Much like my post yesterday, I am struggling to work out why I should upgrade to #4G.
In the day when we used, what was effectively a wet piece of string to connect to the internet, things were really slow. On a PC a dial up modem offered 56kbps, which resulted in 5kb downloads per second. An MP3 would take 20 minutes to download.
Same with mobile phones. I was one of the first to use a data connection on my phone, at that point mainly accessing WAP. You were able to access sites outside of WAP, but the speed of the dial up connection on your phone proved to be EXTREMELY slow. Upgrading to GPRS improved things a lot and made a big difference on webpage download.
As it became more common for a smarter phone (notice I didn’t say smart phone) to be used, 3G became a good method to get what you wanted and get it quicker. Again, speed of download was something that significantly improved and thus was the obvious selling point / reason to buy. With 3G on a phone, MP3 downloads moved in merely minutes.
3.5G (or HSDPA+ as its also known) brought about faster speeds on existing hardware and line rental. Download speeds improved a lot and was now comparable (where you got signal) to landline on an average contract.
4G is now here and EE have claimed a total of 700k users. For me, unless the web content becomes significantly larger (requiring me to need more speed), or the handsets move up a gear and show me a 1080p display which warrants me downloading a film of that quality on my phone, then I just don’t see the point to move.
If it takes me 0.1 or 0.21 seconds to load a webpage, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. An MP3 downloading in 45 seconds or 5 seconds, again, doesn’t really improve my life quality.
Until hardware catch’s up, or internet pages significantly get larger, then I see no reason to 4G.
What would interest me, or be a game changer for me, would be for #o2, #EE or #Vodafone to offer me the ability to use my phone as a wi-fi hub on the move and at home on 4G speeds, at landline costs / rates. Now that would make me switch…