High Speed Wireless & Reality

The news of a 4G working group made me think a bit about high-speed wireless and what we actually see in deployed services. Here in the US, we have available to consumers, 1xRTT, EVDO, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, and HSDPA. None of these come anywhere close to their hyped speeds, though some areas do have better coverage/service than others.

UMTS and EVDO have been promising 2Mbps-4Mbps speeds and only deliver 400Kbps-700Kbps service. Now mind you I’m not complaining, but I just want to point out reality. Remember, any results of testing and development goals are under completely controlled environments, speed, devices and so on.

The end result is will be faster mobile data services for all of us over time, but when you here these high-speed numbers, do yourself a favor and figure that in actual service in the average area you’ll see 10%-25% of this – which again is nothing to complain about!