As a user, my impressions is that the latency involved with routing mobile data around is a lot higher (more like a second, even with LTE) than the latency involved with the physical transmission. Mobile data connections are generally more reliable than WiFi, but usually there is a significant lag before results are returned. Is that not correct?

Any omnidirectional microwave/RF network technology will have a short enough range that the signal propagation time is negligible for the purposes of human-perceived latency. This is a consequence of the need for cells to be small enough that they are only serving a manageable number of users. (Directional links like microwave backbones and backhaul can have latency worth caring about.)

Any latency you perceive comes from your packets sitting in a buffer waiting for their turn to be transmitted or waiting to be re-transmitted after a collision. The problem of queue management for wired networks has only had a satisfactory solution for a few years. When you throw in things like collisions due to the shared medium and interference from other users of the spectrum (less of a problem for cellular than WiFi), transmission rate and power selection covering multiple orders of magnitude, interference that can be problematic for some users but undetectable for users elsewhere in the cell, and the almost complete unwillingness of the hardware vendors to sell anything hackable enough to do research with, it's clear that wireless will continue to suck for the foreseeable future. However, a lot of these problems get a lot easier when you're working at a frequency that can never reach from the inside of your house to the inside of the neighbor's house.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1154366377.

Just posted 22/9 40ms ping in DC Union Station. It's 7pm and the place is packed with people playing on their cell phones while waiting. Maybe blame SF NIMBYs for not letting the cell companies put up enough towers or run enough fiber backhaul?

What part of the country are you located in? I can get full 4G LTE speeds in the middle of nowhere Appalachia where my brother lives, via AT&T. Streaming HD video on my phone there is a non-issue.

Streaming Netflix in Central London isn't an issue (I'm on Three); do you have a choice for a better provider?

What phone are you using? Some phones pawn off HSPA+ as "4G".

Data caps are a form of price discrimination, and will evolve with supply and demand. It's like Apple's upcharge for each jump in flash or SSD size--it's a way to push a higher proportion of costs onto those who value the product the most. The brackets will keep going up and be priced such that lots of people will pay it.

Here in the North we have insane data caps on our regular DSL and Cable internet.

On a couple of the packages, it's possible to blow through your entire monthly cap in 6 hours - and I've seen people do it.

If you look out to 2020, and assume 5G will be ready, what you'll get in production is nowhere near 1tbps. You might see 500mbps - 1gbps commonly deployed across the US and Europe during the 2020-2025 time frame. Deploying the initial infrastructure was very expensive, but now it's in place. That's part of the reason why the US was able to transition relatively quickly to 4G LTE, there was no need to build 200,000 towers again.

Data caps will rise substantially over the next five years. By 2020x, they'll be commonly at several hundred gigabytes at 5G speeds across the US and Europe, with unlimited data at lower speeds as a universal feature. No doubt numerous carriers will offer variations of unlimited data.