4G is the 4th generation of cellular wireless standards. It is a natural replacement successor to the 3G and 2G technologies that rolled out in the last 10 years or so. Way back in 2009 the requirements for 4G standards were planned with the main aim to set a peak speed requirement for  at 100 Mbit/s for high mobility communication  wen moving in cars or on a train and staggering 1 Gbit/s for  stationary users.

The 4G system is opperational but currently fails to achieve the high standards that the industry laid down but its soon expected to fully provide s service that offers a wide ranging and secure cellular broadband solution to wireless modems, smartphones, and other mobile devices such as iPads.

In December 2010, the international telecoms industry started to recognised that current versions of LTE the software that runs the 4G mobile phone service, should be regarded as “4G”, provided that it can be shown that it can demonstrate   “a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed.”

Basically 4G has had to dumb its self down to be called 4G today but the system will get better and should within the next 24 months be able to really deliver a network that can call its self the forth generation.

When the 4G system was introduced to the world in 2009 the speed was promised to be above 100 Mbit/s for moving at speed such as on a train and a massive 1 Gbit/s for stationary 4g mobile phone and broadband users. Of course your home ISP will be introducing more and more systems offing faster and faster download speed but without spending billions of dollars laying super fast optical cable you probally wont ever see speeds over 250 mbs in your home.

So its a mixed result , no today but yes eventually , you 4G mobile phone and broadband will ( soon ) be faster than your current home internet service provider.

Not quite the exact technical answer you were looking for I guess but its pretty accurate. Now how “fast” depends on the  network , different carriers will undoubtedly start to offer different deals with differing download speeds. The official bench point were a carrier can truly call it 4G is 100 Mbps of data download.

However there is a catch and that’s is that most carriers wont actually have the 100 Mbps system up and running for a while yet and will start by offering a lite version of 4G running  somewhere between 5 and 15 Mbps. Its a bit of a swizz to call this 4G but its the only way currently that the networks can operate.

Remember 3 g is much slower , in fact it was designed for voice transmission and kind of mutated in the data side where as 4G is all about the data. not only are the phones different now , but the software with the system is much more efficient for passing data from the carriers.  Its about browsing speed now of course , the voice element was sorted 10 years ago and 4g (lite) currently offers somewhere about a 10 times quicker experience that does 3G , but when full4G rolls out its going to be nearer 100 times faster and defiantly faster than you home broadband connection.