[jlawer]

4G speeds is pretty much the state of the art in production ready systems. While there is a lot of speed available on LTE, once it is shared across a reasonable number of people the performance drops. This is why bandwidth caps are so tight on mobile networks, they can't have all their subscribers pulling 200gb of data a month, else everyone is going to get DSL 1 speeds.

This problem is a fundamental issue of RF Spectrum, and these problems tend to be addressed by blue sky research that occurs at a university.

Google is trying to address this in the most cost effective manner possible... google fibre. Wireless is unlikely to be any cheaper then simply rolling fibre / copper to every home.

[jcavin]

yeah i figured that much, but sometimes it seems like this is also just a spoon fed explanation that the phone companies give us so that they can charge us crazy prices like $10/gb of bandwidth a month. I am skeptical that the full truth is being revealed here.

4 cities available in california for google fibre!! That is nuts. I hope they move a lot quicker or someone else should.

[runeks]

I think it may have a lot to do with regulation.

I've been looking around, to see whether I could find information on the total bandwidth of the DVB-T(2) spectrum for some country, but I couldn't.

I want to know because I'm wondering if, perhaps, the technical abilities are there, but we can't use them because only a select, small set of frequencies are allowed for data transfer.

I'm still not sure whether that's the case though.

[foobarqux]

It has nothing to do with regulation, it has to do with physics. Wireless is not nearly as good a communication channel as fiber or cable. Intuitively this is because of interference with other signals, reflections and obstructions, all of which are continuously changing.

[wtallis]

It's also due to the fact that there's only a few GHz of spectrum in which cheap equipment can broadcast a powerful enough signal to go any useful distance. WiFi operating in 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz are tricky but not impossible to use for anything longer-range than a single building. Much higher frequency, and you have to use pretty powerful transmitters and well-aimed highly directional antennas. Current tech allows for a few bits/s/Hz, so there's only a few gbit/s of bandwidth to be allocated between all long-range communication uses. If you want to offer gigabit speeds to households over wireless, you have to deploy a mesh network that's so dense it would be cheaper to just lay fiber.

[Retric]

You can use directional point to point links to give you basically unlimited bandwidth. The issue with cellphone bandwidth is simply the number of cell towers being kept to low. There are some limits on how close you can space towers but you could for example use one tower per city block.

PS: This is why you can have temperary cell towers for events. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_on_wheels

[e12e]

Apparrently, DVB-T(2) is pretty close to the maximum allowed [according to] Shannon -- so it really just depends on what frequencies are used (and coding details). It is a frequency that is well suited for broadcast ("push") -- so not sure if de-regulating it for general send-receive is such a good idea (see sibling comments). Anyway, did you see:

http://www.satbroadcasts.com/DVB-T_Bitrate_Calculator.html

And:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T2#Technical_details

?