

Ask HN: Why is mobile broadband still getting faster? - hammock

Let me explain the question. So for regular internet on the ground, there's a pretty simple reason why we started with dial-up and eventually moved to the broadband we have now- different types of cables carry different throughput, and we needed to put that infrastructure in place.<p>But mobile broadband is a different story- there are no cables, it's just radio waves and air of which there is a plethora. So what's the difference between 4G and 3G and 2G (why is it faster), and why didn't we have 4G from the very start- what innovation had to be made first?<p>Similarly, what obstacles must be overcome in the future to push the technology to go even faster?
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wmf
Newer protocols use techniques such as MIMO, OFDM, and turbo codes that were
invented and refined relatively recently. Thanks to Moore's law newer radios
can also use a lot more transistors at the same cost; even if such complexity
was possible in the past it would have been too expensive.

