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Cutting Through the 4G Hype
crimeandpunishment writes "Cell phone companies are about to bombard us with advertising for the next big thing — 4G access. The first 4G phone, Sprint Nextel's EVO, comes out this week. But just how big a deal is 4G? Is it fast enough to warrant the hype, or are consumers better off waiting a while? AP technology writer Peter Svensson looks at the differences between 4G and 3G technologies."
It's 9.80665 newtons of force per kilogram of mass.
Canadian carriers just upgraded their networks to 3G, so I'm guessing we won't hear about 4G until 2015.
You guys are just posting this story because...Apple doesn't have a 4G and you're jealous.
Sorry.
Had to be said.
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difficult to find at first, but when you find it, reactivity is good, data flow takes off
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
4 > 3. 'nuff said.
For the first time we'll get decent latency over cell phone connections with 4G.
LTE atleast promises huge cuts in latency which will make many new applications possible.
Anyone without 4G coverage or who just invested in 3G will say it's useless. Until it's at their fingertips, then it's suddenly great. They'll make up reasons to justify their change of heart at your request, e.g. _now_ the phones are good or _now_ it's affordable. This is how it goes every single time.
Anyway, you don't need it, I don't even need 3G, it just makes my life so much easier.
Gimme that 4G. Quick!
Amirite?
For best results, avoid doing stupid things.
Raleigh-Durham, 4G since November as my primary home internet connection.
It doesn't work well in the rain or a thunderstorm. 6-7 Mbit down 1.5 or so up. That is as fast as the DSL connection I could get. I refuse to give money to Time Warner so that's out of the question.
The connection isn't as reliable as DSL or cable modem. It's kind of flaky and the DNS servers that come with Clearwire service are bad. Use Google's or opendns.
That said, it is basically a wireless DSL connection. It is way way faster than a 3G signal. Don't know how it will be on the EVO, but unless the iPhone 4G/HD blows me out of the water, when my iPhone 3G contract comes up in July, I'm going to Sprint to take advantage.
Other than that, it's difficult to point to completely new uses for 4G phones -- things they can do that 3G phones can't.
Couldn't you say the same thing about Dial-Up? After all, its difficult to point to completely new uses for broadband, things they can do that dial-up connected computers can't. The point of 4G isn't to be "revolutionary", it wasn't claimed to be. It is simply trying to be faster. The same thing could have been said about EDGE to 3G.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So, I take it that the author of this article is happy just using EDGE, right? Since that's only distinguished from 3G by its speed?
Technically speaking. The various G definitions are based on the underlying technology that is used for hauling the bits over the air interface 1G - Analog technology (AMPS et al) 2G - Digital transmission (GSM, TDMA, CDMA et al) 3G - WCDMA (UMTS (aka the orginal 3G), HSPA, EVDO et al) 4G - OFDM (LTE, WiMax et al)
Getting Sprint's 4G Evo this Friday. Replacing my Palm Pre for it.
I could care less about the 4G side. Being faster is nice, but they put so many features in it. FM Radio (now just need a ATSC tuner:P), a wifi endpoint for half the cost of a USB dongle, Google OS with HTC touch skin. Did I mention the same cpu as the nexus with double the flash?
My only worry is the speed HTC updates the firmware. The 4G is just a nice feature.
Ever have a fast connection to a network with a slow backbone? Then compare that with a slower connection to a network with a faster backbone?
I have, and I'd take 3G on a fast network to 4G on a slow one. I even made the move from 2G to 3G when 3G was worse than 2G. It eventually got better, but they started 3G in some areas very poorly. Maybe they were holding back bandwidth at first to make sure the demos and "protected" content (videos and such from specific providers) worked best, but the first 3G networks seemed universally slower to me. So I don't trust demos and marketing. Get the devices in the hands of the reviewers who aren't paid to review and have to buy the handsets themselves. Then we'll have a better idea.
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TFA:
>For instance, streaming video might work better, with less stuttering and higher resolution. Videoconferencing is difficult on 3G and might work better on 4G.
People videoconference on their cellphones?
People videoconference?!
>Multiplayer video games may benefit too.
People play multiplayer games on their cellphones?!
Is this guy not a tech writer or am I just hopelessly lost? The most exciting thing I've heard done on a Smartphone is Skype.
3G is a weird system that mixes voice circuits and packet data. 4G will be pure packet traffic. The really interesting thing that I'm looking forward to is: how will carriers justify charging so much more for a one minute voice call than they charge for half a megabyte of data, when the load on the network is identical? Hands up if you think they'll just accept the loss in revenue. Anyone? And packet data will need to be low latency and reliable, otherwise voice calls won't work. It should be fun to watch.
So far my experience with 4G has been Clear Wireless. What I can tell you is that initially, the latencies were not something to write home about (110), but the bandwidth was fairly decent. I could easily hit 3mb/s during testing throughout the city.
Based on my experiences I deployed a large number of them as wireless backups at Kiosks and smaller branch offices.
8 months later now we are considering canceling all the accounts and going with something else as a redundancy solution. 9/10 the modems are not available when going over to fail over and need constant re-provisioning by Clear. Bandwidth is now very high latency (300ms+) and in short supply.
I have heard nothing but extremely negative feedback about 4G (for the last 3 months) in the mobile units as well as the standalone units designed to compete with non-mobile offerings like cablemodem and DSL.
I fear that 4G is really just a bunch of hype because the networks are not ready for the load and they are overselling their infrastructures to meet demand at the cost of actually being able to service the customer.
Just my two cents. If your an area where hardly anybody is using the 4G stuff you are going to have a fantastic experience... for awhile. Dense usage areas? Save your money.
So, I take it that the author of this article is happy just using EDGE, right? Since that's only distinguished from 3G by its speed?
You can't use data on EDGE during a phone conversation (nor receive calls). It's actually more annoying than you might think.
With both 3G and 4G you can do both at once.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From sprints commercials you would think 4g phones had been out for at least 6 months now form them. I think the whole "4G" ads started at least back at the beginning of the football season. Guess the ads were just for mifi and mobile broadband then?
TFA:
Who named this? If it was Marketing, I'm waiting five minutes for the next standard...
If 4G doesn't take off, then will we start seeing ISPs throttling the speeds of 3G so as to make it look more attractive?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
I hope Apple takes a shot at 'simplifying' the terminology.
I really want an 'iG' capable iPhone.
iG? An imaginary connection will just make things more complex.
When Sprint & Verizon roll out their 4G networks will they be able to handle simultaneous voice and data
My sources say yes because 4G treats voice as VoIP.
Look, it's pretty simple.
I have Clear. It's vastly superior to my AT&T DSL line in every single way except for latency (which isn't bad at all). I won't be playing online first person shooters, but other than that it's good enough. In fact, it's better. Much better.
And it's portable.
4g is the real deal. I am not going back.
Basically, the lower the frequency, the further it reaches. Verizon bought gobs of spectrum in the 700Mhz range, which is great for building penetration and longer reach. Compare that to Sprint/Clearwire's 2500Mhz spectrum, which is known to be blocked by wet leaves. T-mobile also bought spectrum in the 700Mhz range, but likely will use it to build out their 3G network.
AT&T pretty much sat that auction out, so I can't imagine their data service getting much better. I hope their pico cell strategy pans out.
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From TFA, Both Verizon and AT&T are basing their 4G technology on LTE -- no more GSM vs. CDMA. Shouldn't this mean then that devices that work on one network can be taken over to another network now? ie-- 4G iPhone on Verizon, and Droid phones on AT&T?
how will carriers justify charging so much more for a one minute voice call than they charge for half a megabyte of data, when the load on the network is identical? [...] And packet data will need to be low latency and reliable, otherwise voice calls won't work.
You may have answered your own question. Packets get routed through the slow backbone with 1000 ms ping and noticeable jitter unless you turn on expedited forwarding (RFC 3246) in the packet header's DiffServ field. They won't charge for minutes used for voice; they'll charge for minutes used for expedited packets.
They already do. A 3G mobile broadband connection from any of the four major U.S. providers is limited to 5 GB per month, while Sprint plans to offer significantly higher monthly transfer caps to 4G customers.
Am I living under a rock or something? I'm vaguely aware that there's something called "4G", and it's supposed to be faster than "3G". Beyond that, I haven't really heard much.
Nothing like whether Avatar is "worth the hype"...
Though, judging from the things I see described this way on Slashdot, maybe hype itself is overhyped?
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Why not / who do you use now that's better [than Verizon]?
For voice, my phone plan with Virgin Mobile costs me $80 per year. For data, I prefer to use Wi-Fi while in a building and my netbook's hard drive while in a vehicle. In a country with $720 per year mobile broadband, Read It Later on my netbook has already paid for itself.
Coverage so far for 4G seems really thin..
For now I don't know if I would get a device that supports it, but a mobile hotspot device might be good if you go to one of those areas at all often.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Keep in mind that most "4G" networks are really just WiMax. WiMax has an odd MTU cap of 1400, and this can be problematic if you start encapsulating packets or appending bytes on via VPN or GRE tunnels and the like. Most VPN clients will automatically lower your MTU with auto discovery, but if you're using a USB type of "modem" or hot spot then you will have to change your MTU manually. For Windows XP and older, this means a registry edit or third party hardware. Vista and Windows7 can alter the MTU from the netsh command line, or just the usual ifconfig from a linux machine.
After all, its difficult to point to completely new uses for broadband, things they can do that dial-up connected computers can't
YouTube. Now was that so hard?
CDMA is 3G. You could even make a decent argument that 3G is CDMA.
That depends on whether you're talking about cdmaOne or CDMA2000.
A phone for all the networks will have to support the frequency bands that all the networks use. Right now, GSM/UMTS phones are theoretically portable between AT&T and T-Mobile, but your device will drop to EDGE speeds if it doesn't support the band that a particular network uses for 3G.
"Cell phone companies are about to bombard us..."
Sprint is already saying "4G" in some ads; it's reasonable to assume that pretty much all the cell phone companies will be using it in their advertising pretty soon.
Speaking of G-spot, I'd rather have Fergie than Fourgee.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Uh oh. We better jump from our Mach 3G Turbo straight to 5G!! That's right, I said 5G!!
Not with Verizon's 3G you can't. Apple even made an ad that took a swipe at Verizon for not being able to do data and voice, personally I've never been on a call and thought "You know what I wish I could browse the Internet right now".
"View it as the difference between watching regular TV and high-definition TV," Carter said. "Once you've experienced high-definition TV it's hard to go back to standard TV. It's the same sort of thing here."
Thanks for the technically detailed article that cuts through all the hype, Slashdot.
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Sprint is not 4G, it's just Sprint's 4th generation. They are not going to be able to run the 4G phones like Verizon and AT&T.
Dude, sick... he's married to your sister.
personally I've never been on a call and thought "You know what I wish I could browse the Internet right now".
Have you ever been browsing and wished you could receive a call? Or watching streaming video? Or using a GPS that pulls data frequently?
In all those cases you are potentially blocking incoming calls, which is the worse problem I think.
As for the use case you mentioned, browsing internet while on a call- what about looking up restaurants, or a map while you are talking to the other person? I do that pretty frequently. It means no data from any application can get out while you are on a call. It's not a bother all the time, just enough to be annoying (I had a 1st gen iPhone with EDGE only for around two years).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If anybody wants to really push "4G" product (using it as its defining quality), he's for a surprise...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia
Probably why that'll be 3G -> LTE actually; certainly why there's no S60v4 or 4xxx-series devices from Nokia.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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Latency : we will not see any change while people are still using MIP (Mobile IP) - this is the source of latency on mobile devices; it gives seamless roaming, but the price is playing ping pong with your packets.
Throughput : if you have a MIMO (multiplex in, multiplex out) implementation of 4G you will see 375 MB throughput in a cell as opposed to 75 ish with Wimax or 3G, the good thing about LTE as I understand it is that you can mix MIMO nodes and normal nodes in a network with no worries, so that means that you can put MIMO nodes where you want them. Of course you can get similar architectural effects with femento cells, but I think that the architecture will work out better and consumers will see better throughput for their devices and more consistency in metro areas even when there is heavy and popular use.
Having said that it is not going to be the case that you will want to switch from your DSL to this - or even more particularally from your NGA to this.
Another key constraint is the battery life of the devices using this - pulling through loads of data is going to drain those batteries, so we will have to see some improvement there just as we did for 3G I guess.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
I have yet to see the first ad for anything “4G”.
But maybe I can thank AdBlock Plus for that...
Or it’s that German 3.5G providers paid so much (it was their own damn fault) for the UMTS licenses, that now there is nobody left who can invest in 4G anymore... :/
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It seems to me, most of us want high bandwidth and unlimited downloading. At least that's what I gather from net-neutrality strings and such. The 4G technology for us, then, won't make much difference unless we can bittorrent our daily 1GB of "educational material"
Just look at what you do with your mobile data connection right now. 99% of even the most hardcore nerds probably used under 500MB of data transfer per month over the 3g connection. The only major change I see happening with this technology is it allows us to actually use skype on our mobiles. Yes I know skype just updated the app to allow that. However spotty 3g will limit its real usefulness.
4G is a fad... at least until bandwidth and usage caps disappear. Then it can potentially disrupt traditional cable broadband providers.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
You can do simultaneous voice and data with GPRS and Edge.
I've done this on TMobile using my HTC Dash for a while now.
Your hardware may or may not support it though.
As I already mentioned, Evo 4G is not the first WiMAX phone, HTC already sells a WiMAX phone (Max 4G) for over a year.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Those aren't voice minutes; they're DiffServ minutes.
Actually, they all run UMTS (3.5G) by now. (And 7Mb UMTS USB sticks for your laptop are not uncommon since at least five years ago.)
GP is correct, Sprint uses CDMA and not UMTS.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Yes, but what about the latency?
Try calculating (or better measuring) the time it takes to download a web page and you'll find that for many (especially ones with lots of small content from different sites), the speed doesn't matter nearly as much as the latency. The same applies to gaming and various other things. This was the reason why 3G was a massive improvement over 2G even though speed differences weren't always that big.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Unless you are doing some real-time interaction with a server or another client (live voice, live video or multi-player gaming) or unless the latency is measured in seconds instead of milliseconds, how does latency impact typical mobile data access? For the average user (streaming multimedia and web page access), download speed will have the biggest impact.
My biggest beef with the iPhone (3GS) is the time it takes to load pages. Once web pages start to load, they pop up pretty quickly, so I assume this is a problem with DNS and may be specific to my network (Rogers). The latency decrease that 4G brings may help this a tiny bit, but I'd rather see this problem completely eliminated before getting higher sustained transfer speeds and the other 4G features.
And then next year it will be 5G. It never ends...
Does anybody know where this limitation comes from? Designers with no foresight? Or some hardware/CPU limitation?
Back in 2004 I was using my Motorola v66 flip phone as a GPRS modem for my Internet connection in a remote area, and I could still receive calls while I was using GPRS via the laptop. I noticed on a more modern Motorola phone (circa 2007) that many features would be disabled while using either EDGE or Bluetooth, and I guess that this was because they all required the same DSP chip or something. I didn't expect this to become a common feature of all phones, but rather assumed it was a temporary limitation of this cheap EDGE-capable model...
...we're going to FIVE G!
http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/
Cynicism, like dogmatism, can be an excuse for intellectual laziness. - Susan Shirk
Here in the UK, I had a conversation about 3G with two British Telecom marketing managers, and a senior technology bloke of some kind, around about 1996. They told me 3G was going to "bring 2 megabits per second to your handset", and that these speeds would be "reliable" over about 80% of the UK for average consumer mobiles "by about 2005".
Let's hope this 4G business delivers. Really, the "mobile broadband revolution" has been a complete and utter joke. I'm here in central London in the year 2010 using my iPhone 3Gs and it's about as fast as I remember my 28.8K modem was in 1995. Quite often I just turn off 3G just to save battery life - it hardly seems to matter to the overall speed of data access I get here.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I have to admit, also, that I have never known anyone who "through" a party.
Apple used 2G, 3G, etc to refer to their iPod generations for quite a while, and before that they used the Motorola G3 and G4 processors in Macs.
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When I had dialup I would click, click away, and watch something an hour or two later.
How many new tabs or new windows, each with one video page, could you have opened at once and still have them load to completion as opposed to the connection timing out? And how much did a second phone line cost?
Now, 10 years later on youtube, I click, click away, and watch something 10 minutes later.
With broadband, you can connect
So maybe YouTube wasn't as good of an example as Netflix Watch Instantly, whose videos can be 20 times longer. Another example is video chat, for which an hour of latency is unacceptable. That and major updates for modern PC operating systems; it took weeks for a lot of PCs behind dial-up to get Windows XP Service Pack 2 through the BITS client in Automatic Updates.
As a lifelong reader of IT mags, I have an experience of reviewers downplaying the role of new technologies. I may bring up uncountable examples: the CD-ROM, the Internet, flash memories, digital cameras and so on. Every time they test a starting technology here's the comment: "it's not a revolution". Sure. No technology is a revolution from the start, because no technology grows from nothing. There's always a previous technology and a following evolution. That's how mobile internet slowly evolved from GSM 9.600baud unstable and almost unusable connections to the current state of the art of 3G, HSPA+, which is a 3.5G technology to say the least. Also, the reviewer manage to look dumb when he says the only obvious improvements of 4G is latency at an ADSL line level. Geez.. that's what we were ACTUALLY AND BADLY IN NEED since the whole mobile internet began to take off! Latencies today make you want to die: what use can you make of a 7.2Mbps HSDPA line when it takes forever just for your mobile browser to begin transfers? And no way for a whole set of applications to ever appear on mobiles before this lag issue is worked out, on line multiplayer for example, which doesn't allow a mobile connection to be elegible as a replacement of ADSL lines. So, 4G really and by far improves what actually needed to be improved, it isn't just a fancy double digit transfer rate to stick on a mobile device. And we should wait 3 to 5 years, dying on our 3G laggy connections before adopting it?? Geeeez... And besides all this, the reviewer here takes for granted what 4G carriers will be advertising is WiMax. This is perhaps true in the United States, but here in Europe there's almost no plan for WiMax and all carriers are about to start upgrading from 3G directly to LTE. LTE is a more recent technology and is better than WiMax. If you really want to compare some 4G labeled technology to the most advanced blend of 3G you have to take LTE for a test.
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^ I can't believe I did a quick search on default mod view and got nothing already mentioning bees!
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4G is officially referring to IMT Advanced as defined by ITU-R. The LTE and WiMax (802.16e) we have now have not yet reached the requirements in IMT Advanced to be called 4G, and LTE is definitely not "the dominant 4G standard" as quoted in the article. Although IMT Advanced is not yet finalized and has to wait until October this year, the candidates include LTE-Advanced (3GPP LTE R10 and beyond) and WiMax Evolution (IEEE 802.16m).
4G as defined to IMT Advanced would give a 100Mbps peak data rate during high mobility and 1Gbps during stationary/low mobility.
LTE that AT&T and the rests would deliver 100Mbps downlink data rate but only about 50Mbps uplink, and only up to about 300Mbps when in low mobility. For the real 4G, one will have to wait until October this year to have the IMT-Advanced to become finalized, and that LTE-Advanced would hopefully be available in 2012.
4G doesn't work indoors. It has terrible penetration. It's great if your antenna or device is always outside, and there aren't a lot of trees around.
Clear has been deployed in Portland Oregon for over a year and most people hate it. They sign up with home internet service using it because Clear tells them it will be better than a land-line, but it is horribly unreliable. It's really hit or miss if your antenna will get a good signal and keep a good connection.
I also test devices that use it and they always lose signal as soon as you walk a few feet indoors. Maybe people can tolerate this for data with decent 3G or W-Fi switching but not telephony, and even so, what's the point if you have to fall back to either of those all the time?
I don't understand why there would be any demand for it. As far as mobile devices go, 3G is enough for me, at least with my iPhone 3GS, and that's a lot considering I'm on AT&T. And regarding home Internet, 4G does not even compare to having a landline. A landline is always on, but with 4G you WILL get dropped connections.