Well, here's my question then: At home in New Jersey, I am using Cablevision's Optimum Online and seeing speeds anywhere from 30-40 Mbps on downstream and up to 7-ish on the upstream. This is with their "Boost+" service. That's also an extra fee to get that ($15 USD more per month, I believe). The typical download speed has been tested at 13-14Mbps for the average home user in this month's PC Magazine- also flagged as the lowest rated speed in the nation for an ISP. This is not any additional service like I have- it's their most basic tier. Where Comcast was rated at the top of the game at 18.5 on average.
I haven't seen an increase in these home/consumer speeds in over 4 years now- Cablevision's Boost service was previously rated at 30 down and 5 up. I was able to see this as early as 2007 at home in my apartment. Their basic tier was not far off from 10down, 3 up back then and things have not increased much since.
When LTE Advanced hits the market in a few years, mobile speeds should far eclipse these speeds users are seeing at home. Veriaon LTE at their highest rating is already eclipsing what Optimum Online is doing on their lowest rating from a Mobile to Home comparison.
Am I missing something here?
Yes.
Re-read what you've written - you're comparing the lowest wired with the highest wireless - apples to oranges.
To clarify further, the highest Verizon LTE tier is the highest that Verizon can deliver on that medium, whereas the lowest tier is not what Cablevision *can* deliver, it's just what it *does* deliver on that plan. A fairer comparison would be the highest Verizon tier with the highest Cablevision tier - or lowest of both, whichever.
However, unlike the highest LTE tier, that speed can be upgraded, and from a strictly technical perspective the wired option will always have the capability to deliver a higher speed.
2 reasons for this spring to mind:
1. 10Gbit/s over copper is very much available now, but as a consumer can you get (or afford) a 10gbit/s network device for a standard PC? Probably not.
2. The wireless base station is connected by some kind of wired service - it may be ethernet, it may be fiber, in either case a typical BTS will have 1 or 2
gigabit connectors only, the second of which *may* be used with a wireless backup (often
Microwave) to prevent catastrophic failures in the event of a cable cut.
LTE advanced BTS may go for 10gbit/s uplinks when they come out, but by then, what might be available on copper or fiber by that time is likely to still be vastly superior. They've recently cracked 100gbit/s over copper and are going for the magical Terabit.
Besides, wireless networks of any and all carriers are far more restrictive in what they'll let you do on them - data caps are virtually always going to be lower on a wireless device than a wired one (2g, 3g, wifi, wimax, lte, doesn't matter), if for no other reason than it is likely to be required in order to maintain a good QoS. At least this is the experience I'm having with my own wireless network and the reason we won't be offering "unlimited" on the same.
But finally, despite all of these advances, what you get as a consumer may also be vastly different from what is available as far as technology is concerned: most consumer PCs barely even handle 1Gbit/s properly anyway, so until that part gets sorted (like we all move to
SSD) then there are other bottlenecks caused by these old-school components which need to be eliminated for super-gigabit speeds to be worthwhile.