Vijay: Aaj mere paas paisa hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai, naukar hai, bank balance hai, aur tumhare paas kya hai?
Ravi: Mere paas 4G hai! "
It is 40 years since Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor mouthed that classic exchange. In the event of a remake of 'Deewar' in today's more materialistic world, is it too fanciful to imagine a zippy mobile connection replacing 'maa' on one's must-have list? 4G, the 4th era in mobile communication, now touches phone users in 10 states in India and by mid 2015, will likely cover the country.
Is it the big deal it is made out to be? Let's do a reality check. In theory, 4G or the avatar that is being rolled out in India, LTE or Long Term Evaluation -- is five times faster than 3G, with top download speeds of 100 MBPS(upload speeds are half of this). Theoretically this should be about 5 times faster than what we have been able to achieve with 3G. In practice,the best speeds I have experienced with a 4G data dongle over one year of sustained use, is 10-12 MBPS.
On phones, service providers say we can expect to attain download speeds of 40 MBPS, but in practice this may degrade because speeds depend very much on how many other customers are connecting at the same time. So for starters, let's discount the hype about dizzy speeds and lighting downloads.Conservatively, we can expect a 4G phone in India to load a YouTube video or a Facebook news feed or your GMail account in half the time that it took with a 3G device.
That said, it makes sense to go in for a 4G phone if you are contemplating a new purchase, because it will give you a small but critical edge, when it comes to doing online money transactions, reducing the risk of a frozen screen in those critical seconds after entering your credit card number. And since our friends seem increasingly to be sending us pixel-heavy files of their baraat or birthday videos, a 4G connection will certainly reduce the frequency of those annoying pauses amidst the streaming. If you are one of those who only use your phone for voice calls and SMS, 4G will be no big deal but for any one who uses the phone to access the Internet in any measure, 4G is the way to go
Airtel launched its first 4G data networks way back in 2012 in Kolkata, Pune and Bengaluru. In 2015, it has opened the service to 4G voice, on phones across some 17 cities in Karnataka, Punjab, Chandigarh, Maharashtra and Bengal.
Aircel 's 4G services already cover Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh/Telengana, Assam, Bihar and J&K. Tikona's 4G spectrum covers Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, but the company has not yet launched its 4G services. Reliance is expected to go pan-India with 4G services when it launches its Jiyo service sometime this year. We can expect India to be blanketed with 4G by end 2015. BSNL, nation-wide and Augere (in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh) can also be expected to go 4G this year. The 4G subscriber base is expected to reach 10-15 million by December 2015 in the country, estimates consultancy firm PwC.
The clinching argument for upgrading to 4G is this: cost is no longer a stumbling block. Handset makers have launched a number of 4G phones below the lakshman rekha of Rs 10,000 --Xiaomi's Redmi Note, which Airtel is selling with its 4G SIM; Lenovo' A6000, currently the cheapest 4G phone in India at Rs 6999, the Micomax Yu Yureka; Microsoft's Lumia 638. But if you are bringing back a 4G phone from a trip abroad, be warned that in India, 4G is being rolled out only in 2 bands Band 3 (1800 MHz) and Band 40 (2300 MHz); other nations use different frequencies and their handsets may not work here.
