Mobile Demonstration of LTE-Advanced Pulls In 600 Mbps Download Speeds

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Hey, anyone else hear that popping sound? My guess is it’s the collective heads of Comcast (and most any other internet service provider in the United States) exploding, reacting to the fact that they just got their lunch eaten by a bunch of Korean researchers who took a test of LTE-Advanced on the road and blew Comcast’s top specs clear out of the water.

The test was pretty simple in nature: take a few Korean researchers from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and stick them in this big custom RV, and then have them drive around a while and see what kind of net connection they can sustain.

Anyway, how it all turned out was downright astonishing; the research team in the custom RV managed to pull download speeds of over 600 meg per second. This is actually enough to–get this!–stream 3D video.

By way of comparison, the results of LTE-Advanced are fully six times faster than the best LTE can hope to get, and a whopping 40 times faster than 3G.

Considering that Comcast’s best connection speed seems to top out at 20 meg, this is actually a pretty big deal, and a deal that’s no doubt terrifying not only to Comcast but to anyone else. While we’ve seen internet service providers previously scrap and bicker over every byte they release, technological development has been advancing to the point where they’re going to be in a serious bind from competitors sneaking in with better tech.  And don’t even get me started on the catastrophe that will befall places like HughesNet, who counted on being the only game in town in a whole lot of places that will suddenly find itself aced out by something like this.

The internet service provider landscape may well find itself irreparably altered by the advance of technology, and I look forward to seeing just that.