[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.