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I am posting this , since i saw discussions related to CINGULAR/AT&T some few days back , which led me believe there are telecommunications enthusiasts around!

I am with a story from CHINA. ChinaLaunches 4G before 3G off the ground

A little background! 3G provides you bandwidth upto 2 Mbps ( 384 kbps WAN), 4G is to provide something from 20 Mbps or more. China , on its advent to 4G has claimed it might provide to 100 Mbps today with its "Future" project. In fact, 4G is in formative stage elsewhere and is expected to come to market on 2010.

NOW, its fine. We are having good bandwidth with improved products. But my question is : there is equally a community the 802.11 family ! They provide efficient bandwidth, well enough for any thing i dream of now! 802.11b/g with pretty good speeds ( 11 Mbps / 45 Mbps ). Once the hyped 802.11n (600Mbps) finalizes and standardized, it would have even more focuses for mobile vendors to be implementing 802.11n mobiles.

So, isnt the future on Wifi phones? Why would ppl work on 4G to speed up their network to few tens more Megabits per second, when you could work on providing higher speeds of hundreds. Is it the infrastructure that they find it hard to alter, but if they eventually must, why would that be a hindrance?. AND still , by 2010 , they could standardize on 802.11 mobile phones rather than improving on 3G/4G or more G ! :)

I pretty much summed it up here what i had to say! Please contribute on your views and feel free to agree/disagree what i pointed out.

As you know that to get connected to a Wi-Fi network you need to be in close proximity of the access point and this coverage area hasn't increased much even though we've moved from b to g and well on the course to 802.11n; but the case with the cell phone is that we are constantly moving from one cell to another and one access point would be virtually impossible to cover an area equivalent of one normal cell that a modern day cell-tower covers.
Then I think the question of hand-off will also impede the Wi-Fi phones to attain ubiquity; which I am suppose would be quite difficult or is it even possible? I am not too sure about it!
Whatever may be the reason, I still believe it is good to have a choice of Wi-Fi on a phone on top of the other connectivity options; as such when we are in close proximity of our trusted network, it becomes more feasible to get connected.

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RamJhigini , i agree.

The other hindrance i see is the 2.4Ghz unlicensed , shared spectrum that WiFi uses in contrast to the licensed spectrum G's use.
pros: less policy management/ licensing - eventually reduces cost
cons: Take care of the interferences! That would be nasty if you had to worry abt microwaves and other appliances! QoS then will be another problem!

There are plenty phones already in market providing support for both of 'em. I do see a future where a city is totally WiFi [ ubiquitous network connectivity ] and a decentralized service with 802.11 phones. Well, Apple's iPhone seems to be on its way. Nokia is not far behind.

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PS: i dont want to correct over my typos, but then that was a fact not a literature to be corrected. The 802.11g speed would be 54Mbps not 45Mbps . Please manage to find where the error is on the first post ;)

basically i could not resist this thread dyamn you oldmaven (O:
back with the 4G (O:

okey here it goes: my take on this:
all the technology based before 4G are based on packets circuit switching. this is the major bottleneck.

now since IPv6 has been implemented/rolled out and 64bit addressing has been incorporated in major OS including windows. yes. surprising Windows started supporting 64 bit since the release of Windows 2003 SP1 with X64 patch. any other windows OS prior to it not supported.

getting back to the main point here... 4G technology is IP based. hence you are independent of the radio access technology (although it is compatible). thus can contribute to cheaper devices. it will be based on ip packets switching with digital switches.

now the bandwidth of 3G 384kbps paedesterian, 128 mobile car and 2Mbps stationary.
802.11g ; 802.11n and 4g are all based on OFMD (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) but the catch for 802's is that they are still constrained by the range of 50 meters. they have devised wimax 802.16 [d..g] theoretically suppose to support 70Mbps over 50km radius but has a very poor mobility. and it barely supports 10Mbps over 2km range in the field. another catch is that it operates in the 2.4 GHz range.. and i need not mention why it is overcrowded (O: and the failure of WCDMA2000 i.e. QCOM version of 3g

4G has already achieved 100Mbps outdoor in the mobile and 1 Gbps in the indoor. which is far beyond the theoretical numbers in the standards for 802.11 or 802.16 ...

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but as always
what do i know (O: