I just read this which may be interesting or boring ..
Most people who own smartphones find themselves at some point asking why it is that Internet access for their Smartphone is so much slower than when they get on the Internet using a computer connected to Internet from their cable company, or some other broadband service. After all, in many cases it costs more to cruise the Internet on a Smartphone, and then there are all those all the television commercials from service providers declaring how fast their networks are; so what's the deal? As it turns out, it comes down to the fact that there are two completely different types of technology involved and each has evolved at a separate pace.
First of all, the Internet access offered by your cable company is based on a high speed direct link using a well understood technology called Ethernet. Data is sent back and forth on a wire though very fast circuitry. Smartphone signals on the other hand, as is noted in a Radio-Electronics article describing the history of the cell phone, have to get where they are going by traveling through the air using radio waves. They also rely on cell towers to not only catch those radio signals emanating from a cell phone, but to pass them on to another cell tower, which in turn passes it on to the next tower, over and over again until the signal makes its way to a receiving station where it is forwarded to its true destination. All that forwarding takes time.
But, according to Stephen Temple, one of the early architects of the cell phone system, in his online book the History of GSM, it's also about the history of circuitry used in both cell towers and phones. He says that because cell phone circuitry is still so much newer than circuitry used in computers it just hasn't had time yet to evolve to the extent that regular computer networks have.
Temple says that when cell phones were first invented, they used analog signals. Thus, very basic sound-based circuitry was used in the cell towers and of course in the phones. But then, several years in, people discovered they wanted to do things besides talk on their cell phones. First there was messaging, then email, and eventually all of other stuff we have today such as Internet browsing. Making all this work meant revamping the entire cell phone infrastructure. Every cell tower had to be changed to allow for the transmission of digital signals, and new "smart" phone technology had to be invented to make it all work as well.
Once the conversion was made to so-called 3G technology, it was discovered that the amount of data and the speed with which it could be sent wasn't up to what users were demanding for high speed Internet access, thus work began on a so called fourth generation (4G) technology that could be used, increasing data speed a hundred-fold. Unfortunately, this new update in technology means once again updating all the cell towers and incorporating new circuitry in new Smartphones, which of course takes time.
And that's where we are today, sitting on the precipice of a new giant leap in Smartphone data speeds. Once the transformation occurs, over the next year or so, all new Smartphones will have faster data speeds than people will find on their computers at home and people will no longer have to wonder about the discrepancy.
