There's no technology problem waiting to be solved. Laptop manufacturers could build in LTE chipsets today if they wanted to. The issue is that no cell carrier wants them to; it would create demand they're not prepared to meet. The current trend is just the opposite -- to lower monthly limits and increase prices for 4G data services. Creating more demand would just lead to cities where there are more people connected than the towers can handle.
> it would create demand they're not prepared to meet.
So what you're saying is carriers are not "technically" prepared to handle it? I wonder if 4g has any new technologies to handle making more efficient use of resources?
From my understanding of LTE, there's a lot of cool things being prepared in the specifications for 4G that make this scenario less burdensome. For instance femtocells are likely to become more common. I personally know of a specific carrier that's working on a technology so you can share resources between two sectors. OFDM in particular is good for minimizing interference which should allow networks to become more dense, I believe as technology evolves there's a lot of benefits to even the carriers to allow users to use 4G from their laptop.
> So what you're saying is carriers are not "technically" prepared to handle it?
No. I said what I meant; it's not a technology problem. Demand exceeding capacity in the short-term is a capital/resource allocation problem.
Capacity isn't constrained by a need for new specs or new hardware. It's constrained by most of the cell towers only having <50mbps backhaul for 3G. New towers need new radios, new equipment to drive it, and new backhaul to provide enough bandwidth to share among the connections. It takes a lot of time and money to upgrade and build out the network.
The carriers are carefully managing demand through pricing and service limitations so that it doesn't outstrip the rate at which they make those upgrades.
