I have Verizon LTE on my iPhone in the SE region of the country. I watch the free Ustream stuff from Inside Pool and the others in the car sometimes without any problems.
I tried TAR on the iPhone ounce, just to try it out. But I was at home on wifi, so that wouldn't offer you any perspective.
My experience is they are on the border of sufficient speed.
I had dsl home and even there the wireless wasnt so good. I just changed at home fwiw to cable, while we're on the topic of needed bandwidth. If anyone is considering the change.... wow, what a difference!
Dsl was 3mbps. And now cable is 60 to 70 mbps! Wirelessly, no further issues either.
I know that part isnt about 4g, but just an fyi of the huge difference.
We don't have this problem on OSPN. We trans code to the lowest bit-rate to hit mobile, tablets, and limited internet speed users right off the rip. 640x360p @ 350kbit/s .375 mbits.
We are able to do this because we administer our own network, and provide the customization to the industry the way the streaming giants are more universal and can specifically care less about live billiard streaming.
We are debuting our new RTSP channel which will seriously hit 100% of devices. We also offer a java chat client that works on just about every device that has a web browser with java-script enabled.
We've been working desperately for a number of years on this project, and finally making some head room technological wise.
Most ISP's will throttle all bandwidth over HTTP and RTMP regardless if the speed test is 12Mbit/s. They can now throttle with virtualization specifically per socket and port thanks to Cisco.