China has been dominating tech headlines for a few days - from the incredible rise of internet users to Google's admission that maybe censoring its Chinese index wasn't a brilliant idea - but now it seems they're trying to crank things up even more.
Apparently a group of movers and shakers in Shanghai have decided to skip 3G, which has proved quite troublesome for them, and go straight to 4G instead. Here's Reuters:
Data-rich 3G telephony -- which allows high-speed transmission of data and images -- is not yet available in mainland China. But a group of 10 "leading domestic institutions" called the "FuTURE Project" on Sunday rolled out 4G in Shanghai, the official China Daily reported.
China aims to hold field tests for the 4G system -- whose rollout has cost 150 million yuan ($19.3 million) and will allow data transmission at up to 100 megabutes per second, several times faster than current technology -- and put it into trial commercial use up until 2010, the paper added.
It brough to mind a great piece that Kevin Kelly wrote last year about "the myth of leapfrogging", and how we shouldn't expect cultures to skip whole generations of technological development. Of course, in the case of 3G/4G, we're not talking about a huge shift from riding horses to flying cars - it's more a difference of degree rather than kind.
