If you've got a smartphone, chances are good that you've also got access to one of the many 4G networks. At the best of times, these networks can hit speeds of 10-20 megabit per second. But Samsung's got a new experimental network that can push 1.2 gigabits per second at highway speeds.
That second part is important for two reasons. The first is obvious – many people use their phone on the go. In the car, I'll stream Pandora and pull up maps all the time. But what a lot of people don't know is that when traveling at high speeds – as people often do with their phones – it's much harder to transmit data at decent rates. So seeing this kind of test done in non-ideal, non-laboratory conditions, is a lot more promising than someone saying they managed to move a ton of data from one side of a small room to another. Even if it's only half as effective, we're still talking about 30x times faster than just about any cell network currently available.
God, I love the future.
You're reading Numbers, a blog on Kotaku that examines games and culture through the lens of math and statistics. To contact the author of this post, write to dancstarkey@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @dcstarkey.