UFOs, Bigfoot and 4G Broadband
I have a quick question for you? What do UFOs, Bigfoot and 4G broadband all have in common? Give up? The answer is that they’re all things that are often spotted, but never actually captured. You can probably understand why I say that about UFOs and Bigfoot, but why 4G broadband? After all it seems that every cell service provider in all the land is touting that they have the newest, biggest and the fastest service these days, but what is the reality?
To begin with we need to define what true for 4G broadband service is. According to the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) headquartered in Geneva Switzerland true 4G is defined as having download speeds of at least 100 Mbps (megabits per second) and none of the networks out there at the moment meet that specification or even come close. The best you can expect as of early 2011 is 12 Mbps from Verizon and T-Mobile with sprint coming in at 10 Mbps. So how can they go about calling their less than 4G networks actual 4G? Well it’s because they fall into a gray area, while they’re not technically up to the 4G standard, they are quite a bit faster than standard 3G networks and sometimes by a factor of 20.
Currently the most technically superior 4G broadband network out there is Verizon with their 4G LTE (long-term evolution) network. The LTE Network provides 12 Mbps actual downloads with theoretical speeds of up to 50 Mbps. T-Mobile also delivers 12 Mbps actual download speeds with their 3G HSPA + network, now called 4G, and 21 Mbps theoretical. Bringing up the rear is Sprint with 10 Mbps actual speeds and 20 Mbps theoretical. So as you can see a more appropriate title for these new 4G broadband networks might be 3G extended or plus networks.
It’s not all bad news though. Even though Sprint comes in dead last as far as speed is concerned, but not by much, they offer unlimited data usage on their 4G network as of this writing. Another plus is that even though overall data speeds are not up to ITU standards at 12 Mbps, that number is still far superior to current 3G, which offers actual speeds of between 500 kilobits had 1.5 Mbps. The 12 Mbps speed in itself will open up whole new options as to whom you might want to use as your main home broadband connection. Be leery though most of the so called 4G broadband is confined to major cities at present, once outside those cities you’ll be working with 3G and the imposed 5 GB data limit. This also means that overages will be added if you exceed that limit.
So what is the upshot of this whole 3G/4G fiasco? Well for one you can probably expect to see the major providers’ de-emphasizing the 4G label in the near future. The greater emphasis will be more than likely placed on coverage instead. So like both UFOs and Bigfoot you can probably rest assured that true 4G will not be captured anytime soon.
