Cutting Through the 4G Hype 283
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."
4G is a big deal (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Oh c'mon (Score:2, Interesting)
Damn you for stealing my thoughts! My variation was that if this had been an Apple product, 4G would be the greatest thing since cooked food...
It's like comparing FIOS to DSL (Score:3, Interesting)
I have, and I'd take 3G on a fast network to 4G on a slow one. I even made the move from 2G to 3G when 3G was worse than 2G. It eventually got better, but they started 3G in some areas very poorly. Maybe they were holding back bandwidth at first to make sure the demos and "protected" content (videos and such from specific providers) worked best, but the first 3G networks seemed universally slower to me. So I don't trust demos and marketing. Get the devices in the hands of the reviewers who aren't paid to review and have to buy the handsets themselves. Then we'll have a better idea.
Re:a brief experience with 4G, since november (Score:3, Interesting)
How are your ping times?
Pricing? (Score:4, Interesting)
More than likely not (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My worry (Score:3, Interesting)
If 4G doesn't take off, then will we start seeing ISPs throttling the speeds of 3G so as to make it look more attractive?
Re:a brief experience with 4G, since november (Score:3, Interesting)
If it isn't reliable, they're skimping on error-correction in order to inflate the best-possible speeds. More fools them. All a competitor has to do is include error-correction into their calculation of data rates (so their marketing doesn't look any worse) and then use the improved reliability and improved actual speed to steal customers away.
Voice has low latency (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:More than likely not (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:More than likely not (Score:4, Interesting)
The Motorola modems huh? Yeah, the lack of bridge mode is a real pain in the ass. However, I have noticed something a lot more disturbing. IP addresses that were sold to us as effectively static, are changing. Now because we have routers using them as failover connections the WAN interface is a LAN IP and we use DHCP reservations on the Motorola to ensure we get the same one and port forwarding to allow the VPN's to work. The changing IP addresses is proving to be an issue right now.
Las Vegas. We don't have a single area of the city with the same coverage levels of 8 months ago. Across all locations, and every single person I talk with both professionally and personally, coverage area and quality of service has taken a nose dive from about 4 months ago.
It's to the point that the general consensus with everybody I deal with is that 4G is no longer a viable tool that can be seriously recommended in the Las Vegas area.
Totally agree. From the service reps on up everybody I have talked to has been very accommodating and pleasant to deal with. Too bad that just being nice at the end of day won't keep delivering the bandwidth where it needs to be.
Jump straight to 5G!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:a brief experience with 4G, since november (Score:4, Interesting)
... but unless the iPhone 4G/HD blows me out of the water, when my iPhone 3G contract comes up in July, I'm going to Sprint to take advantage.
Ah, I see you've noticed that tech journalists are unabated idiots. It went something like this... the next gen iPhone is stolen or left in a bar, and tech journalists immediately start referring to it as the "iPhone 4G" even though it's obvious (to anyone that stops to think about this for 10 seconds) that whatever it is, it can't possibly be that.
So... the difference between the iPhone 4G and every other 4G phone that might be released? Every other 4G phone is a 4G phone, while the iPhone 4G, named by the brilliant tech journalists, due out next month, is only a 3G phone and the third generation of Apple iPhone products. It is the 4th released iPhone... where the 'G' comes in is anyone's guess.
Until the poor bastard lost his prototype iPhone, the 'G' moniker was used only for multiples of earth gravity and cell phone generations. Now, the G is used to describe the fourth iPhone, i.e. the 3rd gen iPhone, aka the iPhone 4G... and like a good Weezar album or a Rocky movie, the iPhone following subsequent to the release of the next iPhone will also be known as the iPhone 4G, and it will be a 4G phone. Please don't confuse the iPhone 4G with the iPhone 4G. The former is a 3G phone, while the latter is a 4G phone.
Other way (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Characteristics of 4G etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
Latency : we will not see any change while people are still using MIP (Mobile IP) - this is the source of latency on mobile devices; it gives seamless roaming, but the price is playing ping pong with your packets.
Throughput : if you have a MIMO (multiplex in, multiplex out) implementation of 4G you will see 375 MB throughput in a cell as opposed to 75 ish with Wimax or 3G, the good thing about LTE as I understand it is that you can mix MIMO nodes and normal nodes in a network with no worries, so that means that you can put MIMO nodes where you want them. Of course you can get similar architectural effects with femento cells, but I think that the architecture will work out better and consumers will see better throughput for their devices and more consistency in metro areas even when there is heavy and popular use.
Having said that it is not going to be the case that you will want to switch from your DSL to this - or even more particularally from your NGA to this.
Another key constraint is the battery life of the devices using this - pulling through loads of data is going to drain those batteries, so we will have to see some improvement there just as we did for 3G I guess.
Re:Asking the obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:a brief experience with 4G, since november (Score:2, Interesting)
umm.. apple's used G to refer to generation of their iPod products too for quite some time. it's just that the 4th Gen iPhone (and possibly 4th Gen iPod Touch?)
it's confusing to normals, yes. but don't get your knickers in a bunch over it.