Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research

5:00 PM -- It's hard to avoid 4G these days. Watch TV, troll the Internet or travel around any major city in the U.S., and you'll see ads pushing faster wireless data services and devices using this amazing new wireless technology.

But, as we saw with the iPad launch, many users don't really know what Long Term Evolution (LTE) and fourth-generation (4G) wireless technology actually mean.

And who can blame them? Operators have played fast and loose with the term to try and get an edge over competitors. In part, that's thanks to the body that lays down the law on what 4G wireless actually is, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The technical bit
4G wireless was originally supposed to refer to technologies that use Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as the basis for the wireless speed boost. Capabilities required included maximum downlink speeds of 100Mbit/s when a user is on the move and up to 1Gbit/s for stationary downloads.

The ITU had designated LTE-Advanced and WiMax 2 as the only real 4G technologies, due to start arriving in operator's networks in 2013 at the earliest. In a press release in December 2010, however, the body said, "it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third-generation systems now deployed."

So operators could say that technologies that had been called 3G are now labeled "4G," which is confusing for users, as we saw with AT&T Inc.'s re-labeling of the iPhone 4S as a "4G" phone.

Real 4G
So, here are the networks LR Mobile thinks can legitimately be counted as major 4G deployments in the U.S. in that they use the right OFDM technology to speed downloads and reduce the time it takes to set up data calls, allowing users to stream videos faster and upload photos more quickly to their social networks.

Table 1: Who offers what in the U.S.

Operator 4G technology Where it�s at Average download speeds
AT&T LTE 28 cities N/A
Verizon LTE 203 towns and cities 5-12Mbit/s averages claimed on LTE downloads
Sprint WiMax/LTE WiMax in 71 markets; LTE in six cities by mid-year 2012 3-6Mbit/s on WiMax
T-Mobile USA LTE Coming in 2013 N/A
MetroPCS LTE 13 cities and much of Florida 2-6Mbit/s
Sources: Light Reading Mobile, Operator data

We haven't included high-speed packet access-plus (HSPA+) networks from AT&T and T-Mobile USA because, while fast, they are clearly derived from the 3G standards that the operators were already working with, even if they market them as 4G.

For more
Get a snapshot of what's 4G and what's FauxG below:

— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Light Reading Mobile

5:00 PM Confused about what 4G really means? Check out our handy table of true 4G operators in the US
March 20, 2012 | Dan Jones |


Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 
Related Videos
Most Popular
Read
White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
Featured
Resource Library SPONSORED CONTENT
Spanning Tree
An Ethernet protocol that checks a network for loops