Thread: any idea when 4g will come to the UK?
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dchky is offline dchky
2010-10-04 , 11:21
Posts: 549 | Thanked: 299 times | Joined on Jun 2010 @ Australian in the Philippines
#7
Originally Posted by damion View Post
Which 4G? The pointlessly/stupidly fast, ~35Mb/sec sort of speed that phone cpus and gfx chips and storage devices are not able to benefit from, that you get in Japan and research networks, or the 3 - 7.2Mb/sec speeds we've had for years with hsdpa that we call 3.5G but that Americans who are typically one of the most technically backwards countries with mobiles, have just started to roll out as the name 4G?
Technically 4G is supposed to be able to provide a peak bandwidth of 100Mbps for mobile use and 1Gbps for stationary, though if you follow the spec nice and close, 4G is primarily a way for the carriers to wedge more users in to similar amounts of spectrum / space. Even if they could throw triple digit chunks of megabit sized bandwidth at single users, they will definitely not be doing that any time soon.

Although I think perhaps you're being a little harsh on Americans, what they refer to as 4G over there is more or less a marketing buzzword that has no relevance to the actual wireless standard - it's how they refer to phones - it has no basis in reality, last weeks 4G phone will be next weeks 3G if a new (more expensive) model comes along.