I read in the guardian that 4g could be available next year but I looked on http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/16/uk's-future-4g-network-has-tech-companies-divided.aspx and it says that the network carriers are still waiting on the allocation of spectrums from the government. Also somewhere else (can't remember where) it cost about £22billion for the UK networks to get to where they are today with 3g and they will probably be holding onto to 3g for the time being to recoup their costs.

does anyone know of anything regarding to 4g in the UK??

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?

its not pointless. no-one gets near the higher speeds of hsdpa and the new 4g can basically guarantee hd streaming nearly everywhere we dont get that with 3.5g and will allow people to even play games with no lag on a 4g network using their laptops or even netbooks

i think 4g in the UK is hopeless. I mean you can still go to places tht don't have proper internet access (and even if they do, it is mega slow). Not everyone has access to fibre-optic broadband in the UK, so 4G might still be a long way ahead.

With phone processor speeds constantly on the rise and a seperate GFX chip becoming the norm, I think phones will definitely be able to handle 4G in the future.

And now I'm talking about the real 4G.

4G is more energy efficient and supports a larger amount of users to maintain its capacity, so actually it should be a lesser (or maybe equal) burden on our devices to handle.

Got no idea about 4G and the UK, but here's a tidbit of (un)interesting information: Finland is in talks with the Russian military to free up some bands for 4G that are currently working at the same frequency as Russia's armed forces' military comms. This is why 4G is delayed in Finland, although in one city an operator is performing initial tests with the technology with a small control group of consumers.

4g in the uk will probably take the form of LTE.

The big holdup was and still is government holdups in issuing spectrum licences.

No phone manufacturer is going to dive in head first until thats resolved.

I would suggest complaining to your MP and not your telco if you want it to happen quicker.

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.