizon's sytem for HSD, as opposed to a private dedicated data system, such as using a VRM that runs at 96 kb/s. If you compare the ongoing costs of Verizon's HSD to amortizing the huge first cost of a private data system, I can't see how the dedicated data system can compete economically.

For a local or small state organisation, yeah.

When you need to cover a large area (state police for example), you'd never have any chance of saving money on a private network (or of ever even paying for the equipment), compared to being on the commercial GPRS and CDMA networks.