will the real 4g please stand up?

Tired of all the jazz about 4G? Join the club. It seems like all the carriers are flocking to this new tech buzz word. Who cares though? It's a pretty well known fact that none of the wireless carriers including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint have cell phone data service anywhere near 4G standards. What is the official 4G standard? How about 100 Mbps - and that's in both directions - to and from your phone. What does 100 Mbps mean to the average data user? It means you could send over 300 decent quality pictures to you friends on Facebook or Twitter in one second.

So you're probably wondering why should you care about 4G since you don't have or won't share 300 pics anyway right? Well that's a reasonable stance; I don't have 300 pics either but perhaps the bright star behind the 4G marketing buzz (and it really is just marketing) is that the 4G craze is creating a lot of jobs for wireless carriers. What's a lot of jobs? How about over 500,000 new jobs will be created in the next 10 years, with most within the next 5 years. Now that's impressive at least for the tech industry anyway. Stop whining these guys (techies) were eating soup and crackers 5 years ago when the housing and mortgage industry was booming. Every dog has its day. Anyway, although the jobs created are with wireless carriers they will be across the board in terms of actual positions including sales, marketing, call center operations, cell tower technicians, software engineers, and so on. Maybe not so many jobs in marketing though - it looks like that area is doing well already(you know 4G this, 4G that). So whether or not the real 4G stands up - one thing is for sure - 4G equals jobs.