Look lively - 4G is coming

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Stand by for a mobile wireless technology that will allow users to send and reciece data so quickly they can see as well as hear the person they are calling, watch high-definition television and films streamed to them on the move, and upload camera and camcorder footage to the internet even as it's being shot. Voice-only calls, meanwhile, could be free. Consumer trials of the first 4G(fourth generation) mobile networks are due to begin this year, with the first handsets expected to go on sale in 2011. Usually such leaps in technology begin in Finland, home of Nokia, or in Silicon Valley, California, but this industry-redefining development is rooted closter to home --in Swindon. The Wiltshire town is home to a research facility operated by Motorola, the international electronics company, where 4G is being developed and where local trials will be conducted.The difference between 4G and existing mobile data networks(the most advanced of which is 3G) is the amount of data that can be sent within a given space of time. The 3G system was designed to communicate with the internet the it was configured in the digital Stone Age of 1981; 4G is fully up to date with today's faster, more efficient internet. When up and running, it will be the quivalent of having a super-fast broadband wi-fi network covering 90% of the UK's population. The promise of 4G is a maximum transmission speed of 140 megabits per second (Mbps.) That's nearly half as fast again as Virgin Media's top-end 100Mbps broadband cable package---the speediest in the country --and 100 times quicker than 3G. It's so fast, it could supersede the tangle of cables that bring broadband the problematic "last mile" -- the distance from and exchange (connected to the internet backbone by optical fibre) to your house ( which might rely on 100-year-old copper wire). JUST HOW COOL WOULD IT BE TO HAVE 4G??