Never mind GPRS, 3G, Wi-Max, etc. The comms technology we're all waiting for is now officially Ultra Mobile Broadband, which maxes out at an utterly staggering 280Mbps, or almost three hundred times the speed of the average home broadband. You'll have to wait at least three years though..... (via GeekZone)
Read on in the full article.
Unless you were mounting some kind of live television broadcast, would you ever need more than a few megabits in a portable device? Come to think of it, would you ever need more than a few megabits in a desktop PC?
. . . and what's that going to do to my mobile's battery life? Five minutes?
Peak data rate of 280 Mbps? Yeah, right: maybe utterly alone in a cell, not further away than 10 meters from the base station, with neither rain nor fog nor wind, for around 20 seconds (because after that your battery will be drained), and don't you dare to move - maybe even with pedestrian speeds the rate will drop dramatically already...
No, seriously, I spent half an hour now googling around trying to either substantiate or put the claim into perspective, but I failed. Maybe somebody with more technical knowledge can help here?
Even if it was 280mbps for each phone in all conditions, what on earth could you do with that?
I suppose one possibility is the death of portable mass storage, if phones could get that speed cheaply there'd be no need for things like flash memory or HDDs. You'd have virtually unlimited space through online services for music and film accessible anywhere, the iPod concept would be dead.