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Four gees? My town dun' even get three gees.

:(

It's a silly place.

I do have 3G where I live, well around my house. Other places in my village are suspect at best. Even worse where my wife's parents used to live there was no 3G, try surviving for hours with your in-laws without 3G. They recently moved, so I thought the 3G thing would be solved, but their new place is in a dead zone as well. Sometimes 3G appears, but then nothing happens and then 3G goes away again.

And why does my wife get upset if I stare at my phone all the time? The rest read folders and watch Carlo & Irene. Talk about mental torture.

So, they don't even let you use their WiFi... I take it they are still upset about that stealing from them their daughter thing?

WiFi??? They don't have WiFi, Internet or even a computer! And a good thing too, they'd be a perfect and willing phishing target.

He calls my iPod "a little radio", they sold their caravan on the German Internet(!) and think websites are closed on Sundays.

So you don't consider even iOS devices to be (your) in-laws-proof?
Hm, to what degree any possible phishing could be solved by any parental controls in them? (I see a new meaning of the term ;p ) And/or not setting them up with an email.

Unless you're also disturbed by the prospect of constant ~skyping... (I can certainly see how that might not be worth having an access point at their place)

Edited 2012-08-22 18:54 UTC

They have an average age and IQ of just over 70. They have never used a computer, let alone the Internet. I think it's best to keep it like that.

We did almost learn them to send text messages. For some strange reason they always send empty ones, but they can read ours.

My town uses the standard 9.8 m/s/s "1g". If they increased it to 4g, the extra weight would make it too hard for people to get off of the couch.

- Brendan

I still use my old NMT450 phone, as it is the only one i have tried with coverage on the ocean and in the mountains. Oh well.. It would be nice with faster calling and SMS =P

No really, i got internet at home, i do not need it on my phone as well. I might get antisocial. (Or should i say even more so) But i do understand people that want it.

W8, weren't Nordic NMT networks switched off a few years ago?
(and what do you mean by "the ocean" - Skagerrak?! Surely not the Baltic lake...)

Yup, 3G speed is quite enough for what you can do on a phone.

What I'm curious, is how much they plan to increase their prices in the 3G networks to support the 4G one ...

I doubt 4G is very much about increasing theoretical maximum speed for individual subscriber, as far as the telecoms are concerned... in their eyes, LTE has greater spectral efficiency - hence the ability to squeeze more users (each getting "acceptable" speed) in a given chunk of spectrum, particularly in dense locations.

Short-term, probably not that much of a difference for subscribers; not likely to disrupt anything (especially since the new iPhone will certainly work just fine on older networks, and probably use noticeably more battery on the newer)

Any change is always bound to increase prices for us. LTE has a theoretical speed most if not all people will never get anyway.

Rumor has it the new iPhone's battery has only a slightly larger capacity. Unless they have some new generation LTE chips it may cut its operation time shorter than the iPhone 4/4S. I'd prefer it to be a bit longer.

In a way it's a kind of disgrace these cell phones, Apple and others, barely make it to the end of the day on their battery charge. I'd say make it 2 days and even that's crap. You can't use your phone without any power outlets nearby.

As for battery life, I believe that from a theoretical point of view, 4G chips should be able to eat up less battery than 3G chips when offering equivalent performance. That's because to qualify as "4G" under the requirements of the UIT, tech like LTE Advance is supposed to use an all-IP network, in which even voice and texts go through the data connection of the phone, unlike 3G tech which has to maintain two simultaneous cellular connexions, one for voice and texts and one for data.

Of course, this is again purely theoretical, and I am sure that current 4G phones will manage to waste even more power than 3G ones in spite of this. Besides, low nework coverage has never been a good thing for battery life.

I believe a problem with the early 4G handsets was battery life. This may be a reason of the Android phones with big screens: they're big anyway because of the battery to support 4G so you might as well put a screen on it. Of course in the IT world time flies and things improve fast.

Somewhere I still have a Dell Axim X3i PocketPC. If you turn WiFi on you can almost see the battery run out of the room.

I don't think that increasing screen size to solve battery problems would work. The extra screen area eats up a lot of battery too...

Maybe at some point, manufacturers will start to put gigantic empty areas around the screen to this end though. After all, the obvious option of making thicker phones seems so unacceptable to them nowadays...

Increasing the screen size won't make the battery run longer, but it does fill up space that would be unused.

But it's a shame batteries keep improving all the time, but the hardware needs more and more power keeping the running time about the same.

What people forget is that there is still no VoLTE with seamless downgrade available in phones(switching from packet 4G to switched 3G/2G).
Up until then I doubt that VoLTE will be used much. Mobile broadband is a better option, where all practical LTE deployments in EU have been to date.

I imagine the distinction is mostly logical on the handset level & not making much of a difference for the radio modem (work of which uses most power, I guess); relevant mostly for backbone-level (and there already are networks, among more recently deployed 3G ones, using an all-IP architecture on that level - at least some from Huawei, with the benefit of straightforward upgrade to LTE).

Either way, using a mobile phone with data-only SIM card doesn't seem to make a difference... (OK, so maybe the control/SMS channel is still active; but, it's active all the time, even when idle - and in that state, even the most advanced mobile phones can last quite a while, so I'd guess its share of battery use is marginal)

It's not so simple ...I mean, the primary change is that people are using mobile data more and more. Hence, we demand for networks to be upgraded anyway - and it would be quite possibly more pricey when sticking to older tech (if there would even be enough spectrum for the required capacity).
You could probably give quite comfortable experience to everybody using just EDGE, but it'd likely take at least an order of magnitude more spectrum allocations than we use for mobile phones now (hence requiring new equipment, anyway; NVM blocking other usages, that could be costly too)

Spectrum is just an inherently scarce resource, new communication standards are our way around that...

Plus, for the carriers (in the US) that do have decent 4g coverage, they cap their data plans such that you can't do anything interesting with it anyway, so might as well stick with 3g/HSPA+.

There aren't a "few" black holes. As a real world example - there is no 2G (let alone 3G) on the train mainline from the South Coast between Petersfield and Guildford. Not on O2, not on Vodafone and not on 3. Given O2 and Vodafone together are close to 50% of the UK carrier market, isn't that pretty pathetic? That's 40 minutes of a 1.5 hour journey on the mainline commuter backbone! From Guildford, the reception is spotty, and the closer you get to central London, the more bogged down it is and the slower the speed is. And yet we now have WiFi on the Tube? I'd LOL if it wasn't so depressing.

Luxury.

Before I had an iPhone I used an iPod touch on the train. The stations had free WiFi, but often before I managed to make a working connection the train would start moving again. Around this time I started to dislike web apps a lot.

Recently I spend 4 days in Belgium in a resort. I found an open WiFi, but I never got an IP address. Tried it every day (while waiting in the snack bar queue). I assumed it was not for visitor use, but part of some system. When we left we could fill out a form grading all the resort services, this included use of the free WiFi(!).

Not really luxury - none of that stations on that line have WiFi to attach to. Even Waterloo has pretty crappy Cloud and BT Openzone that is slower than 2G most of the time. I used to pair my N800 with an old SE phone (can't remember the model, probably a K800) and get gprs speeds. That was class. It also cost me a bomb.

As for your router issues - either it wasn't giving out IP addresses (and you might have been able to fake a real address and connect) or it might just have been broken.

One of my neighbours has the only open access point around my home address. No idea who, but it is open... just not connected to the internet. It'll happily allow you to connect, but there's no network behind it. I port scanned it once and I don't think there's even any hardware attached.

Maybe your neighbor likes the flashing LEDs.

I have come across a few people who thought WiFi is something like 3G, it's everywhere but you don't have to pay for it. My sister in-law is one of them. She has no WiFi at home, but still wanted to use it because she was told it was cheaper.

Not as weird though as the person who was happy to be getting an iPad and the first thing she would do is put all her (paper) books on it. After explaining what I meant with my "How?" question she became less happy realizing you just can't put paper books on a digital device just like that.

It's probably not too far from the truth in the UK, considering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FON#BT_Fon_Community (and compare on http://maps.fon.com/ ). Of course, it doesn't really work out if you don't also have a home connection.
Belgium is comparable. Netherlands not that bad, too... not sure what happened with DE, a few years ago it looked somewhat between NL and BE.

Overall, not sure how such outcome is possible, but it almost seems like mobile reception in PL is generally one of the least problematic ones, hm... it's almost as if somebody put some thought & real resources into it, cares even O_o (plus some nice perks recently, like free basic 3G & LTE internet access throughout much of the country, or reusing of NMT450 spectrum for CDMA450 "broadband" for the countryside). I don't even remember when was the last time I noticed signal loss, trains/mountains and whatnot (except places purposefully chosen sort of for that - say, the pub-club in the ~dungeon of one castle, few-metre walls, thick enough so that mini-concerts are barely audible outside & don't seem to bother people in residential buildings right across the street) - but then, maybe that's also me not being constantly glued to the phone.

Edited 2012-08-22 17:46 UTC

If I go to the nearby city of Arnhem 3G is good everywhere, until you enter a shop.

But in general 3G is good in most populated places in The Netherlands, it's just that there are a number of black holes. They are here today, but they were also there yesterday and 5 years ago. So if coverage is bad somewhere I don't expect it to change.

If Apple came with a 4G iPhone with a bigger screen and one with 3G only, the current 3.5" screen and longer battery life than the 4G I would go for the 3G version with longer battery life. For a phone 3G is fast enough IF it's available.

My iPhone 4 gets me through the day, but only if I use it normally. If I go on a gaming session it won't make it.

Wait, you can't just force 3G off in Apple phones? (hence seemingly not considering it as a viable option for a possible 4G iPhone)