Is 50Mbit/s enough of backhaul bandwidth?

If we say there are about 1,000 subscribers per cell tower and each will need about 1 Mbit/s bandwidth, 50 Mbit/s will only serve about concurrent 50 users well. Is this enough?
in reference to: Unstrung - Fixed/Mobile Convergence - Sprint: Please, Sir, Can We Have Some More Ethernet Backhaul? - Telecom News Analysis (view on Google Sidewiki)

IEEE's 125-year Anniversary in Silicon Valley.

As professionals, it is always valuable to take stock on how far we have come. The IEEE 125-year anniversary event at the Computer History Museum yesterday was one such. One quick takeaway from the presentations that Vint Cerf and Howard Charney gave is that the future will be even more exciting than the past!

Vint related how round-trip computer-based translations can sometimes go awry:

"Out of sight, out of mind" when translated to Russian and back to English got translated as "invisible idiot".

Virtualization and the Indian Driver.

After the conclusion of a recent 3-week vacation in India, I feel compelled to state that virtualization as a concept has been practised in India much before VMware (NASDAQ: VMW) came on the scene in 1998, and even before the advent of the virtual machine by IBM as VM/360 in 1972.

Consider lane markings. Lane markings are a way to physically partition a road so as to promote effective sharing of the road. However, drivers in India routinely ignore lane markings probably because they feel they can promote better sharing of roads without paying the needed amount of attention to the markings. How else can you explain the following driving behavior?

A driver prefers to drive on a road so that the lane marking is at the center of the moving vehicle span. Indeed, many drivers seem to make an attempt to use the lane marking as a guide to keep the center of the vehicle right on top of the lane marking.

An illustrative behavior arising from the use of the virtualization concept can be seen in the following style of driving.

A vehicle A is going on an undivided road 2-lane highway at a certain speed. (For planning purposes, the maximum speed you can expect on most Indian roads is 30Km/hour, and that is a separate subject). Another vehicle B close behind A determines that it needs to overtake A, unmindful of whether there is a vehicle C coming in the opposite direction in the other half of the road. You as a passenger in the vehicle B squirm in your seat. However, this is where virtualization happens! Thanks to the honking by vehicle B, drivers of vehicles A and C promptly swerve away from the median mark towards their respective shoulders and a clear virtual lane in the middle is formed for vehicle B. In other words, what was a 2-lane highway to begin with is now transformed into a 3-lane highway, the lanes now virtual.

Clearly, this is partly in jest, but you get the idea.