There’s loads of hype this week about 3G, 3.5G, 4G etc. 99% of it appears to be hype though.
As ever Petri’s 3G FAQ provides clarity though the mist. Is EV-DO 4G? Nope. Frankly, even though
Russ gets excited
by the possibility of 700kbps or higher with High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSPDA), I’d still be rather cautious about those claims, remember claims of 1Mbps with WCDMA? At the end of the day it’s still a 3G technology (albeit one that’s apparantly faster than some of the others).
We’ve talked in the past about 4G and the hype behind the whole 3G/4G/5G marketing nonsense, and this is more of the same.
The difference since May 2003 is that now more and more real 3G networks are lighting up and being used by people around the globe. This is a chance for the good networks to tell us what they can offer with 3G, how they can take advantage of the higher data rates, and how innovative they can be with their products. Cheap voice bundles and jumpy video calls aren’t going to hack it, with smarter phones and higher data rates they can do better than that.
