Sprint and Clearwire Fight Over Smartphone Finances

CamelTowing said:
"No one hauls their Xbox around". That is hugely incorrect. I know many people who do just that. Gamers haul their Xbox, PS3, Laptops, and even their full tower gaming pc's to lan parties all over.

Everywhere a LAN party congregates, there's a fixed-line internet solution available for much much less expense then a "4G" wireless connection. Cellular internet connections are only needed for devices that run off batteries. Everything else is better served by a Wi-Fi router connected to a cable in the ground.

I'm not opposed to people paying for whatever they want to buy, but I'm not ignorant of reality, either. Trying to offload intensive, low-latency, high ping-rate data onto a scarce, shared resource cellular network is just asking for trouble.

WiMax and LTE ARE true 4G networks. They already meet the latency requirements. These are the technologies that offer the proposed 1Gb/s to meet the 4G requirements. Do they offer 1Gb/s speeds yet? No.

They are not 4G until they meet ALL the requirements of the standard, just like a 3rd-year medical school student is not a doctor. You have to meet all the standards before you can be labelled a physician.

The honest thing to do here would be to stop calling it "4G" until they meet all the specs! Right now they're all "proto-4G".... just like HSPA+ is. These technologies do not provide radically different classes of service. LTE and WiMAX are better then HSPA+ but they are not a "generation" ahead by any stretch of the imagination and they need to stop claiming to be. In today's marketplace, speed is 100x more important than latency.