T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer, Neville Ray, stated the obvious during a presentation in San Francisco last week. Customers who have devices that can achieve a higher throughput will consume more data than customers who are stuck with “slower” speeds. To be more specific, T-Mobile customers with devices that have a 42 Mbps HSPA+ radio consume an average of 1.3 GB of data every month. Compare that to the average T-Mobile subscriber, who manages to go through only 760 MB during the same length of time. In other words, give people a fatter pipe, and they’ll figure out how to put it to good use. We saw the exact same thing happen several years ago with wired broadband. Sites like YouTube and Viemo were built because there were more and more people getting high speed connections at home. This makes us pause, what applications or services are out there today that take advantage of the ridiculous speeds that 4G LTE can enable? You can point to HD video streaming, but that’s been around for ages. Fast upload speeds for photographers in the field? Maybe, but that’s niche. What’s the killer app?
An even bigger question is can today’s devices even take advantage of today’s bandwidth? Brian Klug from AnandTech recently slapped the iOS 6 beta on his iPhone 4S and ran the SunSpider benchmark. His device completed the test in 1843 milliseconds. The two year old laptop that this writer is using can do the exact same test in just 237 milliseconds. That’s almost 8x as fast. Maybe we’re at a point where it isn’t the pipe that acts as a bottleneck, but the processor that can put those wirelessly delivered bits to good use.
All we know is that there will inevitably be a day when we look back at that 1.3 GB per month figure and wonder how the hell that was possible since we’ll all be averaging about 500 MB every 24 hours.
[Via: The Verge]