[slight]

What a load of nonsense. The idea that faster and faster wired and wireless broadband open up huge new opportunities just doesn't make any sense to me. 4G just gives me webpages a bit faster, it's not even especially noticeable most of the time. I can already stream 720p video to my phone which is more or less indistinguishable from 1080p at that size. What other massive fast downloads do you need on a mobile device while data caps are still in the low gigabytes?

[gbl08ma]

You are ignoring the fact that it's not just mobile devices that take advantage of fast mobile data connections. Being able to bring a LTE hotspot on long out-of-home stays is pretty nice, and while you may not want to do big downloads on your phone or watch 1080p videos on a screen with less vertical resolution than that, you may want to do so on your laptop.

If for you 4G is only slightly faster than 3G, then blame your service provider, because it's not supposed to. Where I live (Portugal) I get 2-7 Mbit/s speeds with 3G and 10-40 Mbit/s speeds with 4G. But most importantly, I was getting 100 ms pings with 3G while 4G pings are more like 20 ms. Or perhaps your service provider is limiting LTE usage to phones and forbidding tethering, which is silly too.

LTE is, right now, the only way to even get proper Internet connections on rural areas, where the alternative is DSL with speeds below 1 Mbit/s, and sometimes not even that. I believe it's also much cheaper for the network operators to cover those areas with wireless Internet than by laying copper, let alone fiber.

The main issue, that can't be stressed enough, is indeed the data caps. As things are now, higher speeds only lead to hitting the limits in less time. Worse, some sites now seem to detect faster connections and deliver more/heavier content over these (cough YouTube in auto quality mode cough), completely ignoring that a faster connection may still have caps. But I have no doubt there are uses for having fiber-like experiences over wireless broadband, especially if the latency is reduced (IMO more important than increasing the speed).

[slight]

I'm not saying it has no uses, just that it's not going to bring some sort of revolution, especially with such low data caps. If the current networks aren't rolled out more widely then giving hot spots of very very high speed isn't going to lead to new services as there's not wide enough coverage.

I use my mobe for tethering on holiday and it's great but the only problems I have in that case are bad 3G coverage.

Yes of course the bump from 10mbit (which I get with HSDPA, top speeds on HSDPA here in Barcelona are over 15mbit) to something like 40 is useful if you're using it for your desktop/laptop but that's not really what this article is about.

The general assumption that higher and higher data rates will enable new uses just doesn't hold true to me. In the last few years my home connection has gone from 30mbit VDSL to 300mbit fiber and honestly it's only really noticeable in a few edge cases like downloading games on Steam. I see no radical new use cases taking any sort of advantages of these sorts of speeds, just as I haven't for 4g mobile networks.

[z3t4]

This reminds me of the famous quote: "Everything that can be Invented has already been Invented".

But I agree with you that if you have a 10 GB monthly limit, higher bandwidth wont change much.

[rcarmo]

Re: the rural angle, and considering I'm near Alentejo and only getting 384Kbps right now, allow me to explain that 3/4G at 2.1GHz won't cut it for wide-area coverage, and that it isn't cost effective to upgrade most transmission lines in rural areas to the point where you can have multiple simultaneous users with high bitrates.

That said, my current situation is not representative - I'm in a known poor spot (it's tricky to get a decent signal due to lack of line-of-sight to a base station, and the nearest is 5 klicks away as the crow flies) and if I go uphill and bask in the sun with my iPad things improve markedly :)

Also, LTE at lower frequencies will fix most of these issues - we already have some of the best mobile broadband connectivity on the planet here in Portugal, and it's only going to get better.

[staticint]

Perhaps the issue is actually with your provider? In practice, HSPA+ (3G) usually allows for 20Mbps in my experience, which fits right inside your 10-40Mbps LTE window. Going from 20Mbps to even 40Mbps really isn't going to be noticeable in many circumstances. In theory, HSPA+ actually allows for download speeds greater than LTE allows, although less so on the upload side.

[AndrewKemendo]

Higher speeds mean we can offload high-speed processing to remote computers (cloud etc...) and give you the same services for smaller devices with longer battery lives or improved experiences with the same devices.

This is critical for wearables like AR glasses and the like to become commonplace.

For example we build 3D point clouds in real-time on devices and then process them on the cloud to stitch them together to then reload on the device. With super fast internet we could move our mapping to the cloud and could reduce our hardware requirements to basically a camera, battery and an LTE chip.

[jamesrcole]

What I'm about to say is not about that article, but just a general point.

This is that the printing press "only" made it quicker and cheaper to make books, and the internet "only" made it quicker and easier to move information around... So improvements that can be characterised as only incremental can still be important.

(I'm not trying to weigh in on the case of this 5G stuff however)

[sullyj3]

I think that once speeds like this become available, it will drive significant developer creativity. We'll very quickly figure out new and interesting ways of utilising all that extra bandwidth, and very quickly end up at a point where we're again pushing the limits of the available technology.

[raverbashing]

You have less contention on the bandwidth bottleneck between the cell phone tower and you device (and all other devices on the cell tower)

Why do you want to go from 802.11g to n? But then you upgrade your incoming connection, add more devices, then you see the difference

[7952]

It could allow devices to download content just in case it is needed. This could be great for business which often rely on large attachments and downloads. Why should I have to use some cloud viewer when my phone has plenty of bandwidth and storage?

[facepalm]

Virtual Reality environments perhaps?

Compare playing Second Life to playing World of Warcraft. Second Life loads all data from the server, WoW has most of the world preinstalled on the client.

[ZenoArrow]

Agreed. What do I need 5G for? I never think 'I wish I could use my phone more'. I use it too much as it is. All the IoT stuff in the article is a load of cobblers, we're more than capable of doing stuff like monitoring pipes without linking every device to a 5G network, you just have a lower power radio network linked to a router connected to the wired Internet. Why on earth would you want to flood the mobile networks with IoT traffic, do we really want to compete for the bandwidth with IoT devices? As you say, data caps are an issue too.