Tuesday, 3 September 2013

4G

I've been looking at the price of 4G telecoms vs 3G telecoms. It all seems rather splendid, what with faster internet on the go, but I've noticed a few drawbacks:-
  1. You need a new phone that is 4G/LTE compatible. So, £400 for a phone, or else pay for it over 2 years on a contract.
  2. One of the best uses of having high speed is that if you want to get a really huge file (like a movie), it can come down much quicker. But, most of the contracts come with a piddly 1GB of data, and a movie is about 700MB of data, so if you get a movie, that's most of your data for the month gone. So it ain't much good as a facility for getting big files on the go, just small files more quickly, which isn't much of a perk.
  3. The places its being rolled out in are the sort of towns and cities where you already can't move for McDonalds and Starbucks and Wetherspoons, so you can already get a decent wifi connection for the price of an espresso.
I'm sure this will become useful at some point, but well, it seems a bit redundant at the moment. Or can someone tell me what I'm missing?

3 comments:

benj said...

They'll just start throttling back 3G.

It's got noticeably worse on my contract.

They'll force us to use 4G by hook or by crook.

Graeme said...

agrees with Ben Jamin'

but I have just returned from a holiday where I spent a few days in Seattle. There is a Starbucks on every street-corner - to the extent where it got to be a standing joke ...I spy with my little eye something beginning with S....

usage and data charges are a thing of the past

Mark Wadsworth said...

This all sounds fascinating, but will it work on a Nokia 110 or my landline at home?