LTE Advanced should give users 75Mbits/second rates, in the real world, I think. I will TAKE IT.
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You realize that for the last several years, US cellular carriers have basically raced to the front of the pack when it comes to adopting new cellular technologies, right? A few other countries are in our league, but we're hardly toward the end like we used to be.
You are right about fees and caps, though!
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Screw you Aussies and your raging wireless! At least porn on the internet isn't illegal here in the USA. ;-P
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LTE Advanced will scale to 1Gbit/sec but I don't think the underlying technology require speeds of that rate.
Honestly, I tend to think of the "generations" in terms of orders of Magnitude. Which kind of goes against my point of LTE Advanced being the first true 4G tech, which used to be true, until they redefined HSPA+ and LTE as 4G. But, thinking of it int he following way is actually kind of more useful in some ways:
2G cellular data: upper tens to maybe 100-ish Kbit/sec rates (down)
3G cellular data: Couple of Megabits/sec (down), maybe 1Mbit/up
4G cellular data (counting current generation high-end as 4G): 10-30Mbit/sec (down), maybe 10ish up on a good day here in the USA
So the next real "generation" in this more "layman" way of describing it should give us 100+ Mbit/sec down, probably up to a few hundred. And then after that, we'll be getting to Gigabit speeds.
I expect to see the 100 to several hundred Megabit rates being fairly prevalent in the USA and other places by 2016, and Gigabit wireless cellular around the turn of the decade.
God, and I still remember my screeching 2400 baud modem...