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."

Comments

4G is a big deal

[zyklone]

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.

On paper it looks like a good phone.

[WarlockD]

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.

Pricing?

[Zuriel]

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.

More than likely not

[EdIII]

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.

Re:More than likely not

[lidocaineus]

My experience is completely different. In Chicago, we literally have 50+ of these things deployed all over the city, all at 6/1 speed tiers. We regularly get 10mb down (well above our bandwidth tier), and always get at least 1mb up. Latency is anywhere from 50-100ms to most hops; it could be better, but Clear is somewhat nacent and I hear they're focusing more on raw bandwidth than latency (apparently with 4G you can approach the latency of wired services). We've had these units in place for about 7 months now, both as primary and out of band connections - we really couldn't be happier. The only thing that could be improved upon is the lack of NAT control on the devices they currently use.

I have a feeling that wherever you are, the backhauls are completely overloaded. This actually happened to a couple of our POPs - one in particular was only getting 1/1 and was getting daily dis-associations from the WiMax tower sometime between 1 and 3AM for about 20 seconds. Customer service was unbelievably accommodating though - they said that work was being done on the tower that particular POP was associating with, and that we wouldn't be charged AT ALL until the tower work was verified complete and our connection was stable. Basically we had an ok and usable connection for free, and when whatever work was completed, we knew right away - the bandwidth jumped up to right where the other POPs were. Consider me impressed with their customer service, to which I'm normally used to horrible, horrible experiences.

Voice has low latency

[tepples]

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.

Other way

[SuperKendall]

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).

Re:Asking the obvious?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Disclaimer. I work for Clear, a wimax provider that sells it's servce as 4G.

I was in Chicago for ACen. I was checking work email on my data card. Someone asks me what's the big deal over 3G. I hop right over to speedtest.net and show him my speeds. 4 megs. 70ish ms latency.

He was blown away. Easy. It also depends on the coverage, YMMV, etc. But 4G is a big deal