What is "4G"?

[Tangent]

5mb per sec.... what better format needs 100mb per sec?

what would blueray require.. if to stream it? not 100mb
on a less than 10" screen... would it matter? your eyes would see difference??

Just a few years ago 1 mbps was more than fast enough for anything you could imagine doing online. Today 5 mbps is good and 1 is just ok. I have no doubt that we will reach a point where a < 100 mbps connection will be annoyingly slow. Who knows what kind of bandwidth it'll take to transmit fully immersive holographic images?

I wouldn't be surprised if we stop storing anything locally on our phones. Just over 12 years ago it was perfectly reasonable to use a 1.44 MB floppy disc as the storage medium in a digital camera and you'd fit plenty of images on each one. Now the Nikon D3x would take nearly a hundred floppys just to store a single RAW image. If you want to be able to open files like that instantly so customers don't whine about lag, you need a screaming fast network.

 

[Medion]

5mb per sec.... what better format needs 100mb per sec?

what would blueray require.. if to stream it? not 100mb
on a less than 10" screen... would it matter? your eyes would see difference??

You're assuming that this is only for smartphones. Verizon's plan, since they're making their entire coverage map LTE, is to compete with the Satellite "broadband" companies in rural areas. Those customers would gladly pay $80/month for a 10GB cap and $10/GB overage (current LTE pricing model, subject to change) as opposed to the satellite prices we see today.

For example, Hughesnet: (ignore the promo price, it's only good for 3 months after mail in rebate)

$60/month gets you 1.0mbps down, 200mb daily allowance (6GB cap)
$80/month gets you 1.5mbps down, 300mb daily allowance (9GB cap)
$110/month gets you 2.0mbps down, 400mb daily allowance (12GB cap)

None of these plans compete with Verizon's LTE. The $80 plan is 5-12mbps (so 2.5-6 times faster than Hughes $110 plan). To reach 12GB, you'd pay $100 for the month, still cheaper than Hughes. When Verizon starts the LTE-A rollout, you're going to have fiber-like speeds in the sticks, and they'll have no competitors there the way things are going.

 

[Outlaw71]

These articles only tell half the story though. 3g only operates on the 5 ghz range of the bandwidth, while 4g (theoretically, not sure if the current '4g's do or not) will operate all the way from 1ghz to 20ghz range of the bandwidth. Can you comprehend how much more data can be consumed with that wide of a channel with which to consume it? It's truly staggering.

Sure the 'g' might just mean 'generation', so yeah this might simply mean it's the 4th generation, whoopty do. But the speeds that they're increasing these phones to handle is going to freaking blow any 3g phone out of the water. Yeah I've streamed tv/movies/video over the 3g network... it leaves something to be desired.

4g should clear that up pronto. 1080p streaming should be flawless. So why 100mbps (actually from what I've read that's the low end, 300 mbps is where they're aiming to top it out... but that's using the best of everything in a perfect environment, that won't be what you'll hit consistantly or anything) you ask? Well not too long ago tv's only showed us content at 320p. Then came DVD at 480p. Then came tv at 1080i/720p, and now we're up to 1080p. And the refresh rate has gone from 60 hz, to 120 hz, to 240 hz, and now they have 480 hz. Oh and now comes along 3D... my point is, do you think they're done now?

No chance. They will always get bigger, better, faster, more real, more vivid, more clear, more.... it's never going to stop improving. And who cares if you can't tell the difference on your phone from a 1080p video to a 2160p video, people will still want the higher resolution regardless. If higher resolution is available, people will flock to it.

So 4g has to have the capacity to carry us for the next decade or so. By that time Tangent is right, even 300 mbps will be so terrible our grandkids will be screaming at their crib monitors because their cartoons are lagging. 10 years ago if you told someone you had a phone that was capable of hitting 3 mbps they would look at you and go, "why on earth would anyone ever need something that fast"???

But today it's just so-so. And as hard as it may be to fathom right now, someday 300 mbps will just be so-so as well.

 

[NYCHitman1]

And the refresh rate has gone from 60 hz, to 120 hz, to 240 hz, and now they have 480 hz. Oh and now comes along 3D... my point is, do you think they're done now?

My TV displays at 600 hz

 

[Outlaw71]

Plasma?

 

[EarlyMon]

LCDs actually update; they tend to maintain state until commanded to change. Nonetheless, the marketers won out over R&D, so now we have refresh rates for LCDs. Plasmas refresh because light output from the energized phosphors decay. The high subfield refresh rate of 600 Hz associates with a phosphor formulation that tends to not burn-in.

The real dictator of picture quality for image smoothness comes from response rate.

Like 4G, hdtv fact is hard to separate from marketing's explanations.

 

[dan330]

of topic... some posts need to be deleted!




i am just sayin