You may have noticed a lack of input from me lately; well it’s been a busy couple of months – in the good way of course. Though through all the life changing events of the last few weeks, a technical debate did break out which was partly brought on by the new iPhone release, as well as various marketing campaigns by Orange and T-Mobile.

It surrounds the hype of 4G, and why it’s really not much of a selling point despite what Apple may say (they HAVE to sell it, remember?), I would like to clarify why.

4G is definitely a good thing, not only is it much faster, but it does away with the old circuit switching methods of 3G and also natively supports IPv6, when 4G is fully rolled out – it will certainly be worth clinging on to.

Yet this year only about 16 cities in the UK will have access to the chosen commercially deployable method of 4G - LTE. Although there have been numerous rumours that the method may change, this is highly unlikely as other nations such as the US have already deployed LTE successfully.

If you happen to live in one of these cities (the Telegraph have provided a nice map, found here), then 4G is certainly worth considering, yet there is one other point worth making.

4G handsets currently require a separate transceiver to handle the frequencies required; as a result this will use more battery power, I’m unsure how much this will impact the performance of your average phone – but if we’re to learn anything from the initial 2G to 3G switch, the power consumption required by the network always lies just above the advancement in battery performance, meaning the first generation phones will never quite measure up to their successors in that department, obviously.

Bottom line, let the battery\software mature, perhaps even combined transceivers will arrive soon, and the 4G network will expand to the rest of the nation – more importantly, multiple operators will own the spectrum, instead of just Everything Everywhere (EE), opening up more competition to the market, which is always good for us consumers, right?