4G, the standard that will allow mobile phones to roam over Wi-Fi networks among other things, a step closer following a ruling of the Federal Communications Commission in the US on VoIP. True, it only affects the US, but that’s a big market. There’s a lot of detail here about what needs to be ironed out before the technology becomes useful, but the ability to use your mobile phone at a Wi-Fi hotspot should appeal to almost everyone. In addition to the promise of cheaper calls using wireless VoIP, the data transfer rate is a lot higher and a lot cheaper, bringing the transfer to mobile phones of larger files such as movies an economic possibility.
When operators first showed phones that could play movies well, and that you could download movies over the network, journalists did a quick calculation to work out you’d be paying a couple of hundred bucks for a movie and dismissed the comments.
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