The clever folk at Korean electronics company LG have done a test of the new upcoming LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile broadband technology and achieved data speeds of 60 mbps down and 20 mbps up. So remember that most of us are happy to get 5 mbps on our landlines and you’ll see that this is Very Fast Indeed. It’s currently no good for voice calls, only data, but the boffins are working on adding a voice layer as we speak (although thinking about it, what’s the matter with simply using VoIP comms?). LG and Nortel had earlier done tests in a car at 110 kph and achieved 50 mbps download, so this is a real technology folks.
The marketing bods are claiming that you’ll be able to download a full movie in less than a minute, but we all know that’s not going to happen before OJ gets out of jail, so let’s just imagine streaming high definition movies via a mobile device, any time, any place. There, now you can salivate safely.
Of course what they don’t tell you is the fact that the batteries will last 35 seconds at full speed, but since when did practicalities ever get in the way of good old techno-lust? Anyway whichever way you cut it, this new 4G technology is going to have a massive – and I mean massive – impact on technology in general, not just the portable sector.
The result is a 13 by 13 mm modem chip, perfectly sized for the next generation of slim-yet-powerful handsets. For its demonstration today, LG used a test terminal running Windows Mobile to play back high quality, on-demand video. In addition to this handset modem, LG is also developing the first preliminary LTE-based data card, which can replace the wireless cards currently used in computers.
