Apparently, with sparse coverage, nonetheless, if I need something quick, I ditch both the home or office internet and tether up to Optus.

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/m...221-3350n.html

My Vodafone 4G in Perth and Midland is seriously fast

As someone who knows something about this, fibre is still the best medium available today but wireless is only going to get better and faster and cheaper

I know nothing about it, can it/will it ever be capable of handling 20,000,000 (or more) connections at the same time across Australia ?

I don't see why not but at that level, the weak link would be the connections coming into Australia (mainly across the pacific). I'm not sure but I reckon that's where it would fall down

As an aside, Virgin Mobile have finally turned on 4G on their prepay network. You have to do some mucking about, but it works!

But will it be as fast as Koreas 5G?

No, not in the foreseeable future. Not even close. Already reaching saturation in its current role as a complementary technology. The percentage of data downloaded through a wireless connection has been decreasing for the last 5 years. It now moves just 4% of data, wired does 96%.

One of my mates connection speeds.

LOL, he'd use up his monthly 3 gigs of quota in about 10 mins with that or less.


Until they up wireless download capacity to something reasonable like 100 gigs at least, then I dont see how it can have a long term future. From my limited understanding that can never happen because of spectrum/bandwidth issues ????

Lets put it this way, I've just downloaded Utopia the TV series, it's been a very slow download because there are very few seeders and it's taken about 3 days and a bit to download 5 gigs at a limited speed of 24.9 kps.... Still that is far more useful to me as a user than 3 gigs at 600 mbs.

My ADSL speed is circa 16 mbps at present which is fine for my useage.... I could do with a faster connection in the future though, with the advent of live Hi def TV streaming on the horizion from around the world. I dont see how the limited quotas on wireless are ever going to be useful, for me at least, with the massive amounts of data that tv streaming willl need.

On a side note, I see there's not going to be a Samsung S5, their going straight to the 6. Clever marketing to be a model 'higher' than Apple. So I'm guessing the next iphone will be a 7!

Try searching on "Ultra HD 4K and beyond". My impression from reading all the highly technical articles is that only the next generation of fibre to the home will be able to carry the proposed standards in about ten years time, they won't be available on Free to Air because they'll need speeds and bandwidths that we can hardly imagine at the moment. We'll have 27 channels of sound with definition far greater than 4K on huge TVs, not sure that I'll want it that big but many people will.

My understanding is 4K is going to use H.265 (HEVC). That offers compression that's 1.5-2 times better than H.264. Plus as you double the size you don't necessarily double the datarate. If you were encoding "shift this big block of pixels to the left" - you are still encoding the same instruction, just with a bigger block of pixels, etc.

And, of course, there is little point to 4K resolution unless you have a projector anyway - so they'll finesse the quality for those expensive, but not really very big, flat screen TVs.

Upshot is it won't need 4x the datarate, and it probably won't even take 2x the datarate. A bit of content delivery from close at hand, a bit of buffering, and they'll probably fit it into Turnbull's 25Mbit, or down ADSL2 running at full rate.

Haven't got 4G where I live yet, so I haven't got a 4G device yet either. Will wait until it is available before splashing.

Currently on cable and getting 36MB download which is fine for now.

I didn't make it too clear but I meant Beyond 4K. Tests were carried out last year between London and Paris, they needed Gigabytes to carry all the data. The BBC produced an excellent Podcast on these tests. New TV standards are now being planned and researched about 10-15 years in advance.