News - EC gives the all clear for 2GHz 4G, widens pipes up to 1GHz

[HEXUS]

Wisely, the European Commission scavenges more bandwidth for our 4G future.

Read more.

[Kushan]

I'm due for an upgrade around June next year, right before the supposed 4G rollouts in the UK (I'm not sure EE counts, with their pathetic usages). I wonder if it'll be worth just getting another 2-year contract on 3G or holding out on a rolling contract for 4G.

[s_kinton]

My guess is 3G will be the default choice for most people until 2014 due to the carrier pricing.

[kingpotnoodle]

My guess is 3G will be the default choice for most people until 2014 due to the carrier pricing.

How many phones really have the horsepower to use 4G data connections, it'll push the bottleneck back onto the CPU in most cases. Unless you've got a super high end phone and spend large amounts of time in city centres you're probably going to be fine with 3G until 2014-15. I couldn't give a toss about 4G at the moment, DC-HSPA seems good enough to me.

[Scribe]

How many phones really have the horsepower to use 4G data connections, it'll push the bottleneck back onto the CPU in most cases. Unless you've got a super high end phone and spend large amounts of time in city centres you're probably going to be fine with 3G until 2014-15. I couldn't give a toss about 4G at the moment, DC-HSPA seems good enough to me.

I see it more as ensuring speed under heavy contention. I often have a 3.5G signal full bars on my phone and get nothing from it.

[ajones]

My guess is 3G will be the default choice for most people until 2014 due to the carrier pricing.

How many phones really have the horsepower to use 4G data connections, it'll push the bottleneck back onto the CPU in most cases. Unless you've got a super high end phone and spend large amounts of time in city centres you're probably going to be fine with 3G until 2014-15. I couldn't give a toss about 4G at the moment, DC-HSPA seems good enough to me.

DC-HSPA only offers throughput gains, not capacity. The clue is in the name; Dual-Carrier (or dual-cell, depending upon scenario). If you are in a congested area, the carriers will be in heavy use anyway, so 2xzip is still zip. LTE offers better spectral efficiency compared to UMTS, so you get more bits per Hz, and is designed to allow you to use a lot of spectrum for a connection. That, plus other enhancements in the way LTE is designed, gives you the capacity increase.

Pretty much the only way you can increase the capacity in UMTS now is adding more carriers (which is tricky given the quantity of spectrum the operators have) or more cells - either large macros which are hellishly expensive, or lots of small cells which are currently in test phase.

From the Smartphone perspective, LTE isn't going to be a massive deal until there is significant penetration, unless you are using data intensive services such as video streaming. There are other use cases for the tech beyond phones though.

UMTS isn't going away - GSM use is only just beginning to plateau, with some countries still using GSM as the dominant tech due to poor 3G phone penetration. If you're struggling with throughput on your 3G phone or have poor fixed broadband speed, LTE maybe the way to go today. If not, then I wouldn't let the availability of LTE sway a decision for picking up a new contract. LTE is coming, and will be better than anything UMTS has to offer, but there are still lots of deployment issues to overcome.

[scaryjim]

tbh, I still use GPRS/EDGE most of the time when I'm using my smartphone (rather than my alternative dumb phone ) simply for battery life purposes, and the fact that I can happily run email, twitter and FB - plus a lot of mobile websites - on EDGE bandwidth. It's only if I want to do something more bandwidth intensive that I even bother turning 3G on. The vast majority of our mobile usage still doesn't (or at least shouldn't) require megabit connections (after all, you can even stream internet radio at ~40kbps and still get acceptable quality audio), but that doesn't stop people hogging all the bandwidth to send a 100-character tweet! It looks to me like the only difference 4G will make is in maintaining reasonable connection speeds under heavy load and serving the very small number of people to whom mobile video streaming is an essential part of their every day lives. I doubt the rest of us will really notice that much...

[Geraldzgg]

wow 5GBPS, it almost like fiber optics technology